A brief experience with SugarCRM
Updated February 18, 2015
A brief experience with SugarCRM
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Other
Modules Used
- Home, Targets, Leads, Accounts, Opportunities, Contacts, Tasks, Emails, Notes, Calendar, Meetings, Projects Target Lists, Documents, Calls
Overall Satisfaction with SugarCRM
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.
- Initially things were smooth and seemed to increase in efficiency. We were able to dig through fairly large target lists pretty quickly, and track our progress on the way. Multiple people were working the list together and making good progress.
- Unfortunately we didn't get much more ROI from our time with SugarCRM. The experience was enlightening, but we ended up going with a different route for our sales.
- Vtiger CRM,Highrise,Microsoft Dynamics CRM
In comparing against the above, the primary motivation we had in selecting SugarCRM was cost. With the Community Edition, we could easily host the site ourselves (we had ample infrastructure available already). Vtiger appeared to be a fork of Sugar that was not as well regarded by the community (although things may be different now). Highrise had costs per user that we believed we could avoid. Microsoft Dynamics CRM was *very* expensive and promised to be just as much (if not more) work to set up than SugarCRM.