SugarCRM Professional - Gets the job done when your organization is tight on a CRM solution budget.
January 16, 2014

SugarCRM Professional - Gets the job done when your organization is tight on a CRM solution budget.

Andrew Dunifer, MBA/MS MIS | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Sugar Professional

Overall Satisfaction

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.
  • It has helped us to keep track of clients and manage communications which have ultimately turned into closed deals for the company.
  • Because the application has been slow to get users to use fully, I find that we have to go through several iterations of training to review proper use and this takes us company time.
  • Allowing us to archive communications has protected us as well when projects are completed and a client has some discrepancy on expectations based on previous conversations. We have all of this data backed up to review in these scenarios protecting our company.
I have used Oracle, Peoplesoft and Goldmine platforms in the past and found that these systems where much easier to use and had very little to any technical issues with the application. To be fair, the aforementioned platforms were mainly used as an end user in some sort of Sales capacity and I did not need to manage the back-end as I do with SugarCRM so there may be issues with those applications that I never saw.
Our organization will continue to use Sugar as long as it remains cost effective and it addresses the majority of our needs. I will, however, recommend looking into other options once our needs increase and there is additional budget for some bigger named and more robust platform options. I feel if the application was friendlier to end users we would get better productivity as well.
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.