Returning User - Sugar vs Salesforce

[Paul S]

Hi Guys,
I am after some advice.
We used sugar CE 3 years ago and gave up on it. It just became all to hard and we may not have been ready for it.

The issues were:
1. upgrades were not smooth
2. we couldn't get a smooth integration with thunderbird email and communication became fragmented and all over the place.
3. we couldn't get any real answers to problems via the forum, more just general advice or none at all leaving us stuck with no real specific answers.

We are now desperate to use a CRM we have reviewed salesforce but it seems we don't get much more than sugar.

Sugar is very attractive as we can host it our selves and integrate it with our own internal software.

Should we give Sugar another go? I imagine this time round we would find a company to advise and install the implementation to our specs. Someone such as Sales agility.

Can anyone tell me if this has worked for them and is someone like sales agility the right way to go.

Any advice would be appreciated. We really need to find a clear path and get into it.

Our operating systems are Win 7, WinXP, Linux ubuntu and mac. We use all browsers and Thunderbird as our email client. We use and program in MySQL, PHP on Linux servers running Apache in the usual configurations.

Thanks in advance
Paul

[rafael.q.g@hotmail.com]

I know some companies which used sales force, and migrated to sugar because it is free, so they can save some money.

With the saved money they could invest in sugar customizations/development to make sugar works how companies wanted.

Because I have sure that sugar by default will not reach all the expectatives of all campanies, but with some customizations, it gets there.

[Paul S]

Thanks for your input rafael.

My question was more based on quality and comaptibility with the softeware we use. Rather than price based. What I want to know is will Sugar work for me and my company and who can help me implement it properly.

Thanks
Paul