SugarCRM Review
April 08, 2016
SugarCRM Review
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Sugar Ultimate
Overall Satisfaction with SugarCRM
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
- We did not move forward with integrating Sugar so I'm not able to accurately comment on ROI
We ultimately selected Salesforce due to the issues faced with SugarCRM however I would recommend SugarCRM to any company that doesn't plan on managing the CRM in house. The costs associated with hiring a Sugar Partner and purchasing multiple licenses are still going to be lower than Salesforce costs most likely and you'll have the same functionality. However if you want a CRM that can be managed in house without a steep learning curve SugarCRM is not the way to go.