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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 Small Businesses (1-50 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

(1-25 of 32)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Jay Moore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by our Sales team only within our organization. It is used only for new sales and some retention efforts. We don't use a lot of the full features of it. We mostly use the leads and prospects modules.
  • Customize screen layout
  • Customize fields
  • Search functionality
  • Recording data
  • The email campaign of SugarCRM is very difficult to use. It is way more complicated than it needs to be.
  • Importing into SugarCRM as a lead is very easy but importing into account/contact is not.
SugarCRM is very flexible, and, since we have direct access to the underlying data, it is not too bad to integrate with other systems. If you want it as an email campaign platform, then I would look elsewhere or think about integrating with a tool that is better suited to do that.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It has really helped us to maximize our sales and marketing efforts. All our info regarding sales opportunities, accounts, contacts, leads, etc are under one platform allowing us to get visibility into our sales efforts and pipeline. Also by automating most of the tasks by setting up workflows helps a lot in saving time and making the process efficient. It is very easy to use and very affordable and also well suited for most businesses. It covers most of the important functionalities required in any CRM like workflow automation, analytics, leads and contacts management, etc. Overall it is a very robust and scalable CRM in the market for small to mid size businesses.
  • It was easy to set up and didn't take a lot of time during integration.
  • Its export functionality is good.
  • Their customer support service is fantastic and their technical support is great as well.
  • Their reporting and analytics function is very comprehensive.
  • It is very well-organized in terms of content management or Workflow management and opportunity management.
  • The UI can be made better. It's a little clumsy at times.
It can be used as an end to end CRM tool. It has all features for lead management, opportunity tracking, contact management, analytics etc. It is more suited for small to mid sized companies. It's not the best CRM if your requirements are heavy in terms of workflow management as lacks some advanced features present in other CRMs.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company has multiple product lines, each with their own sales teams. Since each sales team is managed separately, CRM tools have historically been used very differently by each team. We have been through multiple big-name CRM tools. What eventually happens is that product use drops to almost zero because the tool cannot meet the needs of everyone. Sugar Sell has solved that problem for us.
  • The product is highly customizable.
  • It has powerful reporting features.
  • It performs much faster than other CRM products we've used.
  • Integrations with other systems work well.
  • Initial setup / configuration is involved and takes time.
  • There are limitations on logging into multiple devices.
  • The menus across the desktop and mobile versions are inconsistent.
If your organization has needs or requirements that it seems cannot be met by the industry leaders in CRM, I would urge you to talk to Sugar Sell (SugarCRM). They bent over backwards to work with different groups of people within our company to prove to them how committed they were to making the product work for us. It seamlessly integrates with our email and other applications we use frequently. And they helped us configure detailed reporting for our very complex sales territories and organizational structure.

If you are looking for a very basic CRM tool that doesn't require much configuration, Sugar will still work for you, but you certainly have other options.
Edward Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SugarCRM is being used in our team to generate and monitor tasks and also to manage our business needs, such as offering an administration portal for personalized support and sales and marketing automation, creating automated workflows as an administrator, and now the documentation is much easier because each user places the information in a centralized place and registers the contact with the buyers, and we have realized that this keeps our business organized.
  • Intuitive, simple and very robust user interface.
  • Organize your work better with lots of information you can add.
  • Needs some ways to automatically purge or self-clean old data.
  • Sometimes it's slow, and reports can be better and that affects the global search that doesn't always work.
The product has an excellent development model. Excellent integration with SQL. It can be customized to meet business requirements, it is cost effective and architectural integration is flexible, I like being able to create a new opportunity directly from an Outlook email and the fact that it can be implemented on the site, allowing additional flexibility with integration to other systems. On the other hand it is not so easy to use or robust compared to other CRMs that we have used, in addition to the fact that sometimes it is slow and not all modules work in the same way, for example, not being able to mass import the budget module, or lack of scanning in the document module.
December 13, 2018

SugarCRM - great product

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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 house internal information and build reports on my team's sales funnel in terms of prospects and warm leads to closed accounts. We have various sales teams globally so its helped us scale while streamlining reporting and communication among the teams. It also helps ensure all teams are maintaining their client pipeline with a intelligence behind it which is helpful for management.
  • Very easy to set up and configure reports among teams. Very customizable and allows me to build reports that illustrate how the team is performing.
  • Exporting granular reports into excel for in depth analysis and actionable measures.
  • Ability to mass upload lots of information and leads. Important for our team to import lots of information on prospecting clients.
  • UI is sufficient but seems a bit outdated compared to SFDC.
  • Inability to login to multiple devices computers.
  • The email marketing tool is decent but far from the best, overall other solutions that have better marketing platforms.
When our company got acquired in early 2018 we had various sales teams located globally. Some of the teams did not use a CRM. With SugarCRM we were able to streamline all reporting, communication and accountability among the teams. The CRM has helped us ensure the teams are not targeting the same clients and doing double work. Additionally since teams are in various timezones the activity tracking is extremely helpful to give a snapshot of the latest status with the account and how close we are to the sale. Without this CRM we would be extremely messy and on different pages with each sales team.
Peter Fletcher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We have worked with Sugar for many clients ranging in size from 2 to over 300 CRM Users.

Sugar is extremely flexible and cost effective compared to its competitors like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.

Sugar covers the whole customer life cycle from Lead through Sales and on-going Support and Marketing. It is easy to use and has many features like in-line editing that keep Clicks to a minmum. Most tasks can be one with two or three clicks.

Sugar Mobile gives a very strong mobile app to give users complete flexibility whether at their desk or in the field.

  • Sugar gives full account and contact visibility so any member of the organisation can have a full and accurate view of all related activities, products install, contracts in place and much more. It gives the proverbial One View.
  • Dashboards are one of the strongest parts of Sugar giving each user their own view of the way they can and want to interact with the customer. The dashboards are a key feature in that they are very easy to customize so that each user has a personal view with tasks, data views etc. appropriate to their role. Customizing these dashboards by role is also very easy. No coding is required, it is largely a matter of dragging and dropping fields.
  • Sugar's Forecasting Module makes the forecasting process quick and easy by using the Opportunities already created by the Sales Team. It also provides great individual feedback to the Team regarding YTD & QTD performance against Quota.
  • Sugar Mobile is a very strong mobile app for IOS and Android that is both easy to use and comprehensive. I t can be used both of-line and on-line mode.
  • With Version 8, there's not much Sugar can't do for us. With Plug-ins for most extra requirements that Sugar doesn't deliver at no/very low cost it's easy to build/deliver what we really need.
  • S
Sugar is an excellent product that covers the CRM needs for most organisations, large or small. Its low cost, flexibility and ease of use make it stand out in a very cluttered market. For mobile teams, Sugar Mobile is a free IOS/Android App that is superb.

Ease of customisation and administration mean our clients can control their own destiny if they wish to. This ease of use helps significantly reduce Sugar's TCO sine external consultants are not required to make the system changes that Clients want on a regular basis.
December 12, 2017

Sugar CRM Is Pretty Sweet

Zeke Becerra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sugar across the organization in many ways: to manage marketing automation, customer journey, and our quotes. My use of Sugar is completely sales-related. I use it to manage my customers and prospects in the way a CRM is traditionally used--logging communication and activities with them in the CRM. I also create and manage quotes in Sugar and that makes managing my forecast/pipeline easy to do.
  • Quote Management
  • Activity Logging
  • Marketing Automation
  • I'd like to see the reporting interface become a little more modern. Too much menu-diving required.
SugarCRM is great for keeping track of your interactions with your customers and prospects, both from the standpoint of logging activity manually (calls, emails, etc.) and linking it with a marketing automation tool. I think for someone who is not a Sugar admin, reporting can be time-consuming. As a Territory Manager, I want creating a new report to be easy, fast, and accurate. SugarCRM provides accurate reports, but I haven't found creating them to be easy or fast.
August 17, 2016

Sugar CRM Review

Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The marketing and sales department used it for the tracking of vendor contacts, partnerships, trade show contacts and lead vendors. We also used it to track project management for different sales and marketing initiatives. In the system, emails were tracked against contacts. New opportunities for projects and trade shows were also managed. For all of these different functions, we had simple workflow actions that made notifications for certain business events and triggers. We also used the system for sales and marketing reporting on ROI and forecasting for sales.
  • Open source code which allows your developers to customize it however needed. It also did pretty well integrating with other products.
  • The Sugar CRM community is pretty vast and the user community is very engaged so you can find great resources and answers to questions and problems.
  • Our team really liked the custom reports we were able to create inside the application. They were visually appealing, user friendly and worked very well for our business unit's needs (forecasting, ROI, campaigning etc).
  • Official documentation is not a strong point for this application. I wish there was more reference material to guide people new to the system from an admin and developer side.
  • There are fewer bells and whistles to the application than other CRMs.
  • Since it is open source, you don't have any sort of support plan options like other bigger applications like Salesforce.com or Oracle etc.
Small businesses may find use of the application because it's low cost. Or companies that have a pretty straightforward sales process and won't require a lot of heavy customization. Heavy customization is fine in the framework, however you need a skilled developer to be able to manage it.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sugar across our sales/marketing/account management teams to organize and track our customers and prospects - particularly our sales/marketing funnel.
  • Sugar's reporting is pretty simple to use once you get trained up on it.
  • The pricing is good for an organization of our size.
  • Ability to customize also good - again, once you get trained up on it.
  • Really, really find it a hassle (at least right now) to sync Sugar with our marketing automation software. We use a 3rd party API as our connector between the two systems but I find glitches in it that concern me and make me wonder if all my information is being accurately transmitted and matched up.
  • Sugar wasn't very intuitive when I first began using it. We recently had a 3rd party come in to redesign the system for us and once it was customized, it was much better.
  • Search function doesn't always seem to work in the top nav bar- frustrating when I'm trying to find something fast and don't want to go into a module to do it.
I think Sugar is the kind of thing that can be used out of the box but shouldn't. We needed help to go back and rethink the design of it for our organization and once we did that, it became a better solution.
Marc Prince | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sugar is being used by the whole organization. We use it primarily to track all of our interactions with our clients. We can now monitor the entire sales funnel. One of the biggest process failures was in our followup with the client. Know what the conversation and pain points are with each contact has greatly increased our win ratio.
  • Pricing is a major consideration with Sugar. When comparing Sugar with competitors, the cost to value ratio is outstanding.
  • I really like the ability to customize the reporting.
  • I have my dashboard really locked in. I log in, view the dashboard, and drill down into the issue of the day.
  • Sales funnel.... Knowing how much we are promoting, how those promotions are affecting our target, and how we are engaging with those who have responded. Sugar has made this a simple process that we have integrated into every workflow touching the sale.
  • PSA connectors. I have not found a PSA with a great CRM integrated, so I let the PSA do what it does best. Problem is getting the Sugar to more closely integrate with the PSA.
  • Sugar's flexibility is great, but it sometimes seems like I am handing out a lot of nickels and dimes to third party developers for their modules.
  • Desktop and mobile menus could be a bit more homogenous.
We all have Sugar on our computers and mobile devices. Workflows are dedicated to ensuring Sugar is always up to date. Now, when I am in the field, or meeting with a client on their premises, I have all the information on my phone. Many of my closings are done in the moment.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SugarCRM is used by marketing and sales to track prospects and customers and provide reports.
  • Customized reporting is a strength.
  • Customizable to user needs.
  • Getting to a point of being usable can be difficult.
  • If something is customized and SugarCRM updates, things can go wrong.
  • If something is customized, it had better be dialed in the right way, or things can go wrong.
I believe with proper support a more complex sales force would appreciate SugarCRM. Simpler sales operations or those who do not have backend support might want to look at a simpler product. Social and marketing is underdeveloped at this point. Other products offer more if you are looking to integrate.
Chin Uba (MBA, MSc, MCITP, MCSE) | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SUCRM as we call it, is used across the whole organization and I have deployed it for a few clients. We have used it primarily as a CRM and for client follow up.
  • Excellent database system. Can be copied to other servers.
  • Custom fields.
  • Ability to link CRM data to deals.
  • Good user interface.
  • Provide portable versions.
  • Probably provide platform independent CRM system.
It is a very stable CRM and that is what it is! However, I will recommend it more for businesses in healthcare, manufacturing, IT, accounting and logistics. In fact any business where there is a need to keep customer records in a pliable way and be ready for retrieval is where SugarCRM plays well.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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
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