CiviCRM is designed to manage information about an organization's donors, members, event registrants, subscribers, grant-application seekers and funders, and case contacts.

Volunteers, activists, and voters - as well as more general sorts of business contacts such as employees, clients, or vendors - can be managed using CiviCRM.

[6] CiviCRM's core system tracks contacts, relationships, activities, groups, tags and permissions, while additional components keep track of contributors (CiviContribute), events (CiviEvent), member lists (CiviMember), cases (CiviCase), grants (CiviGrant), campaigns (CiviCampaign), petitions (CiviPetition), bulk mailings (CiviMail), and reports (CiviReport).

Supported programming interfaces include REST, server PHP and client JavaScript APIs,[10] a CMS-agnostic extensions framework,[11] and Drupal and Symfony style hooks.

[1] A number of notable optional extensions have been released over the years, including an integration with the responsive open source email template builder Mosacio,[16] the Shoreditch theme - a reimagining of the core CiviCRM user interface,[17] and the CiviRules extension - which allows the system to apply actions based on rulesets.