SugarCRM Community edition has been a great daily driver for my music business. It's reliable, and has enough functionality to enable me to record all the key data that I need. The ability to self-host the platform is fantastic, because it helps keep costs down, and when you work on a small-scale, you don't need all of the processing power of a paid hosted solution. Definitely a great option if you have the savvy to install and maintain your own instance on your web server.

I used the self-hosted community CRM for several years for my own music business. It has a ton of functionality that matches a lot of the basic features you find in Salesforce Classic. It's a great tool for keeping track of client data, deal tracking, etc. It's also nice to be able to self-host the platform as well as it's a lot more affordable than using a paid SaaS solution.

SugarCRM Community Edition looks pretty dated. If you don't have a lot of experience with the typical CRM data model concept, it can be hard to figure out how to use the system. The interface could be modernized to make it easier to navigate and find your way around. Another downside to being the Community Edition is that you need to know how to install and maintain the platform on your own server, but this is also a plus if you do have these skills.

Overall my experience with this CRM is great. I am using it daily and I can say that my daily work is incomplete without it. It is so simple to use and provides amazing results for reports and dashboards, their customer's support team is very responsive.

I am using it for more than three years and like almost everything about it. This CRM is very easy to use because of its simple design and easy to use user interface. I like the way SugarCRM provides reports and dashboards which is very easy to understand. SugarCRM provides secruity of data and information and now I can handle the different campaigns, create a different campaign for anyone and even get a complete picture of it very easily.

I would like to highlight one thing that I dislike about it which is its overall cost. A small organization may not afford this CRM but overall it is worth to spend on it.

You get what you pay for. It's an average platform with some significant drawbacks that aren't realized until you've signed on the line and are trying to onboard it. We use Sage as our base platform and had intended to use Sugar to allow our teams to work in one system and have it communicate with Sage. In theory, this saves us time, entering data in one window instead of multiple tabs in Sage. However, in many instances, Sugar cannot write to Sage. That's a one-way street, so many tasks still require manual entry in Sage. It's also very clunky. The data refreshes/synchs very slowly, so you're rarely looking at real-time data. It will refresh and reload pages while you're actively working in them, deleting your progress and forcing you to start the process over. Creating dashboards and reports requires the user to be literate in tech talk and computer logic. Trying to navigate the back end to find the data you're looking for takes ages. I haven't even tried playing with the workflow builder because I can't find the time to teach myself how to build a report or dashboard, much less anything more complex. We have identified numerous shortcomings, but when we contact Sugar Support, they tell us it's a bug they're working on with no timetable for a solution. Apparently, there are a LOT of bugs.

The system is easy to use in theory. The UI is decent and processes are intuitive. The price point is attractive since the company boasts that it parallells other higher-priced options in features and functionality. The onboarding was fairly simple and adjusting to the system was not difficult.

Customer service is abysmal. Our original contract included six limited use licenses designed to let our leadership team review content across all areas of the system (able to view all, but not edit certain elements). However, they did not work as promised and we ultimately had to purchase the more expensive licenses to allow our team access. When we made the purchase, the team at Sugar deactviated all other licenses on our account, despite the fact that we were only half way through our annual contract, which we'd already paid for. I tried calling their domestic customer support line and got voicemail. I eventually reached technical support via email, who had to relay my request to another department. Our business was effectively offline for half a day while this was sorted out and our access was restored. Two weeks later, I received an EMAIL from our Customer Success rep. She apologized for her late response and asked me to outline the issue. I did so and requested a call to discuss the incident. I never received another follow-up email, much less a phone call. Between bugs with the licenses, bugs with the search/filter, email issues, and zero customer support, I cannot understate how disappointed I am in this purchase and this company as a whole.

Overall, I really enjoyed Sugar and think it would be a great fit (especially for the lower price point!) for marketing and advertising agencies that are looking to build out custom flows. Their customer care team was incredibly helpful and knowledgeable, and I really enjoyed working with them.

The SugarCRM team was incredibly helpful and supportive during our decision between various CRMs we were testing out, namely Salesforce and SugarCRM. They were flexible, accommodating and had amazing customer service throughout the process, even willing to develop new APIs to integrate with our proprietary billing system 90% of our clients were on. I really enjoyed the visuals of Sugar - as all the bells and whistles were there, but it didn't seem overwhelming (as Salesforce can) and it's geared more towards marking service teams, like my division of the business. I also really find the dashboard visuals to be superior to Salesforce. Overall, the price point was better than Salesforce, too.

Since Sugar is geared towards marketing and sales teams, it wasn't a great fit for the other teams within our organization (i.e. one-time products like printing, etc.). Though workflows are cleaner and more intuitive than Salesforce, there wasn't quite as many bells and whistles (i.e. it was difficult to build in processes that involved external teams that we outsource to).