About
We built CoreCNX because three good products in the same suite did not share a single contact record. CoreCNX is a CRM (a shared database of your contacts and your history with them) that gives each contact one timeline, showing every door knock, text reply, chatbot lead, and email open in the order they happened.
The origin
For two years, we offered the CNX Suite as three separate products: Beacon for door-to-door canvassing, CampaignCNX+ for text messages, and Alma for website chatbot conversations. Each product did its own job well, but none of them shared a contact record with the others.
A campaign manager would come to the Monday meeting with three browser tabs open. Beacon showed whose doors had been knocked. CampaignCNX+ showed who had replied to the mass text message. Alma showed who had booked an appointment through the website chatbot. The same person (Maria Santos, who lives on Fourth Street and voted in the primary) would appear in all three, with a different contact ID in each. No single tool showed her full history with the campaign.
CoreCNX was built to close that specific gap by giving the suite one central contact record. The door knock, the text reply, and the chatbot booking all appear on one timeline, in the order they happened, and each is marked with the product that recorded it.
Beacon, CampaignCNX+, and Alma each handle one channel of communication: canvassing at the door, sending texts, and handling replies on your website. They record activity, but they do not try to be the main, trusted record of who each contact is.
CoreCNX is that main record. It holds the contact record, the pipeline (a board of stages that shows where each contact stands), the unified timeline, and the email marketing tools built around them. The other three products send events to it from the door, the phone and the chatbot window. Each event arrives as a webhook (an automatic message between systems) that carries a private key only the suite products hold, so CoreCNX accepts only genuine messages. CoreCNX finds the matching contact (by phone number first, then by email address, or creates a new contact if neither matches), checks that the event has not already been recorded, and adds it to the timeline.
The unified timeline is the central feature of CoreCNX. Everything else in the product (pipeline, email, reports, and tasks) is built on top of it.
Most CRMs treat the contact record as a folder of notes. When you open Maria's record, you see her name, her email address, a list of tags, a custom field for her ZIP code, and somewhere near the bottom a tab labeled "Activity" that almost nobody opens.
CoreCNX reverses that arrangement, so the activity feed is the contact record. When you open Maria's page in CoreCNX, the first thing you see is a list, in date order, of every event your suite products recorded: the door knock from April, the text reply from May, and the chatbot booking from June. Each event has a colored dot showing which product recorded it. You can filter the list by source.
Key facts still appear on the page (the lead score at the top, and custom fields), but the feed is the main part of the page. That decision shapes the rest of the product, including how the database is organized, how incoming events are processed, and how the reports and the dashboard are laid out.
CoreCNX Beacon CampaignCNX+ Alma
We are HCM, a small studio of operators and engineers. We build software for campaigns and small businesses that have run out of patience with Salesforce. The CNX Suite has four products, and we do not plan to add a fifth. CoreCNX holds the central contact record, Beacon manages door-to-door canvassing, CampaignCNX+ sends texts, and Alma is the chatbot on your website. All four use the same email address, with one bill when you buy the suite, and each product sends its activity to CoreCNX.
Because we keep the product family small on purpose, we can connect the tools to each other easily. We do not have to depend on a partner team at another company that might change its API (the connection its software offers to other software) at any time. That is why the suite has this shape. It is also why CoreCNX exists, because once we committed to building four products, we also had to build the place where their information comes together.
We expect that about a third of CoreCNX accounts will never connect another suite product. These customers run a law firm, a regional services business, or a small nonprofit. They use CoreCNX as a regular CRM, with a simple pipeline, capable email marketing, a contact list that imports from a CSV (spreadsheet) file, and reports that anyone can read without special training. We designed it to work well for them.
Pricing is based on the number of contacts, in the same way as Beacon and CampaignCNX+, and starts at $49 a month. Each plan includes up to 5, 10 or 20 users (Enterprise has no user limit), with no per-user fee and no separate "integrations tier" that costs extra. You do not need a sales call to see the product, and the 14-day free trial requires no credit card. We would rather have ten thousand small accounts using the product happily than a hundred enterprise contracts that nobody enjoys signing.
We will not build a marketing automation suite with sixty triggers, twelve form builders, and a screen for designing automated steps that needs a consultant to set up. We also will not build a "platform" with an app store and a partner certification program, or the other features that turn buying a CRM into a long purchasing process. Other excellent companies already build those products, and we do not intend to become one of them.
We will keep building a central contact record that handles every event your program produces, a pipeline that fits how a campaign or sales team works, an email tool that records results on the same timeline as everything else, and a short list of integrations that we can keep working without hiring a large customer support department.
Brian Hunter, founder · HCM · Aurora, IL
Try it
Sign up, import a contact list, and move a contact to a new pipeline stage. The change appears on the contact's timeline. You get the same product we built for our own use.