SugarCRM

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.

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.

We have been using Sugar for several years, but only in the past six months have we really dug down to fully utilize the software. The tool is fairly simple to use, I like the reporting functions, but the feedback I get from my sales team is that it is just 'clunky' to use. I'll give you one little example. For the Opportunity 'Actual Closed Won' date, I found through coming across some bad sales data for the month, that if you close a sale in January, and that same month you mark it as Closed Won. But lets say in March you want to go in and add a note to the description. Once you edit that note, (thus changing the Modify date) you autimatically changed the 'Actual Closed Won' date to March. Really messes up sales reports! When I contacted Sugar, there really wasnt an easy fix. We found SierraCRM (third part software) and Bill Convis from there helped with a solution to this problem. We have now purchased this software and believe that this will help take us to the next level of using Sugar. Sugar Support via email is usually pretty prompt, but as far as hearing from our 'Account Manager', just 2 weeks ago was the first time I heard from someone regarding our account. At that point, I had already reached out to SierraCRM, so I did not need anything from Sugar.
To summarize: Great tool, though a little clunky, but the price is not bad. Customer service could be improved, especially for companies like us who are invested in the process, and just need some help taking our sales process to the next level. Thanks!

its a good basic tool which is easy to use however, the spinning wheel every time I update, save or switch fields is testing my patience