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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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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

(1-19 of 19)
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May 28, 2021

Af

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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 the large number of duplicate accounts that are in sfdc currently. [Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)] is used by other software companies as well and I was tasked to get the crm and see if it could add value to where salesforce is lacking and that’s the source of the truth.
  • Building personal reports
  • Integrations
  • Visually appealing
  • Lack of Drill down to the level of detail
  • Cannot slice and dice the data with multiple scenarios
  • User experience is a little slow
I think [Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)] is well suited for small to medium sized businesses it seems to lack a true enterprise feel and I doubt it’s capabilities if your company is exceeding either 100M in revenue or, more than 450 employees. Other than that[,] it is an affordable crm if a company does not want to invest in an enterprise crm like a salesforce. I would recommend [Sugar Sell (SugarCRM)] to all my medium to small sized network accounts to use.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sugar is the main program for our company. It's used across the whole oganization. At the momento we've had small issues such as sometimes it would get stuck or at times certain information was not available on the right hand side at the time of putting notes on a case.
  • User Friendly
  • Saves Information Quickly
  • Informs you what you did wrong in order to continue
  • Add More Color to it
Sugar allows us to keep récords of the clients that the company has, such as new inbounds that are coming in hot or clients that you have to follow up with. These last couple of updatees that the system has made have been real helpfull. Especially being able to link a phone system to the system and be able to dial out quicker.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This system is used by several departments within the company, and this allows each department to have knowledge and control over the situation of our client. With this, each person who can open the information of our client will know what the problem is and the history of the customer and in this way to be able to offer a correct service and attention.
  • Facilitates access to customer information.
  • Schedule appointments and follow up with clients.
  • Allows a correct and effective contact with customers.
  • System load is sometimes slow.
  • The appointment scheduling system.
  • Data update.
Sugar Sell is an excellent system in our company since it allows us to share information between the different work departments. It helps us when the client calls us, no matter who answers, [they] will be able to provide the correct attention because the client's information will be sent to the Mac and I can also update it. I could improve the system for scheduling appointments, but it works well.
Kelly Wasden | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently using SugarCRM in its most basic form, for sales account management, and have recently started using it more for post sales and customer support. We track lead flow and where they were generated, reports for some mild forecasting, as well as all lifecycles of the sales process. We currently are using it for tracking converted leads, opportunity creation, upsell opportunities, and account management from our Customer Service team.
  • Leads.
  • Account conversion.
  • Price.
  • Reporting could be improved.
  • Simplicity and ease of use.
  • The clunkiness of the UI and the APP.
SugarCRM can make sense in some scenarios where it is somewhat cheap to deploy and get up and running. Don't be fooled by simplicity though, because you might need to hire an outside source to come in and configure it all properly for you which isn't the cheapest thing ever. For smaller sales teams, I think SugarCRM can and really has gotten the job done for us. However, as the team scales and more reports are needed, I find it very hard to recommend as a CRM when there are SO many other better choices out there. Reports are a mess, their mobile app is terrible, and their opportunity conversion is an absolute joke and needs some serious UI/UX re-tooling.
Emma McCarthy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SugarCRM as our primary tool in tracking applications, determining eligibility, and managing payments for children in publicly funded preschool programs. Although it was primarily designed as a sales tool, we use it less as for sales (given that we are not a sales organization) and more as a relationship management and accounting tool. We have a very small team (10 people total), but we all use Sugar on a daily basis.
  • Extremely flexible. Sugar is open source, and so you're able to build customized modules to fit your needs readily and easily.
  • Robust reporting capabilities. I appreciate how it's quick and easy to pull the data that my clients need.
  • Easy to use. Sugar has a fairly straight user interface, and so is usable even by those who are not particularly tech savvy.
  • More approachable user interface. At its core, it's a complex database, and it's not always intuitive.
It's well suited for tracking and managing customer relationships. We also find that it's well suited for tracking program eligibility. We use it to manage over 6000 applications for publicly-funded preschool programs, as well as the entire communication flow with both families and preschool providers who engage with our program. It does well if you have a few different customer groups that interact with one another - it allows you to track your communication with these groups, as well as their relationships with one another.
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.
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.
April 08, 2016

SugarCRM Review

Aaron Fisher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I reviewed multiple enterprise CRMs to find which would fit our company the best. SugarCRM was one of those. My review consisted of actively testing each CRM for about 2 weeks, attempting detailed customizations, testing the workflow processes and evaluating the overall usability of the system. At the end of my review there were two CRMs that ultimately met our requirements, SugarCRM and Salesforce.
  • SugarCRM's number one strength is the ability to host your instance on-site. This make any customization and changes possible as you have full control over every aspect of the CRM, including the source code.
  • The price of SugarCRM is its second strength. It has essentially all of the features of Salesforce and more but at a dramatically lower price.
  • The integrated Project Management module was another top selling point for my organization.
  • SugarCRM is hard to use at the administration level, plain and simple. Of all of the CRMs I reviewed SugarCMR had the steepest learning curve and was the most difficult to understand.
  • I also needed to make some customizations that weren't "out of the box" I was able to make these customizations easily in Salesforce but had to program everything by hand in Sugar and still wasn't able to implement my customizations fully.
  • At a developer level the Sugar Framework is quite a bit to learn. I thought that it would actually be easier to develop in Sugar since it uses common programming languages however the framework that Sugar is built on is very confusing and bloated with far from adequate documentation.
  • Developing and administering Sugar feels like you need to have some secret insider info that you can only get if you hire one of their "partners" to actually do the development and administration for you. It is not something that can be done easily in house like some of the other CRMs
SugarCRM is a great fit for a company that wants the features of Salesforce but not the price, or if you need to be able to host the CRM yourself for security or customization purposes. Finally I would recommend SugarCRM to a company that plans on having an outside "Sugar Partner" set up the CRM and perform regular maintenance as opposed to handling it in house.
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.
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?
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 04, 2013

I won't sugarcoat it...

Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Good customization options.
  • Reasonable price point for small businesses and non-profits.
  • Decent option if you want an open source solution.
  • The platform is maddeningly slow to begin with, but every task flow requires a new page to load which makes it all the more frustrating.
  • It is not confusing to use, but it is very inefficient. Every task took so much longer than it should because of the sheer number of clicks and page loads required to do anything.
  • I ran into several issues with navigation and functionality. For example, when I used the search bar, a tool tip would pop up reminding me about a new feature... but it hovered over the search results!
  • Often auto-pop tools would not work, making it difficult to link contacts with accounts.
I might recommend Sugar to a small company that is working with a tight budget. My startup used Sugar for a few years, but we moved to a more efficient tool as soon as we had the budget to do so. That said, if you aren't going to use it regularly, it isn't worth the trouble of setting it up.
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