SugarCRM

Full Review

Compared to the other contact management tools I've tested out, SugarCRM was a whole different animal. For other services, I read a few FAQs and downloaded the free trial within a few minutes to get the hands-on experience. Not the case with SugarCRM. Instead, I spent 30 minutes watching a variety of demo videos trying to get some grasp of what Sugar does. This isn't so much a flaw of Sugar - in fact their collection of demo clips are very helpful - but rather speaks to the complexity of SugarCRM.

As I was registering for my free trial, SugarCRM asked for me company's annual revenue (for lead tracking purposes - something many have complained about). Head Startup is no Fortune 500 company by any means, but the options still stunned me. I clicked the drop down menu, and the lowest possibility was 10M or less. Options ranged in the hundreds of millions, and topped out at over 1 billion. This too speaks to SugarCRMs target market. Sure many outside reviewers tout Sugar as a solution for ‘small businesses', but I'm hard pressed to think of a startup that made 10M+ a year right out of the gate. I'll still review the app, but this is an important disclaimer: I believe there are better alternatives (HighRise, Relenta) out there for startups, both in terms of viability and purpose.

Sugar supports a wide array of services, but is centered around the customer relationship. Client profiles and accounts are easily created, and can be assigned to users. Integration across various teams and departments allows for higher efficiency and transparency. For example, a sales associate and customer service representative can have full access to a customer - avoiding the case where a customer has had problems (and been working with customer service), but the account holder has no idea of the problem. Email, online marketing, corporate calendars, to-do lists with prioritization, and professional reports are all additional features of SugarCRM.

If there was one word I had to summarize Sugar, it's customizability. Depending on the type of the user (sales, customer service, administrator, etc) the homepage and interface are accordingly preset. At any time a user can customize what shows up on his homepage, what tabs appear, and even things like color scheme. Administrators have the ability to change the user-based presets, create teams and assign roles, and even change entry fields for new contacts, leads, tasks, etc. Almost everything is customizable, and in a very WYSIWYG manner. There's no code, there's no outside applications - just drag, drop, and type.

SugarCRM comes in two models: Professional and Enterprise. Professional costs $360/user/year, and Enterprise costs $600/user/year. Compared to products such as Relenta and HighRise, SugarCRM is significantly more expensive. But given SugarCRMs features and capabilities, it's a lot more reasonable to compare it to something like Salesforce (and getting in the range of SAP or Oracle). And when you make that comparison, SugarCRM is very reasonable.

The Bottom Line

For startups who are confident in future expansion, or want to be prepared for the prospect - I'm more comfortable recommending SugarCRM. It can be tough to switch from small simple services to complex systems, especially in the face of rapid expansion and an evolving business. In that case, it's better to have the complex system in place from the get-go. It might mean unnecessary headaches and costs in the short run, but over time the headaches saved from not having to upgrade are worth it.

I think SugarCRM is a good deal for the feature set it provides, and makes sense for medium to larger businesses (or startups highly confident of expansion). The bottom line, though, is that most startups don't need something as complex as SugarCRM. I'm working at a startup right now, and there are only a handful of employees - there aren't a bunch of teams spread out across different tasks. Frankly, we wouldn't make use of most of SugarCRM's features, so why pay the price tag? There are alternatives (Relenta, HighRise) that do a better job doing less, and I'd rather invest in those.

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