SugarCRM vs. SalesForce.com
Disclaimer: I really like SalesForce.com as a CRM choice. I have therefore come to know it best, and to expect any other CRM to deliver the functionality and dependability that I have come to expect from SFDC. I don't care if something else costs less if it is unreliable or short on features.
That said, I also love supporting the little guy and prefer open source over closed systems in general. I'm a Firefox user, not an IE person, for example. So I wanted to love SugarCRM and have an option I would be proud to offer clients who can't afford SFDC prices. How unfortunate then for my review of SugarCRM to reveal it to be way too buggy and annoyingly planned to be able to recommend.
First let me say the things I like about Sugar. I like that you can change how your user interface is arranged whenever you want. You can simply change the theme shown in a dropdown field on the home page to change colors, arrangement of the object tabs (horizontal or vertical), and more. You can also create new home page views that mash together various components, such as lists of all your Opportunities, Accounts, Leads, etc. with graphical charts based on reports. In SFDC you get similar customization ability, but it is pretty much limited to just one view of the home page. You can't name a bunch of configurations, save them all as links, then switch from one to the other at the click of a button whenever you want.
I also love that Sugar includes an integrated project management component, though I couldn't get it to actually work. But to get to the downside later, let me just say that it is nice to not have to hunt for, install, and pay for an add-on, such as DreamTeam's $40/usr/mo pricey though excellent app. Sugar starts up day one with the feature there, and you can see Gantt charts at the click of a button, if you crave that sort of view of tasks on a project.
Of course, the thing most to love about Sugar is the price. You can get it for free if you want to download the community version and install it on your own web server running PHP. You then have to maintain it yourself, but there are a lot of IT people who know PHP, so if you have in-house IT with those skills, you will probably be fine. If you want an on-demand solution within the SaaS model, Sugar offers several options, each of which is less expensive than SFDC. For the Professional Edition of each, you pay $30/usr/m with Sugar and $65/usr/m with SFDC. For Enterprise Edition it's Sugar $50/usr/m and SFDC $125/usr/m. (In a later article I will review Zoho CRM, which is even cheaper.) Comparable Sugar editions also contain more features than the similarly named SFDC edition. For example, Sugar's PE includes workflow and campaigns at no extra charge.
A year ago there would be a long list of important functions available within SFDC that are simply missing in Sugar. Not so any more. Sugar has pretty clearly been copying SFDC like nobody's business. They even use the exact same list of picklist/dropdown values sometimes, such as for Opportunity/Sales Stages. Now it seems to be less a matter of having the function listed as included and more a matter of getting it to work.
Take the project management feature I mentioned earlier. I created an Account, created a related sales Opportunity record, and then created a project off that Opportunity. Great. But then when I added tasks to the project record, I simply could not get them to show on the Gantt for that project. It clearly says the task is related to the right project when I create or later edit the task, but when I go to the project the tasks don't actually get related. How is anyone using this?
This is in an area where I have no expectations coming from SFDC, because SFDC has no native project management. I just want it to work. But an area where I do have expectations set by SFDC is when it comes to working with Opportunities and Products. I expect the system to do things for me, like calculating the Opp Amount based on which Products I've added. Sugar doesn't do that. I also expect it to allow me to create an independent Price book from which I can pull products for any Opportunity. Sugar has me create each product as a unique entry related to a specific Opp, like Opportunity Products within SFDC. Nowhere did I find an actual price book that could be set up by admin or management staff then accessed by users.
On the admin side, I was annoyed by the handling of picklist/dropdown values. I think of each field in terms of what object the field is related to, regardless of what type of field it is. There is a difference to me between a Type field on an Account versus an Opportunity versus a Case. I don't expect to have to go to one location to find all of them, but in Sugar you do. You edit most fields on an object-by-object basis, but dropdowns are treated specially. They are all accessed in one central location. I could get over this, not expecting every CRM to have made the same decisions as SFDC, and willing to accept I better include the name of each object within the name of the field if it is a dropdown if I want to be able to find it later to edit the value options in the list. However, the thing is also buggy.
I tried at least 4 times to make changes to the Sales Stage field to either add a new value or edit an existing one, and each time it said it was saving my changes, but clearly did not. When I went to the separate page for editing the Sales Probability (an unnecessary step in SFDC, since the two fields are edited together there), my changes from Sales Stage are gone. When I then go back to Sales Stage, sure enough, not saved.
There are other little things that are just annoying if you've been spoiled by SFDC usage. For example, when you create a new field, instead of entering the label first the way you want users to see it (written out with spaces, etc.) and then having the system translate that into the form it needs to work with the field so you don't have to, it goes the other way around in Sugar. You supply the version formatted for the machine and then you also supply the one formatted for the user. Another example is, when you want to edit a page layout you have to do it twice, once for what the record looks like when it is being edited and again for what it looks like when it is being viewed. Now if you are going to frequently be making those two views different, I guess this is a great feature to have. I've never had it nor missed it in SFDC, but if I did, maybe I'd consider it a benefit instead of a cumbersome and unnecessary chore.
In general I found SugarCRM to be buggy. They have added a lot of features recently to make it more like SFDC (Self-Service Portal, etc.) but it just isn't reliable. Take a look at the frequency of patch releases in the announcements section of their support forum and you'll get an idea of just how buggy, but trying SugarCRM yourself is probably the best proof. Give SalesForce.com a try also, then let me know what you think between the two.
That said, I also love supporting the little guy and prefer open source over closed systems in general. I'm a Firefox user, not an IE person, for example. So I wanted to love SugarCRM and have an option I would be proud to offer clients who can't afford SFDC prices. How unfortunate then for my review of SugarCRM to reveal it to be way too buggy and annoyingly planned to be able to recommend.
First let me say the things I like about Sugar. I like that you can change how your user interface is arranged whenever you want. You can simply change the theme shown in a dropdown field on the home page to change colors, arrangement of the object tabs (horizontal or vertical), and more. You can also create new home page views that mash together various components, such as lists of all your Opportunities, Accounts, Leads, etc. with graphical charts based on reports. In SFDC you get similar customization ability, but it is pretty much limited to just one view of the home page. You can't name a bunch of configurations, save them all as links, then switch from one to the other at the click of a button whenever you want.
I also love that Sugar includes an integrated project management component, though I couldn't get it to actually work. But to get to the downside later, let me just say that it is nice to not have to hunt for, install, and pay for an add-on, such as DreamTeam's $40/usr/mo pricey though excellent app. Sugar starts up day one with the feature there, and you can see Gantt charts at the click of a button, if you crave that sort of view of tasks on a project.
Of course, the thing most to love about Sugar is the price. You can get it for free if you want to download the community version and install it on your own web server running PHP. You then have to maintain it yourself, but there are a lot of IT people who know PHP, so if you have in-house IT with those skills, you will probably be fine. If you want an on-demand solution within the SaaS model, Sugar offers several options, each of which is less expensive than SFDC. For the Professional Edition of each, you pay $30/usr/m with Sugar and $65/usr/m with SFDC. For Enterprise Edition it's Sugar $50/usr/m and SFDC $125/usr/m. (In a later article I will review Zoho CRM, which is even cheaper.) Comparable Sugar editions also contain more features than the similarly named SFDC edition. For example, Sugar's PE includes workflow and campaigns at no extra charge.
A year ago there would be a long list of important functions available within SFDC that are simply missing in Sugar. Not so any more. Sugar has pretty clearly been copying SFDC like nobody's business. They even use the exact same list of picklist/dropdown values sometimes, such as for Opportunity/Sales Stages. Now it seems to be less a matter of having the function listed as included and more a matter of getting it to work.
Take the project management feature I mentioned earlier. I created an Account, created a related sales Opportunity record, and then created a project off that Opportunity. Great. But then when I added tasks to the project record, I simply could not get them to show on the Gantt for that project. It clearly says the task is related to the right project when I create or later edit the task, but when I go to the project the tasks don't actually get related. How is anyone using this?
This is in an area where I have no expectations coming from SFDC, because SFDC has no native project management. I just want it to work. But an area where I do have expectations set by SFDC is when it comes to working with Opportunities and Products. I expect the system to do things for me, like calculating the Opp Amount based on which Products I've added. Sugar doesn't do that. I also expect it to allow me to create an independent Price book from which I can pull products for any Opportunity. Sugar has me create each product as a unique entry related to a specific Opp, like Opportunity Products within SFDC. Nowhere did I find an actual price book that could be set up by admin or management staff then accessed by users.
On the admin side, I was annoyed by the handling of picklist/dropdown values. I think of each field in terms of what object the field is related to, regardless of what type of field it is. There is a difference to me between a Type field on an Account versus an Opportunity versus a Case. I don't expect to have to go to one location to find all of them, but in Sugar you do. You edit most fields on an object-by-object basis, but dropdowns are treated specially. They are all accessed in one central location. I could get over this, not expecting every CRM to have made the same decisions as SFDC, and willing to accept I better include the name of each object within the name of the field if it is a dropdown if I want to be able to find it later to edit the value options in the list. However, the thing is also buggy.
I tried at least 4 times to make changes to the Sales Stage field to either add a new value or edit an existing one, and each time it said it was saving my changes, but clearly did not. When I went to the separate page for editing the Sales Probability (an unnecessary step in SFDC, since the two fields are edited together there), my changes from Sales Stage are gone. When I then go back to Sales Stage, sure enough, not saved.
There are other little things that are just annoying if you've been spoiled by SFDC usage. For example, when you create a new field, instead of entering the label first the way you want users to see it (written out with spaces, etc.) and then having the system translate that into the form it needs to work with the field so you don't have to, it goes the other way around in Sugar. You supply the version formatted for the machine and then you also supply the one formatted for the user. Another example is, when you want to edit a page layout you have to do it twice, once for what the record looks like when it is being edited and again for what it looks like when it is being viewed. Now if you are going to frequently be making those two views different, I guess this is a great feature to have. I've never had it nor missed it in SFDC, but if I did, maybe I'd consider it a benefit instead of a cumbersome and unnecessary chore.
In general I found SugarCRM to be buggy. They have added a lot of features recently to make it more like SFDC (Self-Service Portal, etc.) but it just isn't reliable. Take a look at the frequency of patch releases in the announcements section of their support forum and you'll get an idea of just how buggy, but trying SugarCRM yourself is probably the best proof. Give SalesForce.com a try also, then let me know what you think between the two.
Labels: CRM
posted by Dutton at
8:27 AM
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3 Comments:
Dutton,
It's worth noting that Sugar has acknowledged these concerns from other customers and partners and has committed to addressing these issues intensly over the next short while (I say short while as I can't remember what timeframe they indicated).
I think this will see significant improvement in the stability of the application.
Nice balanced review by the way...
Mark
It was a balanced post but I found SugarCRM to be more flexible and easy to use as compared to Salesforce, It is less costlier as compared to Salesforce and we have implemented it for our clients which have produced great results.
Cheers..!
Sorry it has taken me so long to respond to your comments, but very busy period these last few weeks. Thanks for recognition of the balance of the review. That was definitely my intention, as I really want to provide as useful a comparison as I can, and an unfair review is useless.
I'm glad Sugar is planning some upgrades. I'll review it again in a few months. In the meantime, I can appreciate that Sugar is probably easier to learn (though buggie systems can be hard to learn because things don't happen the way you expect, creating confusion). The user guide for SFDC is so long because SFDC simply does so many things. That means there is a lot to learn. If you aren't going to use all those features, having a cheaper, "briefer" system is probably a good way to go - once they get it to work.
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