sugarcrm pricing and licensing

[akcan]

I'm researching a crm solution for few months. Sugarcrm is good solution i think. I'm sure that sugarcrm customers are happy.

In my opinion sugar weakness is pricing. Sugar is absolutely expensive. You must pay alot and you must continue to pay every year.

We are a very small company with only 10 stuff. I can't pay 4500$ each year. So i wll never have a sugarcrm enterprise. I have to find another product to use. I just wanted to say why i can't choose sugar. This must be important for sugar.

In my opininon sugar can create new license package. For example Sugar for SMB. A software with full sugar technology but limited to max 10 users. I don't say software must be cheap, i say software should be less expensive.

[eggsurplus]

The CE version is free. The On Demand version is no where near that amount for 10 users. I'd redo your research.

[eNick]

Hi Akcan,


As EggSurplus says, the Community Edition is free of charge.

The professional edition is $275 a seat which would be half of what you state, even if all your staff accessed the system.

Price is relative and there are some CRM systems out there which cost $12,000 a seat per year - I know 'cos I used to customise one of them!

But I think price is the wrong way to look at it. The whole point of a CRM system is it lets you manage your customers better. Let's assume it made your staff just 10% more efficient. That equates to a little over saving half an hour per staff member a day. Accross your 10 staff, that's the equivalent of getting in one to two more FTE. How much would another employee cost you in comparison?

Now look at the amount of extra business you can win because you've got more efficient staff, how much revenue does that bring you?

Finally, consider that because you're now more efficient, and treating your customers better, you'll get more return business, possibly better upsale/cross sale opportunities, no forgotten leads - how much more money does that bring in?

My guess is the total return on your $2-$3k investment speaks for itself. It's not a case of whether you can afford it. It's more a case of how can you afford not to!

Nick

[akcan]

I think so i don't talk to micro$oft, siebel etc..

I believe in micro$oft crm is not expensive than sugar.
Sugar crm licensing is based subscription. Each year i have to pay $4500. Perpetual license means you are owner the product just paying somepart of license fee you can get updates. Bur sugar say that i must pay each year.

I know open source version but today companies needs more than community edition. I'm sure alot of people using sugar based other free crm solutions because of sugar license prices.

This is my opinion. I can't pay $4500 each year and i know alot of company managers thinking like me.

I'ts very clear, $ugar crm managers don't think like me. I have to go with another crm solution because i have not $4500.

[eggsurplus]

Is this some Microsoft croonie blowing smoke here?

[machineghost]

>> Is this some Microsoft croonie blowing smoke here?
Seriously! The OP clearly is either a M$ shill or else completely inept. Sguar CE is perfectly fine, and if you want support it is super-cheap (like $120 a year). There is no comparable M$ product to SugarCRM, and the only thing that is comparable (Salesforce.com) is wayyyyyy more expensive.

Now, don't get me wrong, I have plenty of complaints about Sugar's licensing; for instance, the fact that they won't take our money. We wanted to buy improved support for the CE product (because we only use OSS) and they refused because they only offer "good" (phone) support on their proprietary crap. But whatever qualms I have about their licensing schem, the price vs. value ratio certainly isn't one of them.

[DutchAce]

>> Is this some Microsoft croonie blowing smoke here?
Seriously! The OP clearly is either a M$ shill or else completely inept. Sguar CE is perfectly fine, and if you want support it is super-cheap (like $120 a year). There is no comparable M$ product to SugarCRM, and the only thing that is comparable (Salesforce.com) is wayyyyyy more expensive.

Now, don't get me wrong, I have plenty of complaints about Sugar's licensing; for instance, the fact that they won't take our money. We wanted to buy improved support for the CE product (because we only use OSS) and they refused because they only offer "good" (phone) support on their proprietary crap. But whatever qualms I have about their licensing schem, the price vs. value ratio certainly isn't one of them.

I don't get how Sugar adepts always try to compare SugarCRM to Salesforce.com. It's like comparing an Citroen 2CV, pimped with a Ferrari Testarossa kit, with an actual Ferrari Testarossa. Sugar = low-end, SFDC = high end.... stop comparing. You pay more, you get more.

[JVWay]

I don't get how Sugar adepts always try to compare SugarCRM to Salesforce.com. It's like comparing an Citroen 2CV, pimped with a Ferrari Testarossa kit, with an actual Ferrari Testarossa. Sugar = low-end, SFDC = high end.... stop comparing. You pay more, you get more.

I beg to differ, having converted from Salesforce.

Sugar:
Onsite with unlimited access to my own data.
Customizable with a standard, well known language
Backups and redundancy under my control
Lower cost with complete ownership of anything I add- on
Sugar paid support is fantastic.

Salesforce:
Who really owns that data - read up on the arguments about "your data" that lives on other people servers. We do work with very large corps. and some state that they won't do business with us if our data isn't in house.
You have to have the Enterprise version to get at your data and even then it's tenuous access at best.
You can customize some but it's in Salesforce's own little language.
Two and a half years running with Sugar and not a moment's outage. And if there were I can walk across the hall and ask how long until it's back up. With Salesforce there's no accountability
Salesforce outages while not frequent are a serious problem and there's often no explanation and never any accountability.
Salesforce has a bunch of add-ons but those companies are no more reliable than sugarforge people, some less so.
Salesforce support is abominable. I can't count how often I would just give up on a problem because no one responds. I have the professional version of Sugar and if I post a P1 problem I get a response in minutes - often by a phone call.

I could go on and on about this but I know that my people are very happy with our move. We recently brought on a sales manager who was the biggest Salesforce advocate you can imagine. Now he's completely on the other side and loves 5.2's reporting engine.

One man's opinion but I've been heavily on both sides of this.

[mvngti]

I don't get how Sugar adepts always try to compare SugarCRM to Salesforce.com. It's like comparing an Citroen 2CV, pimped with a Ferrari Testarossa kit, with an actual Ferrari Testarossa. Sugar = low-end, SFDC = high end.... stop comparing. You pay more, you get more.

It's a bit arrogant to compare salesforce to a Ferrari and Sugar to a Citroen in your FIRST EVER post in this forum! You are probably a SF employee trying to piggy back an opportunity to promote your closed source, un-customizable product.

If anybody with brains reads only some of the posts on this forum and even some of those in the thread they would probably agree with us that Sugar is probably the Ferrari. After all the Ferrari's in F1 is pretty customized :-)

[rbroomfield]

Put simply Sugar ROCKS. I have never come across a product that even comes close. I'm a php programmer thats customised and installed 30 plus Sugar CE servers. Not a single client has had any reason to knock it. If they want something special i build it, if they want it to work on a Blackberry i tweak it. I could go on but i don't want to waste any more time on the doom sayers.
In short..... show me a product with the flexibility and pound for pound power, support and TCO and i'll eat my socks.
PS as a note i have only posted a few times (because there is rarely a need to!) but i've been following and using Sugar since ver 3.*