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Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)

Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)

Overview

What is Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)?

Sugar Sell from SugarCRM is a collaborative CRM, allowing users to track and monitor activities, map each customer’s journey and automate as many workflows as you need to. Sugar Sell is presented by the vendor as lean, fast and integratable…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

SugarCRM is a versatile tool that is widely used across organizations for managing customer relationships, sales opportunities, and …
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Af

6 out of 10
May 28, 2021
Incentivized
[Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)] is being used as a trial currently to fill in the gaps that salesforce crm cannot do and will hopefully take over …
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Sugar Cell Review

7 out of 10
December 17, 2019
Incentivized
My consulting company has implemented SugarCRM as a resource in multiple client organizations. It is used by numerous departments …
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SugarCRM - great product

7 out of 10
December 13, 2018
Incentivized
We use SugarCRM as a central platform for all teams which allows us to be more efficient internally and externally. We use this CRM to …
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Read all reviews

Popular Features

View all 31 features
  • Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail) (28)
    9.0
    90%
  • Custom fields (28)
    9.0
    90%
  • Customer data management / contact management (31)
    8.8
    88%
  • Interaction tracking (29)
    7.1
    71%
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Pricing

View all pricing

Essentials

$49

Cloud
per month per user (3 user minimum, 5 user maximum)

Sugar Enterprise

$85

On Premise
per month per user (billed annually)

Advanced

$85

Cloud
per month per user (3 user minimum)

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.sugarcrm.com/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $147 per month 3 users
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Features

Sales Force Automation

This is the technique of using software to automate certain sales-related tasks.

8.2
Avg 7.7

Customer Service & Support

This component of CRM software automates help desk, call center and field service management.

8.2
Avg 7.5

Marketing Automation

This component of CRM software helps to automate and scale marketing tasks and the subsequent analysis of those efforts.

7.9
Avg 7.6

CRM Project Management

This component of CRM software helps users initiate, plan, collaborate on, execute, track, and close projects.

8.9
Avg 7.6

CRM Reporting & Analytics

Reporting and analytics in CRM software includes sales forecasting, pipeline analysis, and automated dashboards.

8.7
Avg 7.6

Customization

This addresses a company’s ability to configure the software to fit its specific use case and workflow.

8.8
Avg 7.6

Security

This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.

8.5
Avg 8.3

Social CRM

This component of CRM software helps companies leverage social media in engaging with customers.

8.2
Avg 7.3

Integrations with 3rd-party Software

This involves the CRM software’s ability to integrate with other systems, whether external or homegrown.

8
Avg 7.2

Platform

8.1
Avg 7.5
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Product Details

Sugar Sell (SugarCRM) Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Sugar Sell from SugarCRM is a collaborative CRM, allowing users to track and monitor activities, map each customer’s journey and automate as many workflows as you need to. Sugar Sell is presented by the vendor as lean, fast and integratable with anything. Sugar Sell replaces former editions of the SugarCRM product, including the SugarCRM Community Edition, the open source edition, which is discontinued.

Sugar Sell (SugarCRM) starts at $147.

Insightly, Zoho CRM, and Pipedrive are common alternatives for Sugar Sell (SugarCRM).

Reviewers rate Billing and invoicing management and Single sign-on capability highest, with a score of 9.1.

The most common users of Sugar Sell (SugarCRM) are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

View all alternatives
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Reviews and Ratings

(246)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

SugarCRM is a versatile tool that is widely used across organizations for managing customer relationships, sales opportunities, and tracking marketing campaigns. Users appreciate its flexibility and cost-effectiveness compared to competitors like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. With SugarCRM, users can efficiently manage prospects, sales stages, and customer interactions by providing a central source of information. The software offers features like in-line editing that minimize clicks, making it easy to use and navigate. The Sugar Mobile app provides flexibility for users in both desk and field settings, allowing them to track interactions with clients and improve follow-up efforts. Overall, SugarCRM proves to be an invaluable asset for sales teams, helping them manage leads, track the entire sales process, and increase win ratios.

Additionally, the software is utilized for CRM purposes, client follow-up, managing client issues, tracking applications, determining eligibility, managing payments in publicly funded preschool programs, relationship management, accounting, and much more. It also maximizes sales and marketing efforts by providing a centralized platform for managing contacts, leads, and sales opportunities. With automation capabilities, analytics tools, and efficient workflow management features, SugarCRM proves to be suitable for most businesses. It aids in generating and monitoring tasks while offering personalized support. By using SugarCRM, businesses can identify products of interest to customers and enable more specific advertising. Furthermore, the software provides a single tool to view all information related to current and prospective customers.

Sales departments find SugarCRM particularly helpful as it simplifies sales management by allowing users to make notes and track contact with prospects. With this tool in place, businesses can avoid multiple sales representatives working on the same account. Users have also implemented SugarCRM for marketing automation purposes such as monitoring customer journeys and creating quotes. Moreover, consulting companies benefit from SugarCRM's ability to consolidate client information, track vendor contacts, manage projects efficiently while keeping track of sales and marketing initiatives. For larger departments handling various clients or accounts managers experiencing high turnover, SugarCRM helps stay in touch with customers, mitigates turnover, and avoids re-explaining client discussions to new account managers. The software is also widely used to track leads and customers across the whole organization, providing a central repository for all customer data. It serves as an excellent tool for sales teams to track leads, convert them into accounts, clients, and ultimately track income from projects. Additionally, SugarCRM solves the problem of lack of accounting for certain types of work. Some businesses even prefer SugarCRM as a lightweight alternative to Salesforce CRM for tracking and managing leads and customer accounts. It fills in the gaps of Salesforce CRM and provides a reliable source of truth for other software companies. Overall, SugarCRM has proven to be a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes and industries, offering a wide range of use cases to effectively manage customer relationships, sales processes, marketing campaigns, and more. Its user-friendly interface, flexibility, customization options, and cost-effectiveness make it a popular choice among users. Whether it's tracking leads and prospects, managing customer interactions, automating sales and marketing processes, or providing a centralized platform for data management, SugarCRM has proven to be a versatile solution that helps businesses streamline their operations and maximize their revenue potential.

Customization Capabilities: Many users have praised SugarCRM for its customization capabilities, stating that it allows them to tailor the software to their specific needs and workflows. This has been particularly beneficial in streamlining operations and incorporating larger initiatives, making their companies more efficient.

Intuitive User Interface: Reviewers have consistently highlighted the intuitive user interface of SugarCRM, noting that it is user-friendly and has a nice layout. The easy navigation and clear organization of information make it simple for users to find what they need quickly and efficiently.

Reporting Capabilities: Several users have commended SugarCRM's reporting capabilities, considering them to be much better than their previous solutions. They appreciate the ease of use and intuitiveness of generating reports, allowing them to access valuable insights about their sales activities and performance.

Reporting Capability: Users have consistently mentioned that the reporting capability of SugarCRM is lacking and in need of improvement. Many users have expressed frustration with the limited capabilities for more complex reporting, stating that while it may be adequate for basic reports, it falls short when it comes to advanced functionalities.

System Downtime: Numerous users have experienced frequent system downtime, which has negatively impacted their productivity. This issue has been mentioned by a significant number of reviewers and highlights the reliability concerns associated with using SugarCRM.

Support Responsiveness: Users have repeatedly stated that support from SugarCRM is unresponsive unless there is a complete system outage or impairment. While initial response times may be satisfactory, many users have complained about delays in receiving solutions to their issues, especially when further explanation is required.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 58)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The entire organization used Sugar CRM as a way to keep in touch with our thousands of clients. We had five companies under the same corporation and used Sugar CRM to discern which contact went to which company, as well as keeping track of their notes, which products they had or had used, and each time an employee reached out to them/vice versa.
  • Everything is available at all times, cloud-based
  • You can add extra functions if needed
  • The ability to search through a funnel based on specific requests/inquiries (Ex: City/state, company, etc)
  • It's slow. VERY SLOW.
  • Crashes constantly; makes it difficult to use. Frequently have to log in. You can't have more than one (or two, if you're lucky) windows open at a time, making searches very, very sloooowwww.
  • Very difficult to use. If you need to update or change functionality on a platform, it's almost like pulling teeth. We had to frequently consult with Sugar CRM's staff members to understand how to do so.
I think the biggest issue that we had is that we had so many customers and prospects spanning over 20 years. It made it very slow to search for anything, and many times if we tried to change something it wouldn't actually save. It's very glitchy. I don't really have a specific scenario for best or worst-case, but it'd likely do better in an industry where you don't have tens of thousands of people to sort through.
February 12, 2016

Queen of the Details

Marissa Schuchat | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SugarCRM is being used to track and note web service Requests. My use was specifically in that capacity, though the software is used throughout the organization. We needed a way to be able to monitor the workload of incoming requests, as well as a way to communicate actions taken on each request.
  • SugarCRM includes a number of fields for details, so the requests are complete in their level of detail.
  • SugarCRM has a number of dropdowns that exactly capture the description of the service.
  • SugarCRM integrates with email, so users get an email update whenever a status is changed.
  • Initially you discover that using the Back button is futile, and you have to navigate via the breadcrumbs in the page hierarchy. Having Back button capability would be great.
SugarCRM is functional for back-end/in-house IT services tracking. The software was used to track inventory as well as web services rendered, and a large amount of data. I can see SugarCRM being used in a sales or fundraising capacity as status indicators are really clear as well are the emails that come along with any status changes.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SugarCRM is a good way to organize your contacts and accounts. It helps larger departments stay in touch with what is going on with all of the customers. The biggest thing SugarCRM can help mitigate is turnover in the organization, and lack of understanding of what has been discussed already with a client and not making the client re-explain themselves to a new account manager.
  • Contract & Document Organization.
  • Workflow.
  • Account Management.
  • Upgrades are not smooth for us, it requires a lot of IT support. Our SugarCRM instance is self-hosted.
  • Speed, at times it runs really slow.
  • More customization for setting users up, preload dashboards and dashlets etc.
It's a good cost effective solution and available to be self hosted. At times the software seems to not make sense and the upgrades are quirky. Some modules are taking longer than expected to upgrade from their old layouts. Third party plugins are hit or miss, and at times not written well and unstable for upgrades.
September 29, 2015

Partner's view of SugarCRM

Jeff Bickart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Our entire organization uses SugarCRM. We utilize Marketing Automation, Leads, Opportunities, Contracts, Quotes, Projects. It provides us with the ability to have single tool to view all information as it pertains to each touch point we have with our current and prospective customers.
  • Account Managment
  • Integration with many 3rd party tools such as Marketo and Act-On
  • Choice of deployment; On-premise or On-Demand
  • Documentation is functional but it is not great
  • Updates to the product are not earth shattering
Will you be using a partner to help with configuration and customization of the product? Will you be using your own in house staff to provide your services? Will you be integrating with 3rd party systems or your own in house systems?
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized

We utilize SugarCRM to track our leads and customers. It is being used across the whole organization (sales, marketing, support, etc)

It allows us to keep all data under one roof instead of having to use multiple software pieces to do this.

  • SugarCRM delivers a full project management solution combined with the sales management, marketing automation, and customer support used by employees to manage customer-centric activities.
  • SugarCRM allows you to access client information from your tablet or smartphone and also lets you add info in real time.
  • SugarCRM features a great customization studio as it allows its users to integrate with the existing CRM products with ease.
  • SugarCRM's lack of good integration with Outlook for e-mails is a major flaw.
  • Having the ability to have a desktop application would open the market to more companies who like the best of both worlds.
  • The minimum user count of 10 is definitely a drawback for those smaller companies.
If they want a desktop solution, SugarCRM is out. If they want a mobile/web solution, then SugarCRM is near the top of the list and affordable.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • CRM implementations in different business domains (real estate , financial managment , recruitment etc).
  • It comes with native support with outlook integration , mobile UI .
  • This product has strong functionality for email campaigning , customer activities tracking (emails , tasks, calls, notes), salesforce automation, and marketing automation.
  • There are also some advantages to being an on-premise, open source solution: It's easier to customize and is more secure. Another significant advantage is that when the product is running in-house, our developers have full access to do things like build-out integrations using web services. For example, we recently built an integration to Zillow.com in very little time.
  • The product does not have native support for phone infrastructure (Asterisk open source PBX / VoIP). This is important because many companies run multi-channel campaigns and telemarketing can be a big component. Sugar is really designed for running email campaigns and therefore does not meet the needs of companies that rely on telemarketing to drive sales. This is a big issue.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It was being used for sales. Following leads and converting them into accounts and clients. It was also being used to give an overview of the projects that we were pursuing for old and new clients alike. In this fashion it was partially tracking income from the projects and providing a target for new sales opportunities. The main problem it addressed was the lack of accounting that we had for this type of work.
  • SugarCRM had a very complete feature set. The modules covered everything we needed to track.
  • The free Community Edition was hard to pass up. It was also easy to install and host locally.
  • The customizability of the Community Edition was nice.
  • Although the modules covered most of what we needed, it was hard to make things work for the edge cases. They didn't always integrate with each other in the way that we liked.
  • The themes available were hideous. We ended up creating a custom theme, but even that was not ideal.
  • The integration with 3rd party products and services (like MS Exchange server) was somewhat lacking.
I think SugarCRM is best suited for an aggressive sales department that is not already tracking data. The project management features were not great. Some important questions to ask are: how many people do we have working in sales (a greater number of people makes it a better investment to use SugarCRM)? Do we need a custom workflow for the sales process (I hope not!)? Do we need to track contacts, clients, leads, and opportunities?
February 10, 2015

Sugar CRM is sweet.

Theresa Monturano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used SugarCRM to manage our customers, leads and outbound sales efforts. It was used by our sales team. We previously had been using an Access database to manage our contacts which was cumbersome and we wanted an online solution we could customize for our specific industry needs.
  • Highly customizeable
  • The team at Sugar actually listened to my feedback and made changes to their system based on my company needs.
  • It was way more affordable and then SalesForce and easier to maniuplate.
  • Integrating the data at the time needed more finesse, this may have been changed
  • Mapping sales data was also a little difficult
If you do not need the system to actually process sales orders, then it is perfect!
Zoe Leanza | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SugarCRM is being used in the Sales department to aid both Sales Representatives and the Marketing Department to identify products of interest to a wide variety of customers. It addresses the specificity of advertising materials sent to groups of customers, aiming for more specific and less redundant advertising. The whole organization does not use SugarCRM but has access to it. A potential transition away from SugarCRM is in the works, as it is not the most efficient way of organizing and profiling customers.
  • SugarCRM is easy to learn and can be mastered in a matter of hours. It is laid out in a very intuitive manner and can manage thousands of entries and customers.
  • It can record a wide variety of information - not only customer names and contact informations - but also a description of their work and an ability to select biotechnological tools in which they may be interested.
  • Profiles can be annotated and updated constantly; and grouped into larger laboratories. The corresponding profile of each customer can reveal Sales Representatives and their interactions with each customer, which is helpful in avoiding redundant or irrelevant cold calls.
  • When trying to edit or annotate a subsection of a customer's profile, a new page opens entirely. Thus, rather than being able to see all the information at all times, you have to navigate back and forth in a very inefficient and frustrating way. It makes entering things into SugarCRM very tedious.
  • Duplicate entries are a regular occurence in SugarCRM, thanks to the program's inability to differentiate between small differences (such as a capitalized first name or a suffix).
  • SugarCRM does not allow you to very easily merge duplicate entries, and data will get lost in the transfer or consolidation of information.
SugarCRM is appropriate as a customer profiling database for small projects (ie, fewer than 1,000 customers) but with larger projects it gets very tedious and repetitive, presenting a number of frustrating issues with redundancy and a meticulous attention to detail. Thus, I would recommend this to smaller projects; but it is less appropriate for larger tasks with multiple contacts or locations. Another thing to consider is its user-friendliness. If the employees using SugarCRM have minimal experience with marketing or customer profiling, it is a good choice since it is so easy to learn and navigate - a simple and intuitive layout that resembles a social media site.
Sid Haas | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our sales and marketing teams use SugarCRM to manage customer relationships, sales opportunities, and track marketing campaigns. It gives us a central source for this information and allows managers to review reports/activities at any time. Other departments are beginning to use SugarCRM as they need access to some of the data being stored in Sugar.
  • Reporting - creating and editing reports is easy and intuitive. We find this aspect of SugarCRM to be much better than our previous solution.
  • Navigation - I find it very easy to drill into the information I need. Moving from accounts to contacts to opportunities, etc.
  • Custom Fields - Sugar makes it extremely convenient and easy to add custom data fields whenever and wherever we need them. We've made Sugar do what we need it to with the use of these and we continue to add new ones regularly.
  • Bugs - Each new release contains bugs and glitches that aren't always fixed before the next releas. Unfortunately, we never know where we'll find these. There have been times when functionality has been broken for extended periods of time due to minor updates that are automatically installed for us (we use their SugarOnDemand hosting).
  • Support - There's no point in entering a support ticket with any status other than the system being down/impaired. We never get a response to tickets submitted with any other status. Initial response time from the support team is good. But if an issue requires explanation, prepare to wait for a solution.
  • Direct Mail - We still execute direct mail campaigns as they are effective for us. Unfortunately, Sugar is designed around e-mail campaigns and has little support for direct mail. Simple things cause us problems. For example, we can't export the first and second lines of a street address separately even though we enter them that way. Sugar ends up putting both street address lines together.
  • Integrations - While it's getting better, Salesforce still dominates the market. So 3rd party integrations with SugarCRM aren't as prevalent as we would have hoped.
SugarCRM is flexible enough to adapt to the way you do business. I would focus on asking questions of all CRM providers about that. Just because the software is designed for the way developers think your sales team should work, doesn't mean it makes sense for how you actually do business.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used Sugar CRM as a lightweight alternative to SFDC for a startup within our existing business. It was used mainly to track and manage leads and customer accounts for planning educational student tours.
  • Helped us stay organized.
  • It was free or very inexpensive.
  • Had similar layout to SFDC, so with our experience, we could pick it up and start using immediately.
  • The UX needs improvements.
  • Reporting was limited.
I was not directly involved in the selection process, I know my boss selected this software because additional SFDC accounts with the main business was costly and SugarCRM wasr very inexpensive in comparison.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We started implementing SugarCRM a couple of years ago because our development department started to grow as an independent company. We thought that SugarCRM could solve all our customer relation needs. SugarCRM does the trick and solved our biggest problems, but today we also need to keep some in-house and constant technical support.
  • SugarCRM mobile support for both, iOS and Android. That's good for mobility and works great.
  • It is a cloud based SaaS solution.
  • The framework used in its core is robust and flexible.
  • Campaign management and email marketing tools are weak, it's impossible to send create and send clean HTML templates. We ended up using Campaign Monitor (another emailing tool not related to SugarCRM).
  • The interface seems to be outdated compared to other similar solutions like Zoho.
  • It is not very intuitive and sometimes it's difficult to use.You get the feeling that something is not working as expected.
SugarCRM doesn't work so good if you want to track clients with opportunities coming from email campaigns, and this is starting to be an important feature for our company. We also had lots of problems trying to customize and adjust the customer workflows to our needs. I may recommend SugarCRM to a colleague if it doesn't have lots of very specific customizations.
Andrew Dunifer, MBA/MS MIS | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SugarCRM is being used by the Sales and Marketing departments of our organization. The main function of the program is for our company to track prospects communications and the various sales stages of business opportunities for the company. We also use the email/newsletter function for sending direct e-blast campaigns to our database. We are looking into integrating the application into some Project Management functions for sourcing, billing and managing event activations but have not pursued this option yet.
  • The CRM application is great at tracking sales stages and allowing easy customization of dashboarding and the navigation for sales teams is intuitive.
  • The application is Cloud based so accessing the application is anywhere is easy.
  • There are several plugins which are helpful including one for Outlook which allows you to archive email communications.
  • The application can be clunky at times. We have had to call into the support team because certain buttons stop working as browser updates occur periodically.
  • The email campaign function is much more difficult to use than some more automated platforms like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. You must build target lists only by running reports first. Once target lists are built you must manually build your own templates and trackers are not auto-generated as they are in the aforementioned applications. Everything is quite manual and not as automated as it could be.
  • The HTML coding doesn't always move over from other applications like Dreamweaver as nicely as it could. The formatting of HTML templates isn't as exactly as you built and takes some correction to get it right.
SugarCRM does the trick if you are looking for an open Source CRM application and you don't have a ton of cash for the big name CRM platforms. However, it is very difficult to get user buy-in because it is cumbersome to use. I have experience with many other CRM applications such as Oracle, Goldmine, and a few others and I find that SugarCRM has been one of the lesser of the reliable and intuitive.
January 14, 2014

SugarCRM Review

Art Speakman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • It did seem to be a great tool for organizing data
  • The opportunity function did not work as good as it could have
  • The company I worked for did not use the software for anything but a name and address book for the most part.
  • Just like all software there is a bit of a learning curve to learn the functionality but it did not seem to function up to par with some other software like Act I have used in the past. Compared to salesforce that I use now the sugar crm did not work as well but that is due to its limited use at my former company. Sugar crm did the basics of data collection just fine but we used it for little else. I am not sure what version we used either .
How does this compare to salesforce, act, Boru, or some others on the market?
Stewart Sylvester | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • SugarCRM has really helped me in my job as a marketer in a tech company allowing me increased visibility as to where the leads I generate go and how they are being followed up on. It lets me integrate my marketing automation platform directly into Sugar and lets me work closer with the sales team.
  • Sugar has helped us increase profitability by decreasing admin time with business process automation.
  • Sugar is flexible and completely customizable - very agile and allows us to use it however we like.
  • The calendar needs some more work. Sugar has a great new Sugar 7 edition but they didn't even touch the calendar!
  • Can be slow at times.
What do you want/need from a CRM?
Do you care about open source CRM?
How important are integrations/customizations to you? (sugar is unparalleled in both).
How important is name recognition to your decision makers (ie, will you be fired for not choosing salesforce)?
How much are you willing to spend?
Hosted or on-premise?
Danniel Condez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Fast and easy custom reporting
  • Easy creation and integration of new modules
  • Adding new custom fields to Customer or Accounts module
  • Access control and user management. The design has to be more simpler for assigning custom fields for specific profiles
I would recommend this to a colleague who wants a standard CRM which requires more custom modules. Another key factor for this CRM is the Support Module to handle Customer support tickets.
December 17, 2013

Sugar CRM Review

Joelle DiBenedetto | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Easy to learn.
  • Easy to customize to whatever industry you are in.
  • Great reporting.
  • Email plugins to be automatic to which ever Module you want it to go to.
  • Team/role management
  • Sync/Outlook on the community version
The customization a breeze no matter what industry you are in. As long as you have a work flow to start with, Sugar can easily fall in line. Do your research and make sure that the system has what you need for your business.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • SugarCRM integrates well with third party applications live Omni-Riva Server to provide a bi-directional contact sync with all our users, on all devices. Very powerful and works perfectly.
  • SugarCRM support is very flexible is assisting you with custom module integration, when you use your own developers.
  • SugarCRM Admin functions and 'developer tools' are very easy to access and learn in order to do basic customizations on your own without the need of a developer.
  • Email marketing
You should either have an in-house CRM admin expert (this could be a sales admin or sales manager, that gets trained on the system) or contract a consultant, in order to assure user adoption.
Jennifer Schnell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Customization - Being an administrator, I was able to make small to large scale changes without knowing code.
  • Inexpensive - SugarCRM is inexpensive and that is one of the reasons we chose it over Salesforce.com. Plus it was open source, so our developers could customize it as needed.
  • User-friendly - I found SugarCRM very easy to use and when I didn't know how to do something, I could always go online and find the answer quickly.
  • SugarCRM is better suited for SMB vs Enterprise, would be nice if they could scale it for Enterprise.
  • Reporting: subpar reporting in general. But you can get plugins that help this out.
#1 - vet out your options thoroughly and evaluate what is best for your specific company's needs and goals.
December 11, 2013

The Sugar CRM Advantage

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Extremely robust - so many ways to fine tune the CRM to fit your needs.
  • User friendly - takes very little time to become acquainted with the software.
  • Very good for small to medium sized businesses.
  • GUI - not the prettiest software.
  • Duplicate detection - I ran into duplicate leads frequently and there was not an easy way to remove them.
  • Search function is temperamental.
I would advise a collegue to take their time when setting up Sugar CRM. There are many features and they can be overwhelming if they are all presented at once. If you take the time to implement the CRM correctly it will make your job and your colleagues jobs much easier and more efficient.
December 11, 2013

SugarCRM can be sweet!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • I liked that SugarCRM was user friendly, it was less complex than other CRMs to roll out across our organization.
  • SugarCRM provided analytics that my company wasn't using at the time. The information gained was very insightful.
  • From an operations standpoint, it was definitely more cost effective for our smaller organization, but offered some of the same key features as enterprise CRMs.
  • Small, but key. At the time I was a user, SugarCRM didn't have a thorough customization option to make it reflect the look and feel of our company. That can be integral for sales adoption.
I'm no expert, but I don't think sugar is a good fit for every organization - I've not seen too many people engage from an enterprise level. Know what your end goal is in CRM implementation and be patient. Treat marketing as a sales enablement tool and CRM can prove extremely successful to you.
Collin Yanez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Running call/email logs allowing our company to monitor performance as it happens
  • The ability to link records together through a (fairly) seamless process
  • Viewing a summary for a particular module that allows you to encompass all data at a glance
  • The overall interface isn't aesthetically pleasing, and overall processing of most requests is a dreadful experience
  • Auto-populates almost everything BUT the record that you're actually looking for
  • Creating mass reports to include every detail you desire is almost near impossible. I would challenge the developers themselves to create a flawless report for my team
What's the average load time per page for a particular user of your product, similar to what we need?

Prepare a test report that includes every module/record/detail/etc and ask them to verify it has the capability to do so. Keyword: VERIFY
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Platform was straightforward.
  • Navigating to obtain information was consistent.
  • The overall presentation of the application was straightforward.
  • Campaign set-up is unorganized and tedious.
  • SugarCRM graphical outputs for reports need to have more flexibility.
  • Customization all around for the platform to work best for my company is not easy and can not be changed. Not every company does the same thing and needs to be more customizable without help from the Sugar Support Team.
I would definitely recommend Sugar as a CRM that is extremely useful. Obviously, the type of business and other factors will determine how bold of a recommendation I would provide. But for the most part, Sugar's functionality, organization, and reporting features are rated a 9 or 10. The aspects of where Sugar excels are the most critical aspects of a CRM. If you want a direct useful tool that will help organize your business and allow you to make changes that will lead to ROI, Sugar is a great system to do that for most businesses.
December 10, 2013

SugarCRM

Jennifer Stewart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • The SugarCRM system allows for us to customize modules creating opportunities for the company to streamline and incorporate pieces of our larger initiatives.
  • SugarCRM is a great tool for our sales department. The opportunities & forecasting modules allow for accurate pipelines and better management of goals.
  • We are marketing multiple events to different target lists at any given point during the year. SugarCRM allows for us to manage both our attendee and sponsor marketing in one place. Everyone within the company can see activities and be aware of what is happening in both our sales and marketing realms.
  • I cannot say enough about how the customization has played a part in allowing us, as a company and marketing department, to run as lean as possible.
  • The reporting capability is an area where I would like to see improvement. It is great on basic reports but would benefit from additional capabilities for more complex reporting.
  • The inability to mass update from reports is frustrating.
When determining if Sugar is the right CRM system for your company I would determine if you would benefit from the customization opportunities or need something more out of the box. If you are planning on extensive customization then make sure you have the internal support of an administrator who can work with developers - third party or internal - to implement those pieces. I also recommend knowing the reports that your people will require to present and talk to Sugar about your needs. If you decide to implement SugarCRM explore the third party plugins and integrate what you can from the beginning.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • User organization - Onboarding users, getting them setup and setting scope and access level is great in SugarCRM
  • Phone Integration - The feature that we really wanted SugarCRM for; it's integration with sales calling systems is great.
  • Sales Funnel - The ability to view the sales funnel for our team and to see the value for our pipeline at a given time was amazing.
  • UI Complexity
  • UI Customizability - We were always confident that SugarCRM could do what we wanted but, the complexity and thus cost of making SugarCRM into exactly the CRM we needed was a big question.
Figure out what you are going to build in SugarCRM before you build it. Going in without a gameplan is a recipe for an expensive and painful experience. Also, use seasoned developers who are familiar with SugarCRM. Going cheap here will bite you in the end. The experience in SugarCRM is key; far more than just someone who knows PHP or CRMs in general.
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