SalesForce.com vs. SugarCRM: Why Sugar?

At DataSync, we looked at the CRM market and chose SugarCRM as our preferred vendor. We are often asked why we chose Sugar instead of the largest player, SalesForce.com. Here is the head to head analysis on SugarCRM vs. Salesforce.com:

Cost

SugarCRM pricing starts at less than $15/mo per user, while SalesForce starts at $65/mo per user (the group edition is feature strapped). This makes SugarCRM far more attractive to the average small business.

Feature set

Looking at editions head-to-head, SugarCRM offers more features for less money. Even the Enterprise Edition of SugarCRM has a robust feature set at less than half the price. Overall the feature sets of SugarCRM vs. Salesforce.com are very comparable.

Openness

This one is pretty simple: SugarCRM is open source, SalesForce.com is a closed vendor. We give full code-level access to our customers, giving them full access to control and modify their CRM experience. Salesforce is configurable, but changes code-level are limited and must be cleared by the SalesForce.com team - which does not always happen.

Integration of your email/contacts

DataSync has integrated the CRM platform with websites and communication tools. For instance, our customers can instantly link an email to a customer in CRM. Contacts stored in SugarCRM are accessible in Outlook or in the Zimbra interface inside of DataSync Suite. This is not available in SalesForce.com.

Integration with your website

DataSync has integrated website lead submission forms with SugarCRM out of the box. This allows you to capture leads from your website, and automatically store those leads in your CRM. For more information on this watch our video tour. This can be done in SalesForce, but it's a manual process.