A WordPress CRM Pipeline on a Kanban Board

A WordPress CRM keeps your leads and customers inside the site that collects them, instead of in a separate hosted service. There are two kinds of plugin for this job. A full WordPress CRM system stores contact records and usually sends email. A pipeline board, such as KanbanWP, shows every open deal as a card in a sales stage. This page compares the main CRM plugins with the KanbanWP pipeline, so you can decide which one your site needs, or whether it needs both.

What a WordPress CRM plugin does

Most WordPress CRM plugins share a core set of features:

• Contact records with tags, notes and custom fields, kept in your WordPress database.
• Lead capture from forms on your site.
• Email: newsletters, broadcasts and automated sequences.
• Shop sync with WooCommerce customers and orders.
• Extras such as quotes, invoices, a sales pipeline or a client portal, depending on the plugin.

The core of a CRM is the contact database and the email that runs on it. A pipeline board covers a different part of the job: which deals are open, what stage each one is in, and what you need to do next.

Choosing the best CRM for WordPress

This table compares three CRM plugins with KanbanWP, using figures checked on each vendor’s site and WordPress.org page in October 2026:

Each plugin fits a different need:

• Jetpack CRM fits a freelancer or agency that wants contacts, quotes and invoices in one place. Its free core includes a client portal where contacts view proposals, invoices and files.
• FluentCRM fits a site that sends newsletters and automated emails to its contacts. Its WordPress.org page lists the WooCommerce integration as a Pro feature.
• Groundhogg fits a business that builds email funnels. Its pricing page puts the sales pipeline, lead scoring and a booking calendar in the Plus plan and above.

KanbanWP has no built-in connection to any of these plugins. You can run one of them for contacts and email, and use a KanbanWP board for the deals and the delivery work.

When a kanban pipeline is enough

A board covers the sales process when the main question is “who needs a reply today?” That is often true for a freelancer, a small agency or a shop with a few dozen open deals at a time. A board is not enough when you need a contact database, email campaigns, email sync, duplicate merging or revenue forecasting. For the freelancer view, with a worked example and a daily routine, read how to use a lightweight CRM on a kanban board.

The Sales template

Create a board from the Sales template and KanbanWP adds these stages:

1. Lead
2. Contacted
3. Proposal
4. Negotiation
5. Won
6. Lost

It also adds three labels, Hot, Warm and Cold, for how likely a deal is to close. To rename, reorder or add stages, use the ⋯ button in each stage header and the + Add stage column on the board. See stages.

Getting leads and orders onto the board

KanbanWP creates cards from your site in three ways.

Forms

KanbanWP does not ship connectors for specific form plugins. It provides one WordPress action, kanbanwp_form_submission, which is a named hook that code in another plugin can call. Your form plugin’s “after submission” hook calls the action with a board ID and a title, and can add a description, a stage ID, the sender’s name and email, and extra key and value lines.

The action behaves this way:

• The card goes to the stage you name, or to the board’s first stage.
• The name, email and extra lines are added to the end of the card’s description.
• The card is created with normal priority and no assignee or labels.
• If the board ID is missing or wrong, no card is created and the reason is written to the site’s PHP error log.

The forms guide has a Contact Form 7 example. The same pattern works with Gravity Forms, WPForms, Fluent Forms or your own form.

WooCommerce

In KanbanWP > Settings, the Integrations tab has a board and stage picker for WooCommerce orders. When it is set, each new order creates a card with these details:

• A title with the order number and the billing name, or the billing email when there is no name.
• A description with the order total, the list of items with quantities, and a link to the order in the admin.
• A link between the card and the order, so the same order never creates two cards.

Only new orders create cards. Order status changes do not move or update the card. A second picker, WooCommerce products, creates a card when a product is published for the first time, with its SKU, price and a link. See WooCommerce.

Imports, the REST API and MCP

A CSV import creates a board from an existing list of prospects. The columns can include title, description, stage, priority, assignee, due date, start date and labels. Developers can also create cards from scripts through the REST API, and AI agents can create them through the MCP server, which lets AI tools work with your boards.

Working the pipeline

These board features cover the daily sales work:

• Due dates and filters. Put the next follow-up date in the due date. The Due filter shows Overdue, Due today or Due this week, and you can save the filter as a saved view.
• Views. The Calendar view shows follow-ups by date. The My Tasks view lists your own cards, sorted by due date.
• Custom fields. Record deal value or lead source as free-text custom fields. They are not filterable, so use labels for anything you want to filter by.
• Comments and @mentions. Log each call in a comment, and mention a colleague to hand a lead over.
• Webhooks. Send events such as task_created, task_moved and comment_added to another system with webhooks. Each request is signed with HMAC-SHA256, so the receiving system can check that it came from your site.
• Slack and Discord. Post a message to a channel when a card is created, assigned or commented on. See Slack and Discord.
• Reports. The Reports screen shows the card count per stage, overdue cards and open cards per person for one board.

Stages can have WIP (work in progress) limits, for example on Proposal. You set them with the Default WIP limit setting for new boards or through the REST API. A stage over its limit shows a warning and still accepts cards.

Next steps

• Install KanbanWP and create a board from the Sales template.
• See all features, or AI project management for AI summaries of a board.
• Compare other board tools in the best free kanban board software in 2027.