SugarCRM – Great for free, hard to install and maintain
SugarCRM is definitely one of the most powerful CRMs available, highly recommended by many. I came across it after looking for something FREE for us to manage leads/sales/contacts at CampusLIVE. The time commitment for us to build something close to comparable in-house would have been greater than we could afford.
Their Community Edition is free to download – allowing us to use an Enterprise product sans-support for nothing. Since Google usually provides an instant answer to any application error I run into, this is easy to deal with. Their community forum is pretty helpful, with veterans answering almost any question you have.
Overall, I would recommend Sugar to any small business – as long as you have a patient and tech-saavy IT guy who knows his way around a Linux server through command line.
Pros
- FREE
- very powerful
- lots of plugins available
- extensible, through IFrames (We were able to build credit card processing into it for easy transactions for sales reps)
- Lots of support available through online forums
- Books available at Amazon for first timers
Cons
- Fast, personal support is NOT FREE
- Install is never as simple as advertised. Things went wrong 2 or 3 times.
- For us, some dependant AJAX randomly stopped working, making the application useless until we hacked a solution out.
- When something breaks you get a white screen with no output by default – not helpful.
Recommendations
- Turn error reporting in php.ini (or .htaccess) to E_ALL so that you can get some info from the blank error pages.
- CHMOD every single folder and file to 777. It will save you countless hours of errors because the app is picky about permissions.
- Password protect you /sugarCRM folder with .htaccess so that you won’t have security vulnerabilities from the above tip.
