Sugar Sell (SugarCRM) vs. Tableau Server

Sugar CRM is a good tool, but it's complex to customize. It often requires expensive 3rd partners to implement more complex scenarios that SugarCRM struggles to support; coming back with explanations was usually time-consuming and unsupported. The back end is overly complex in terms of what it needs to be, with many redundant database tables and columns.

Incentivized

Whole funnel and specific channel performance from upper to lower funnel metrics. The ability to view full channel performance for some time, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly, has truly been monumental in how my team optimizes specific channels and campaigns. Daily performance tracking is a bit overwhelming, with load times and having to refresh specific live views over time. It can be challenging to do so at times, as extensive dashboards take much longer to load.

Incentivized

• Great way to keep myself organized. I do not miss appointments with clients since within the system I can input my appointment time and also send out a reminder to my clients.
• It has a nice layout [that] does not seem to be cluttered. I find it to be very user friendly.
• It has customizable dashboards which I find beneficial

Incentivized

• It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
• Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
• Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server

Incentivized

• The back-end programming (logical hooks) for advanced customizations could benefit from a more user-friendly interface
• General layout could be improved by the addition of modern templates to customize the standard look and feel
• Support communities could be further improved with the addition of videos on how to do specific configuration, modules.

Incentivized

• Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
• Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with

Incentivized

Our organization will continue to use Sugar as long as it remains cost effective and it addresses the majority of our needs. I will, however, recommend looking into other options once our needs increase and there is additional budget for some bigger named and more robust platform options. I feel if the application was friendlier to end users we would get better productivity as well.

It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.

Incentivized

There's a learning curve associated with Sugar. Right away, it's not as easy as an out-of-the-box CRM. Once you learn how to use Sugar, the system fits what your needs are. With any other CRM, you'd be trying to figure out how your company can best fit the CRM. You don't want to change your business cycle for your CRM, the CRM should fit your business cycle.

Tableau Server takes training and experience in order to unlock the application's full potential. This is best handled by a qualified data scientist or data analytics manager. Tableau user interface layout, nomenclature, and command structure take time and training to become proficient with. Integration and connectivity require proper IT developer support.

Incentivized

SugarCRM has never been down for us.

Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues

No response time issues ever. Very productive due to its ease of use.

While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.

The support overall at least for us has been phenomenal. Anytime that the system has any Issues at all IT gets in contact from someone from support to get the system back up and running. Have never gone more than 30 minutes with the system not working. So overall I will be definetely recommending this system in any other company that I may work for in the future.

Incentivized

We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer

Incentivized

We feel clasroom training is essential to ensure user adoption and buy-in. Video and on-line training courses gave their place but being in a classroom setting enables the Team to make any potential CRM issues visble right up front.

In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.

Only part of an implemementation as noted previously.

The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.

Study, study, and study. Be prepared to train everyday until all processes are flowing nicely. The CRM is the elephant and figuring out where to take the first bite can be a challenge. But there is only one way to eat this elephant, one bite at a time. Systematic planning is very important.

Incentivized

Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either

SugarCRM is a lot better in many ways then LogicsCRM which I started using when I started as a sales rep at Community Tax. Yet there is still room for a lot of improvements to accommodate a steady workflow. They integration of old CRM files seems to have worked great from Logics to Sugar.

Incentivized

Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Incentivized

Works from 2-300 Users in our experience.

• Overall seems to be more expensive than other subscription based CRMs.
• Has positively impact our sales team to make more efficient and accountability among sales teams. Also allows for high level aggregated reporting
• Has been impactful for all teams, not only sales to track individual activity on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis

Incentivized

• Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
• There are some significant setup for the server product.
• Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.

Incentivized