CRM software keeps track of contacts, accounts, deals and customer conversations. Sales, marketing and service teams use it to manage the pipeline, plan follow-ups, log emails and calls, and report on customer relationships. Salesforce and HubSpot are the usual reference points; European options include hosted platforms and open-source systems that can run on your own servers.
A CRM is rarely a standalone store. It is connected to email, calendars, marketing automation, billing and support tools, so data flows through many integrations, each with its own processors and hosting. Notes and activity histories often contain free text, for instance remarks about health or finances, that was never meant as structured data. Lock-in comes from custom fields, workflow automations and apps built on a vendor's platform, which are hard to move even when the contact list can be exported.
When choosing a European option, check which integrations and sub-processors are involved, whether you can export all objects, custom fields and activity history in a documented format, and how deletion requests are handled in backups. Look at whether customisation relies on open APIs and whether self-hosting or a dedicated environment is possible.