Manufacturing Shop CRM
Self-hosted, open-source CRM/ERP for small manufacturing shops and CNC workshops — projects, BOMs, technical drawings, and an AI assistant in one Django app.
🔗 Visit Manufacturing Shop CRM
Description
Small manufacturing shops and CNC workshops often end up managing their business across a patchwork of spreadsheets, shared drives, and sticky notes — one file for the bill of materials, another for the CAD drawings, a separate whiteboard for what's due this week. This project puts all of that in one self-hosted web app built specifically for how small manufacturing teams actually work, rather than adapting a generic enterprise ERP that assumes a much bigger company.
It's a Django 6.1 application (Python 3.14+, SQLite) that centralizes project documentation with auto-generated folder structures, Bill of Materials tracking with categories and pricing, native support for engineering file formats (DXF, STEP, STL, plus Inventor and SolidWorks references), task management with due dates and priorities, a company/contact directory, and an internal knowledge library. It also bolts on an AI assistant that can talk to Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Groq, or DeepSeek, letting you run natural-language “chat” and “commands” modes against your own CRM data. Everything is MIT-licensed, self-hosted, and ships with a Windows batch installer alongside the usual Django deployment path.
💬 Our review
The short version: if you run a small CNC shop or engineering bureau and are tired of managing projects across spreadsheets and shared drives, this gives you a free, purpose-built alternative with real engineering-file awareness (DXF/STEP/STL) that generic CRMs don't have — the tradeoff is it's a young project (9 stars) from a solo-looking developer, with no enterprise support contract if something breaks.
Against a generic CRM like a free-tier HubSpot or a Django admin you'd build yourself, this wins because it already understands manufacturing-specific concepts — BOMs, technical drawings, CNC workflows — instead of forcing you to bolt those on. Against a full enterprise ERP (SAP, Odoo Manufacturing), it's far lighter-weight and free, but you're trading away the maturity, support ecosystem, and audited security track record those systems have. The built-in multi-provider AI assistant is a genuinely modern touch that most small-shop tools don't have, but as with any AI feature bolted onto business data, it's worth testing carefully before trusting it with anything sensitive. Reasonable pick for a small shop that's comfortable self-hosting a Django app and wants something free and tailored; not a fit if you need vendor support or an audited compliance trail.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Gratuit et open source (MIT), auto-hébergé.
Pros
Conçu spécifiquement pour la fabrication (BOM, fichiers CAD DXF/STEP/STL)
Gratuit, open source, auto-hébergé
Assistant IA multi-fournisseur intégré
Couverture fonctionnelle large en une seule app
Cons
Projet jeune (9 étoiles), pas d'écosystème de support visible
Auto-hébergement = responsabilité sécurité/backups à votre charge
Backend SQLite peu adapté à un usage multi-utilisateurs à grande échelle