More than anything else, what sets CiviCRM apart from other competing programs is that it is designed specifically to meet the needs of non-profits, and provides a well-integrated platform that addresses all their basic needs. This avoids or alleviates the complexities, problems, time, and expenses associated with running separate systems for things such as donations, e-mailing, events, and membership, or trying to programmatically integrate them.

CiviCRM is well suited to the needs of many kinds and sizes of organizations:

Many CRMs are built around common workflows in for-profit businesses that don't always map well into the non-profit world. The sales funnel model, and terminology underlying sales force automation, for example, may not map well to the activities in an awareness-raising campaign. Substituting some terms, and adding some non-profit specific tools, as Convio Common Ground does with Salesforce, doesn't always overcome the issues with the underlying model.

NTEN's 2007 CRM Satisfaction Survey determined the following:

NTEN's 2009 Data Ecosystem Survey reinforced this result by finding that the overall happiness of organizations was similar, with grades of B+, B, and B- going to the top three tools: CiviCRM, Salesforce, and Convio, respectively.

A significant problem with many proprietary CRMs is the difficulty organizations face in moving to a different vendor. As a free and open source software system, CiviCRM places no restrictions on the ability to export and migrate your data. It resides in a MySQL database which may be accessed through your hosting provider at any time. That ability, to directly access and work with your data for customizations, advanced database queries, data migration, and so on, is often quite important. Most significantly, it guarantees that you, the organization, owns your data.

Some proprietary systems are only offered by a single vendor. Service outages, poor help response times, or unhelpful technical support responses, may leave your organization with no option but to switch to a different CRM just to deal with vendor issues. By contrast, the growing pool of integrators, trainers, and consultants for CiviCRM (https://civicrm.org/experts) enables organizations to shift from one provider to another without having to change CRMs.

Unlike with some proprietary systems, there is no vendor lock-in with CiviCRM.

Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress are the big three most commonly used Content Management Systems (CMSes) in the world. CiviCRM integrates with all three systems. This is important because it allows your CRM to easily present public-facing forms and listings on your website. Easy configuration of donation and event signup forms, and self-serve functionality for membership signup and renewals, are incredibly important to many organizations. By centralizing your database and integrating directly with your website, you remove or reduce data entry and data syncing between different systems.

If you are building a new website while implementing CiviCRM, you will need to spend some time comparing the features and tools available in each of the three CMSes to determine which is best for your organization. At a very high level, Drupal is the best in terms of providing a robust rapid application development environment, for programming highly customized sites, using numerous user-contributed modules that integrate well with each other. WordPress, by contrast, tends to earn top scores for usability for administrators. Joomla! tends to be in the middle. But such evaluations are hotly contested, benefit from being more fine-grained, and need to be updated through evaluations of the latest versions. In many ways, the three have converged significantly in terms of the tools and experience they provide. There are less distinct strengths and advantages of one over the other than there used to be. You should evaluate each against your particular needs using third-party reviews.

One factor to consider when comparing options is to research the types of third-party extensions available that may be specific to a certain CMS. For example, you may find the organic group integration module that is available for Drupal to be a persuasive argument for working with that CMS. The webform, views, and workflow integrations for Drupal developers are particularly strong. Or you may need to have membership-based authentication rules that are only available through the Joomla! CiviAuthenticate plugin. Then again, the shortcodes feature that is unique in Wordpress might be the deciding factor in your choice.

Each CMS has a growing list of extensions available, most of which are listed in the CiviCRM extension directory (https://civicrm.org/extensions).

In recent versions of CiviCRM, significant work has been done to expand the capabilities of CiviCRM's native extension-handling tools. A native CiviCRM extension installs and operates similar to how a Drupal module, or Joomla!/WordPress plugin works, but it is CMS-agnostic — it will work in any of the three CMS environments.

In any case, CiviCRM lets you take advantage of a powerful open source content management system, integrating your contact database directly into your organization's website.

The common saying that free and open source software is free like kittens rather than free like beer applies to CiviCRM. The total cost of ownership of a software system is an important metric for deciding which is more appropriate. Open source software costs for a system such as CiviCRM are different from those of proprietary systems. The absence of an upfront purchase cost is not the end of the story. The costs of maintaining the system over its whole life need to be calculated. Instead of one-time purchase costs, or annual or monthly software license costs, there are likely to be additional expenditures on installation, training, and support. As you use the system, and your needs begin to change, you will likely have costs to customize and adjust things. And as new versions of CiviCRM are released, you should anticipate ongoing costs to upgrade the software. Depending on an organization's CRM needs, number of CRM users, and staff competencies, CiviCRM may be more or less expensive than the other alternatives. Support (upgrading, maintaining, and customizing) of a software tool such as CiviCRM can be done by your own staff or volunteers, if the knowledge is available; you can work with a developer or CiviCRM partner, which might be expensive in one way, but save you time when users need to work with the system; or you can get a support contract with a partner or an SaaS CiviCRM offering, which then gives you a flat monthly cost. What is important is to consider these costs when examining your CRM options so that you can meaningfully compare your proposed solutions.

The free in free and open source software is primarily the freedom to modify the software to meet one's needs (see http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Developing+with+the+CiviCRM+team). This is certainly an advantage for many organizations with resources that are unable to get proprietary systems adapted as they require, or that are unwilling to let another organization drive the feature development roadmap and time frame of their enterprise CRM system.

CiviCRM has a strong, growing, international open source community and software ecosystem. CiviCRM averaged over 8,300 downloads per month in 2013. There have been over 500,000 installations since version 2.0, with around 3,600 known active CiviCRM installations in the winter of 2014. Total downloads per month tend to vary significantly from month to month, with jumps reflecting windows of time when new versions are released. But, over the course of the project, there has been a steady increase in usage, based on these download stats. If you're interested in viewing more recent stats in an interactive view, visit the newly released statistics portal: https://stats.civicrm.org/.

In addition to Make It Happen contributions, CiviCRM receives a large number of contributions from the community in the form of code patches for new features, including the following:

The number of issues reported and patches submitted by the community has increased significantly over the years. But along with the reporting has come increased contributions from the community to help provide patches and new functionality.

This has grown further since the migration of core code to GitHub (https://github.com/civicrm). Git provides a distributed version control system model, which encourages code contributions from the community through pull-requests. While the bulk of the contributions are made by the core development team, an increasing number of contributions come from members of the community.

While some might perceive more issues being filed by the community as a problem (people are finding the product buggy), it is very healthy from another perspective. For example, it's not uncommon to see a spike in issues filed when a new version is released through the alpha/beta cycles. During that time, community members are encouraged to download, install, and test pre-production versions in order to provide feedback on features, usability, ease of upgrading, as well as identify bugs before the new version is released. This push is generally very successful and leads to a spike in patches submitted, and ultimately results in a better and more bug-free release. In recent years, there has been an increased effort to get consultants and better-resourced users to contribute patches, in order to allow the core team to focus on enhancements for new releases. Furthermore, many of the issues created in the CiviCRM tracker are feature improvements and suggestions, which over time will make their way into core.

One unique aspect of CiviCRM, that sets it apart from many other open source projects, is the presence of a core development team working full-time on project development. While community involvement is a great sign of project health, the presence of a core development team has ensured steady releases, an aggressively planned project roadmap, and more responsive support patching bugs and supporting users.

In addition, the presence of a core team provides resources for helping new developers in the community get up to speed on CiviCRM development practices. Through training programs, forum support, and the IRC channel, new developers have ready access to the core development team when working through projects.

Extensive administrator, user, and developer documentation is available at http://wiki.civicrm.org and through an online book (http://book.civicrm.org/user). The wiki is maintained in a version-specific format, allowing you to access past versions of the wiki that reference older versions of the software, if needed. The online book is generally updated on an annual basis, and provides the best starting place for general users. Newer, fast-changing, and rarely used functionality is better covered in the wiki.

In addition, inline help is found throughout the software, in many cases providing both a description of the tool or feature, and a link to the online book or wiki for more information.

One of the challenges faced by users of some open source software, compared to proprietary software, has been the difficulty of assuring that support will be available when needed.

Often, when an issue arises in your installation, others have tried to tackle the same or similar challenge, and a record of how they were helped to solve their issue can be found by searching in the CiviCRM Stack Exchange site at http://civicrm.stackexchange.com/. If you find that you're stuck and can't find documentation dealing with the specific problem or use case you are experiencing, begin by asking questions and searching related answers on Stack Exchange. Quite often, you will find tips, workarounds, or debugging steps that will lead you to your solution. The CiviCRM community and core team are renowned for their quick and generous replies to questions on Stack Exchange. It is here where the community really shines. We can't guarantee every question or problem will be solved there, but it is the best place to start when you are stumped.

For those developing in CiviCRM, there is also a #civicrm IRC channel on http://freenode.net, where one can usually find the core team and other knowledgeable community members responding to more challenging inquiries. IRC provides the benefit of real-time conversation over the forums, where there may be some lag time while you wait for others to respond. However, the IRC channel also tends to go through high and low traffic periods. If you stop by, ask a question, and receive no response, you may need to come back at another time, or proceed with posing the question on the forums.