Speed of hosted SugarCRM?

[lmoreau]

Hey everyone,

We currently use Salesforce.com Group Edition but are looking at Sugar as an alternative. I love SF but for what I pay it only does half of what Sugar can do for a similar price.

Here's my only thing. I registered for a trial awhile ago on their site for 7 days. What I notice though is that it's brutally slow! If I click accounts, it says "Loading please wait" for about 5 seconds. Even searching for an account takes forever and loading one does as well. I have Salesforce open at the same time and it loads everything instantly.

Is it just slow because it's a trial server or is it what I can expect with the actual Sugar? An example:

I clicked Opportunities, and the bottom of the page says Server response time 3.17 seconds.
I then clicked on the first opportunity which is in the trial system and now it's server response time 13.55 seconds.
Clicked Leads and it's 5.6 seconds for server response time.

It's not my internet connection I'm on 20Mbps fiber and like I said I have other sites like salesforce open right now that load crazy fast. We wouldn't want Sugar on prem it would have to be hosted so I'm just concerned about the speed if this is normal. Thanks!

[sugar_rawb]

I can say that our hosted version should have much better performance than that. Even the demo should be faster than those numbers, it will take Sugar a pageload or two per module to properly build up it's internal cache (and this is true after any studio change to a module) after that you should be seeing much faster response times.

[lmoreau]

Is an on-prem or even cloud based install faster than hosted? I'm about to buy Sugar and I was given a 2 week trial not on the trial system but production and I find it's soooooo slow. Like salesforce loads things instantly there's zero wait time ever. On average I'd say each page load is about 5 seconds but sometimes 10 or more. Even simple things like creating a new text field in studio I press save and it will say "Loading" for a good 5-8 seconds. It's really getting me concerned because Sugar has tons more features than salesforce, but I also don't want it to make me so unproductive that I never want to use half them because it's so slow. Just wondering if it might be better to run it myself in house or on a VPS?

[kirstyobrien]

Speed of the Sugar hosted version is extremely variable. Some days it will be fast, around 1 second - other days it can be up to 20 seconds (sometimes more). I have raised this with them but I suppose it depends on their load balancing and how much strain is being put on the system . I used Salesforce with a previous company and it was much faster than Sugar.

[lmoreau]

So do you think that an on prem, or if I was to host Sugar myself on EC2 or something it would be better? Here's my situation, we have SF Group edition right now on a 1 year contract for 3 users at their $15 a user rate. Salesforce charges tax so $610 for the year and we have 6 months left so basically $305. There's really 3 main reasons I'm not "happy" with SF or would want to change:

1) I want field level security so that I can actually track compensation for my sales reps directly in the opportunity vs in Excel.

2) I want Workflows so that when my reps do cold calls on leads and disqualify them, it will automatically email the customer a follow up.

3) I want to be able to generate quotes.

So that's why I was looking at Sugar and was thinking of biting the bullet and paying the $1080 for 3 users and then basically switching from SF and taking the $305 loss. I know that's probably not a lot to most businesses but we're a small company, and it's not even so much the money it's more justifying whether it's worth it is all.

I installed vTiger on EC2 yesterday and I think I may just load all my leads into it since it can do the workflows to emall customers plus do quotes and then just do this for 6 months before switching to Sugar. It's just that speed that really threw me off and has me worried.

We used to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM and everyone hated it because it was so slow. The 2011 version was even worse, reps never wanted to put notes on opportunities or what not since if a customer called in, it took so long to load the opp just to put a short note. That's sort of what using Sugar reminded me of. I had Sugar open on my monitor and Salesforce on my laptop because I was still working as I was setting up Sugar and the difference was night and day. SF loaded every page almost as fast as if they were all being accessed directly of my own laptop. You click an opp it loads in half a second there's never delays. So just unsure what to do because I love Sugar it seems so much better than SF. Just don't want to switch so that I can do things like quotes etc but then find that my reps are hardly doing them because it's such a pain is all.

[gates2u]

My versions of SugarCRM have run much much faster, but it will NOT do so on a shared host (my experience only). I started at a version 4.x and migrated to 5.5.1RC, on a dedicated server. Response was speedy. I just upgraded to 6.3.1 and moved it to a VIRTUAL dedicated server, which is now even speedier due to upgrades in the code. This VDS hosts SugarCRM and other light-traffic websites. At most, I feel I only have to wait a second or so or loading, usually pretty instant. There is only one slow function, which is deleting email, which is obviously a bug - there is a thread on it around here.

[lmoreau]

Awesome thanks. Is Amazon's Ec2 platform considered a shared host, or would that be a virtual server as in it should be faster?

[gates2u]

The Amazon eC2 service is a service in which you boot an "Amazon Machine Image" to create a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance". This is equivalent (aside from different procedures in which Amazon handles load balancing and capacity increases) to a virtual dedicated server at any other hosting facility. My opinion, it would be fine.

CAVEAT: I am not a user of the Amazon cloud - there may be other integration issues of which I am certainly not aware.

[lmoreau]

Great thanks. When you sign up for Sugar and pay for it, I understand you then get access to download the software etc. Are there any limitations? Like can I download it and install it on one Amazon EC2 instance then delete that instance, and maybe try on Rackspace, then try on a server in house etc? Or does it like activate to one and that's it?

[gates2u]

I would use the Community Edition and not pay a thing. Download it and test it as much as you want.