Agile CRM vs. Azure DevOps

Agile CRM is well suited if an existing customer business process is defined or drafted thoroughly. Agile allowed automating workflows and marketing to improve lead management and suppress tedious tasks so users can focus on more important matters. However, Agile CRM costs can increase significantly if you want additional features and customizations. If you know what you're doing with CRMs and marketing automation or customer contracts and management then AgileCRM is worth a try.

Incentivized

Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.

Incentivized

• The set-up was simple. We ran into a snag with my domain verification, but Agile support worked with me to get it resolved.
• I love being able to create several scripts based on persona. You can easily use a rule to display the appropriate script for each contact.
• Even team members new to CRM were able to grasp it and be efficient within a few hours - it's simple to navigate.

Incentivized

• Utilize Git as a repository to share work between multiple users
• Ability to configure Pipelines to build containers to run virtual deployments and testing scripts.
• Split individual tasks and relate to master documents for quick navigation and ability to see overall picture of project.
• Track status of each task
• Integrate with Git to utilize branches, merging, approvals, history, etc.

Incentivized

• The email template building tool is inflexible although it is simple to use and looks nice if you can work within its parameters.
• Customer Support is not committed to finding answers and providing the best solutions. Many times each support person has a different answer or fixing a bug will take up to 2 weeks to address. They do not seem to understand that they are an online marketing platform that requires solutions within hours (or maybe days) and not weeks.
• At some point in mid-2021, the process for sending out emails to 10s of thousands of contacts stopped functioning as simply and effectively as it had in the past. My staff (which I use as test cases) was no longer receiving emails, even though it showed in the system that they had received it (and no, it wasn't in spam). The bandaids that they provided me would work for one or two mailings and then stop working again. I was regularly trying to get customer support to find my answers but they were never able to solve my problem. The basic functionality that I appreciated - sending out nicely formatted email newsletters - is now completely gone and the platform is useless for our needs.
• The reporting tools are awful and poorly configured. Querying on groups of people is inconsistent and inaccurate. There is no segmentation feature that I found that was actually effective.

• I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
• The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
• It could improve the search slightly better.

There was a little bit of a learning curve and some bumps along the way to managing this platform, but AgileCRM appears to be responsive to any challenges that arise, which I consider to be of vital importance.

Incentivized

I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.

Incentivized

Until the email issues are resolved I cannot recommend agile for any function. The email delivery rate has halved in the last six months and halved again in the last two with no resolution in sight. The customer service discussions start from zero information anytime suggesting agile are not writing notes or using a ticketing system to track customers' complaints. This results in our staff having to send emails manually and defeating the purpose of the system.

It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).

Incentivized

The training sessions are very helpful, because you have specialist that is available to answer any questions, guide you and coach you on how to dominate a certain feature of the platform. That being said,Whenever I have an issue that needs to be resolved, I can send email or call a support line. I usually use the support line.

Incentivized

The performance of AgileCRM has been acceptable to date. I'm pleased with the ability to modify leads in the system and search for them and add groups to campaigns.

Incentivized

The technical support of this software I liked a lot because whenever we need help to solve any problem or even to answer any questions about the software, Agile CRM's support was quick and efficient and guided us on the best solution to solve the problem. I admire and respect that a lot.

Incentivized

When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.

Incentivized

Each section of the AgileCRM platform has an instructional video that describes in detail all of the features of that section. I found this to be very instructional way to learn about each section. Whenever I had more questions, I could always schedule a conference call with a tutor..

Incentivized

Once I get everything set up, everything started to flow and I can see the major benefit of this platform to my business

Incentivized

Was not part of the process.

Incentivized

It was able to do most of the functions needed but was the most cost-effective to get us started. If you are a new company and looking to get started with a CRM start here for a year or two and when you have the money you can pay for one of the bigger players. This platform will give you all you need to be successful. We have been using it for 2 years and we profited more each year.

Incentivized

Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.

Incentivized

This products Starts with a free Limited version. You can upgradeTo an affordable paid version with minimal features. There's also an enterprise version which is what I have. It's much more expensive, however it allows me to access the full range of features available.

Incentivized

• It may be me but I spent a disproportionate amount of time figuring out how to derive more ROI from Agile CRM. The functionality and facilities were there but I eventually gave up as it was taking too much time and attention.

Incentivized

• We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
• We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
• We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.

Incentivized