Salesforce vs SugarCRM – Pricing and Comparison Review: More Customer Freedom in 2012 and 2013?

For the longest time, Salesforce.com has claimed that Salesforce Pricing lists are justified because of their features that no other CRM can seem to rival, much less be outdone by. But with the advent of Sugar, the options for every CRM user have increased dramatically.

While it is true that SugarCRM shares a common denominator with Salesforce.com in terms of the availability of an on-demand SaaS solution, Sugar offers a lot more than what’s conventional.

Salesforce.com is regarded by many to be the CRM industry leader, but it is much more expensive than it initially appears. It also penalizes you for your success. More on that down below.

Comparing the Strategies of Sugar and Salesforce

First of all, the sales strategy of Salesforce is to get the customer in the door at an inexpensive price. Then they will upsell the customer later as more and more features are required. Sugar gets you in at the introductory price of $35/user/month for the professional edition. And this pretty much covers 90% of the typically required features.

In essence, Salesforce penalizes you for being successful with your CRM deployment.  If your CRM usage grows, you will need to keep moving up to more expensive editions. They realize that 3 years from now, it will likely be cheaper to stay on the more expensive version of Salesforce rather than migrating to a different CRM solution. That is what they are counting on. And price-wise, Salesforce is typically 2x to 4x more expensive than SugarCRM for similar functionality.

Deployment Options for Sugar and Salesforce

With SugarCRM, a client is given the freedom to deploy on-site, behind a firewall, without exposing to any risks that usually come with these types of deployment.

It becomes more versatile by the fact that users can now choose to deploy Sugar in public or private clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, IBM Cloud, and others. These deployment options are not offered/provided by Salesforce – where you are literally “forced” into their pricing and database model.

Authentic Cloud Computing in Sugar vs Salesforce

The best thing about SugarCRM is that it offers its clients a truly genuine cloud computing system. This is the opposite of Salesforce.com which only offers one deployment option – a 10 year old hosting model where the user is required to share their database and environment with other Salesforce customers. This model is called the multi-tenant deployment model and is no longer used by other CRM systems on the market.

This is important because clients who are bound with the laws that require data privacy and legal or audit requirements are often required to maintain their CRM solution behind the firewall. This is a unique choice that clients can enjoy with SugarCRM and not with Salesforce.com. These are two of the top reasons that users say Sugar is better than Salesforce.

Salesforce vs SugarCRM Pricing

In this video I compare the features of SugarCRM with Salesforce. You will see the pricing and feature difference and will be in a position to evaluate which offers a better bang for the buck.

Salesforce vs SugarCRM Comparison – 5 Critical Criteria

1. - Let’s assume you want to integrate with other applications; build your own or download from SugarExchange
   • With SugarCRM you have unlimited APIs.
   • With Salesforce you will need to upgrade in order to access APIs. And even then you will have a limited amount.
2. - Let’s assume yoru new product requires a switch to on-site for compliance
   • With SugarCRM you don’t have to upgrade or purchase a different product. The same edition can be implemented on-site or online. It’s your choice. You will need to pay a nominal service fee for the shift.
   • With Salesforce, this is not possible – at all.
3. - Let’s assume your organization grows and you realize you need  to manage workflow
   • With SugarCRM, workflow and automation is fully supported. It also includes calculated fields and dependent (show/hide) fields.
   • With Salesforce, an upgrade is required. The calculated fields in Salesforce are limited to the same entity. Thus you cannot calculate data from another database table.
4. - Let’s assume your sales team grows and needs mobile capability
   • With SugarCRM, this requirement is fully supported.
   • With Salesforce, you need to pay an extra cost for full functionality.
5. - Let’s assume your business strategy shifts so you want to switch CRM systems
   • With SugarCRM, you have access to your full data set.
   • With Salesforce, you have access to a flat data file. That’s all. This is tricky and risky – and can come with heft Professional Services costs.

Download our Free SugarCRM Assessment

Click here  to download our Free Sugar CRM Evaluation PDF.

With this assessment, you will be able to identify the key enhancements within Sugar CRM.

Topics addressed include:

1. Calculated Fields
2. Favorites and Favorites Dashlet
3. Twitter and Social Media integration
4. Reporting (filtering, scheduling)
5. User interface improvements (there are many!)
6. Sugar Mobile 1.0 details
7. and much more.

Free TCO Calculation Tool for CRM Projects

Click here to access our Free CRM TCO Cost Calculator Tool.

TCO lines include:

1. Annual License/User price
2. Support
3. Hardware (incl. Server and Users)
4. Implementation
5. Staff
6. Network
7. Mobile
8. and much more.

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