Moving from Sugar to Salesforce

[mpuser]

This post is not meant as a slam on Sugar, so hopefully it isn't taken as such. I hope this post will be of use to Sugar staff in understanding why someone moves away from Sugar.

I have been using Sugar since 4.5x (for about a year) but adoption has been very slow. The reasons are varied, but the sense is that Sugar is not optimized for a sales process. It has a lot of pieces but they just don't work in a manner that is efficient for the user. For example, one complaint we get is that the calendar is useless. The information displayed on the calendar omits the most basic of data, such as the account or contact the task is related to. The same can be said for calls. My Calls omits the most important piece of information on the list view - THE PHONE NUMBER. These are but a couple of examples but this sort of problem exists throughout most of Sugar. Email is unusable. Sure, some of this can be customized, but that misses the point. Out of the box Sugar is just not a very optimized CRM. With issues like this, I question if Sugar is even using their own software internally. I would think if they did that these issues would have been addressed long ago. Of course, there are bugs and all software has them. But it seems to be a serious problem with this software.

I'm not closing the door on ever using Sugar again. But for now, I think Sugar needs to spend more attention on real world usability. Pricing is also an issue. For a small company like ours, we only need 2 licenses. Salesforce was actually cheaper for the Professional edition because they didn't force you to buy 5 users minimum. I have written to Sugar about this in the past.

I hope you guys get it together but in the meantime I have to think about my business and Sugar is not ready for prime time.

[Zirius]

I would like to echo these same concerns, and they are very significant concerns.
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We however have decided to stay with Sugar, since we use the Community Edition and do not pay for it, and our need is not so complex that we cannot adapt, at least until we grow a bit more. We have also been hoping that the development team address this.

For us the point of choice will truly come next year as we choose between the CRM tools included in different software that we use. This other software is a technical management, ASP style tool that Sugar doesn't hold a candle to in the area of its strength (doesn't really try). However, the sales-CRM side of that tool has been steadily improving, and it could become compelling to shift to a single tool.

We have used Sugar for almost two years now, and love being part of an open source style project that is growing and evolving. Some of the functionality in Sugar is truly great. But we will need to tend to having a highly effective sales tool.

[laquangthong]

For us, we have to use an free product to introduce CRM to the users and managements. However, once people have adopted the system, and we get the management's support, then we might move to microsoft crm or sale force.

The nice thing about sugarCRM is the available of the community edition, something for us to sample before buying. However, how do you expect us to buy the product, if the sample is so buggy?

[khamel]

I question if Sugar is even using their own software internally.

I would imagine they are, as the followup I received from them after my trial matched the quality of the product (none of my pre-sales questions was answered, they just stopped returning my calls and emails). I knew immediately after my demo that I would not work with the company based on the pre-sales experience. My gut is their sales team is not compensated/motivated adequately.

Salesforce handled my evaluation professionally and really went after the sale with zeal. They even customized a demo site for us to match some of our business processes. I wanted to go with SF but a decision was made to put off the purchase and we elected to use Sugar community edition with a webhost to get started which I think was a good idea as we were up and running in a day. Unfortunately the weaknesses of the product became evident very quickly and we are stuck with compromises we would rather not be dealing with, particularly around blocking user access to privileged data per login/role. For example, we don't want certain roles to see certain fields (i.e. the account) and we do want certain roles to see assigned notes and this is not available out of the box. (On a side note, I'm trying to hire a developer to solve those issues, contact me if you are interested).

I would never pay for Sugar over SF, it's a no brainer given the pricing. If Sugar Enterprise was $25/seat AND I thought I could get any of my basic customization requests answered professionally (even with a sugar consultant at additional cost), I'd consider it just for the reporting and portal. I cannot begin to understand how their executive team came up with their pricing model given the quality of the product vs. the competition. I guess they are hoping companies won't evaluate and will just assume "It's as good as SF but a little cheaper". NOT.

That said, for a very small company with very limited needs and some technical savvy, community edition and a webhost is a great solution at the right price.