Frappe

What Frappe offers

Frappe builds free and open source business software, and its email marketing lives inside ERPNext, the company's ERP. The ERPNext marketing page calls it an "Open Source, Modern, Powerful Digital Marketing Tool For SMBs" and describes a platform that "lets you configure your digital marketing activities and analyze their effects on your revenue." In practice that means email campaigns, newsletters, drip email templates and campaign reporting that sit in the same system as your leads, customers, sales orders and accounts.

This is not a standalone newsletter tool. It is aimed at small and midsize businesses that want their marketing email, their CRM and the rest of their operations (accounting, stock, manufacturing, projects, HR and payroll, point of sale) in one open source system. Because the code is open source, you can run it on your own server, which is why it sits in the self-hosted part of this directory. Frappe also runs Frappe Cloud, "the official cloud platform for Frappe applications," for those who would rather not host it.

Email campaigns

The Email Campaigns feature lets you "automate and manage every campaign, publish content, analyze results, and optimize as you go." The example on the page is a product introduction series, with each email revealing a new feature. Campaigns draw on the contacts, leads and customers already held in ERPNext, so the list you mail is the same data your sales team works from.

Results are tracked in the Campaign Efficiency Report, which lets you analyze the results of your marketing campaigns by market segment, geographical area and more. A configurable marketing dashboard gives a quick view of all business activity, and the sales pipeline view tracks opportunities in real time so you can see how leads turn into deals.

Newsletters

ERPNext sends newsletters, which the page defines as "informational or product-focused emails sent to existing and potential customers." They can nudge subscribers toward an action or share information with employees and investors, so the same tool serves both customer mailings and internal or stakeholder updates.

Drip templates and standard replies

The Drip Email Templates feature is about reuse: many emails can be standardized, and ERPNext lets you configure email templates and standardized replies so a team does not rewrite the same message each time. For documents that go out with campaigns, such as quotations, custom print format templates can be built with HTML or Jinja templating and set up once.

Email accounts, inbox and channels

ERPNext syncs your email accounts, so correspondence is not stranded in personal inboxes. The page describes a unified trail of all correspondence and auto-replies for incoming emails, for both internal project teams and external clients. Emails in your inbox can be turned into leads. Under Omnichannel Interactions the page says ERPNext lets you listen to and engage with customers across email, social, web and mobile, and converts those interactions into data so the sales team does not juggle apps. Call Popup shows live desktop notifications of incoming calls.

Contacts, leads and customers

A contact in ERPNext represents a person and can be linked to a lead, customer, supplier, shareholder, sales partner or user, or stand alone. Billing and shipping addresses are captured with it. Lead management tracks the conversations sales executives have with potential customers. Customer management adds loyalty programs, special pricing schemes, credit limits, receivables, total billing and average customer revenue.

Automation and teamwork

Assignment rules, such as round robin or load balancing, distribute new leads across the team automatically. Follow-up reminders take one click to set up and create an event in the calendar and the to-do list. Tasks can be created and assigned to employees and land in their to-dos, and mentions and real-time chat keep internal discussion inside the system. Document storage lets you upload and share images, videos and documents for a campaign, directly or as a web link.

Integrations and customization

ERPNext connects items, customers and sales orders with third-party sales apps; the page names Shopify, WooCommerce and Amazon MWS and says the setup takes a 4-click configuration. That matters for email: store customers and orders land in the same records your campaigns and newsletters use.

Customization needs no code. You can add custom fields to forms, auto-fetch values, hide fields by user role and create custom print formats. For developers, the Frappe Framework underneath is an open source full-stack web framework, and Frappe publishes libraries such as Bench, a command-line tool for managing multi-tenant Frappe deployments.

Languages and onboarding

The marketing tool is described as multilingual, and users who cannot find their language are invited to help translate it through a public translation portal. Implementation is meant to be do-it-yourself: the page calls ERPNext "the world's first smart, DIY ERP" and points to documentation and video tutorials for a fast, zero-touch rollout. The site lists ERPNext releases up to Version 16.

Hosting, trial and pricing

You can deploy the open source code on your own infrastructure, or run it on Frappe Cloud, which Frappe also describes as full service cloud hosting for the Frappe stack. The marketing page offers a free trial through its "Start free trial" button. The pages behind this entry do not show ERPNext or Frappe Cloud prices; the site links to a separate pricing page.

Support and the partner network

Help comes through documentation, a community forum, Frappe School for learning ERPNext and earning certifications, events and a monthly newsletter, The Frappe Times. Frappe also has a network of certified implementation partners. Its partner plans run from Entry and Emerging to Bronze, Silver and Gold, with Frappe Cloud discounts of 10% to 25% for partners, and each partner must keep at least two team members certified in ERPNext or the Frappe Framework. A business that wants help setting up campaigns and the wider ERP can hire one of these partners.

The company

The About page describes Frappe as "a collective with a loose structure of a for-profit company," with core values of excellence, freedom and authenticity. Rushabh Mehta is named as founder, and the team page lists engineers, product managers, designers, support consultants and partner managers. The home page marks "Frappe at 18" with a look back at the company's journey. Frappe runs community events, including a Frappeverse conference in Mumbai.

Who it suits

Frappe's marketing tools suit small and midsize businesses that already run, or plan to run, ERPNext for accounting, stock or sales, and want email campaigns and newsletters on the same customer data without paying for a separate marketing platform. Open source licensing and self-hosting give full control over data and cost. The caveat is scope: the email features are one module of a large ERP, so a business that only wants a newsletter tool will find a lot of system around a fairly simple campaign feature, and self-hosting means setting up and maintaining the whole stack yourself.