Open Mercato

Open Mercato is a developer-facing foundation framework for building CRM and ERP systems. It's not a hosted SaaS product you configure through a UI. It's a structured starting point that encodes the architectural and domain decisions most teams spend months figuring out, so you can focus on what's specific to your business.

The core ships as a versioned npm package. You never fork it. Instead, you extend it through overlays and overrides that live in your own layer, which means you can update the core without breaking your customizations. That separation is the central design choice: the foundation stays intact, and your changes stay yours.

Out of the box, it covers a lot of ground:

• Security and infrastructure: Auth, RBAC, multi-tenancy, audit trails with undo, AES-256 encrypted vault, and custom entities
• Business logic: CRM, orders and shipping, product catalog, CPQ, workflows, self-service portals, and ERP processes
• Performance layer: Event architecture, search via Meilisearch, caching with Redis
• AI integration: A built-in AI assistant, MCP support, and specs that ship with the repo so AI coding agents can write architecture-aware code from day one

The framework is built on Next.js, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL. It's designed to work with tools like Cursor and Codex, and the repo includes architectural specs that give agents enough context to generate consistent, safe changes across the codebase.

A real-world case study: a logistics company built a full Air and Ocean ERP on Open Mercato in six weeks, covering CRM, quote automation, cost tracking, and live vessel tracking integration. No license fees, no vendor lock-in.

It's aimed at three kinds of teams: enterprise groups that want to ship new internal products without a multi-month infrastructure build-out, software agencies that want a reusable base to sell solutions rather than hours, and teams migrating off low-code platforms who want to own their code without starting from zero. If you've used an open-source CRM before and hit its customization ceiling, this is a different category entirely.