Feature Review: SugarCRM Community Edition Comparison to Professional Edition (Commercial)

If you are using the Community Edition (aka Free Edition) of SugarCRM, you might be wondering if you should upgrade to the Professional Edition (aka Commercial Edition). Click here to see a Feature Comparison Chart.

Below is a list of features that you would gain by upgrading to Professional:

SugarCRM REPORTING

1. Matrix Reports. Create powerful reports across modules with the ability to group by multiple attributes. These are very powerful reports that truly help you discover your ROI.
2. Dashboards. Monitor key business metrics across Marketing, Sales and Support.
3. Customer Profiles. These provide a better understanding of who your customers are. Reports and dashboards show customer profiles by industry, geography, company size, product assets, revenue and other important attributes. By gaining a better understanding of customers, companies can better manage existing relationships and build new ones.
4. Marketing Analytics. This allows you to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns from the initial offer to a closed sales opportunity. Managers can asses the effectiveness of marketing campaigns relative to budget, channel, expected revenue and win rate to gain a full picture of how marketing programs impact the sales pipeline.
5. Sales Trends. Sugar Reporting gives sales managers the insight needed to adjust to changing business conditions. On one screen, sales managers can monitor the pipeline of sales representative by sales stage, view how many calls each rep has made over a given time period, and monitor closed and expected revenue for the quarter. Managers and reps can also take advantage of the strong reporting and charting capabilities to create personalized dashboards that update whenever information changes.
6. Case Reports. Monitor customer problems and how well your customer support team is solving these issues. Case Reports can be used to measure open cases by time period, support representatives, priority and entitlement. With Sugar Case Reports, managers gain a better view into the satisfaction of its customers and the performance of the support organization.

SugarCRM MARKETING, SALES, AND SUPPORT

1. Forecasting gives sales representatives and managers the ability to generate accurate forecasts based on sales data in SugarCRM. Managers can create, assign and edit quotas for their team, roll-up forecasts across individuals and teams, and measure forecast accuracy relative to commit amounts. Sales representatives can take advantage of scenario planning tools to generate high, medium and low forecasts, utilize worksheets to develop accurate commit amounts, and track their sales progress from the Sugar homepage.
2. Plug-ins for Microsoft Office integrate your CRM data with the Microsoft’s leading productivity tools. With a few simple clicks, Sugar users can sync email, contacts and calendar information into Sugar modules, export data into Microsoft Excel and merge CRM data in Microsoft Word.
3. Quotes & Contracts. With Sugar Quote and Contract Management functionality, sales reps can generate accurate quotes with support for multiple line items, currencies and tax codes. Quotes and contracts can be delivered to customers via email, Word or PDF. Strong version control functionality ensures reps can more easily manage multiple versions of quotes and contracts.
4. Mobile. Stay in touch while on-the-go with Sugar mobile functionality. Sugar offers wireless and PDA access that is hassle-free so you can continue to work away from the office. Sugar mobile solutions translate to less downtime and greater productivity.
5. Data Merge. Pull information directly from LinkedIn, Hoovers and JigSaw directly into Sugar 6.
6. Knowledge Base. The Sugar Knowledgebase helps customer support and engineering teams to better manage and share structured and unstructured information. Knowledge Base allows user to create frequently asked questions (FAQs), manage files, and search and rate content – all in an easy-to-use interface.

SugarCRM PLATFORM

1. Workflow Management streamlines critical business processes within your organization. Using Sugar templates, administrators can create custom business processes based on Sugar Objects. Users can also define alerts, actions and triggers to become a more responsive to customer demands.
2. Team Management allows companies to create and manage teams based on job type, division, geography or other attributes. Once roles are assigned, administrators can assign access rights to a given role to ensure team members have access.
3. Module Administration. Delegate administrative authority for different parts of the application.
4. Access Control. Sugar Access Control levels allow information to be shared or restricted based on user role. Administrators can determine what information that role can access at either a module, view or field level. Access Control rights include the ability to access, view, edit, import or export.
5. Data Quality Control. Insure clean data through import and de-duplication controls.
6. On-Demand or On-Site. Choose which deployment option is right for your organization.

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