SugarCRM Review 2023: Features, Pricing, Uses, Pros & Cons

Within our organization, there are three various departments: marketing, sales, and service being the big three. SugarCRM is a business SaaS that streamlines productivity for all three areas right out of the box.

In this SugarCRM review, we’ll go over this business software solution, look at its pricing plans, go over its toolkit, and discuss some benefits and drawbacks. 

SugarCRM review 2023: Is SugarCRM any good?

According to your average SugarCRM review, Sugar is a very good application for organizing a company’s contacts, growing your network through marketing automation, converting more leads into sales, and delivering top-tier customer support. SugarCRM is easy to use, and its lower price package is competitive.

A lot of people wonder if this system belongs on any best sales CRM lists. Sugar Sell certainly does, and can go head to head with other big names like Salesforce, Freshsales, and Hubspot. But don’t take our word for it; read about it yourself. 

SugarCRM pricing plans

So, how much does SugarCRM cost? Let’s review SugarCRM pricing:

How much does SugarCRM cost for nonprofits?

It seems that SugarCRM does not offer any special cost for nonprofits, but feel free to inquire with them directly.
 

Are there any SugarCRM coupon codes or promo discount vouchers?

Much research was done, and it is likely that there are no SugarCRM coupon codes or discount vouchers right now.

SugarCRM free vs paid: what’s the difference?

There is no free version of SugarCRM. They do offer a CRM suite that scales, and you can watch demos for free.

SugarCRM overview: what is SugarCRM & what is SugarCRM used for?

Sugar software is a series of modules, including toolkits for marketing automation, sales, customer support, and an enterprise package with comprehensive features. You can use it for finding new contacts via marketing campaigns, boosting your ROI in your sales pipeline, and helping your users with premier customer service. 

SugarCRM features list 

The main features of SugarCRM are:

• Customer relationship management

• Sales management

• Quotes

• Forecasting and analytics

• Marketing automation

• Customer service

• Integrations

• Mobile apps
   

1. Customer relationship management

The series of applications under the Sugar brand enables users to do marketing, sales and customer support, but it all begins with a good overall CRM module.

With SugarCRM, you get detailed data profiles for all your contacts and accounts. This means that for every person or company that has ever engaged with your business, you can easily track their complete interaction and engagement history, including how you communicated, when, and with whom on your team, and you can even add details in notes to summarize each engagement. 

What's more, as part of Sugar's CRM set of tools, you can offer multi-channel or omnichannel communication ability, meaning your contacts and clients can reach out via multiple methods like email, phone and chat, all within a single unified user interface.
 

2. Sales management

While a standard CRM platform offers some capabilities to do some selling, SugarCRM has many extra features more specifically geared to improving your sales process.

The app provides a lot of tools to nurture contacts in your network to become potential leads. A lead is a contact that has the potential to become interested in purchasing a good or service from your business. 

It doesn't stop there, as once you've gotten a lead, Sugar helps convert those leads into opportunities, meaning that they have officially signaled an intent to buy and are now inside your sales pipeline. 

SugarCRM has great pipeline management features to give you an overview of all the activity there, or let you zero in on a specific opportunity.
 

3. Quotes 

A big part of getting that sale is the ability to create and easily send off clear and nice-looking custom quotes with accurate information, and SugarCRM has got the tools for that.

There are many customization options when it comes to Sugar's quotes. Firstly, you can easily integrate quote creation with your inventory details so that you can be sure to have in stock what you are promising. Next, it is a snap to add discounts to quotes, which are among the best practices when wooing new customers and clients. 

Workflows can then turn quotes into invoices. Finally, you can add delivery dates to quotes, which can be fixed or have a degree of flexibility. 
 

4. Forecasting and analytics

Any good CRM, sales, and marketing system should offer a good degree of automation, especially when it comes to analyzing current trends and data, creating reports, and giving smart suggestions for how to proceed.

SugarCRM has intuitive pipeline analytics. This in-depth analysis module is ideal for getting insights on things like pipeline pain points, churn rates, and drop-off zones, allowing sales teams to focus extra attention where there are issues. 

You can also get fairly accurate forecasting on a number of metrics, like the odds a specific lead will convert to a paying customer. 
 

5. Marketing automation

Sugar Market is where you go for all things related to spreading awareness of your products or your brand, and this set of tools are easy to use and highly flexible.

Use Sugar to build great marketing campaigns with an intuitive dashboard and the use of templates. Marketing content can be customized, targeted, and siloed to really find the most receptive audience. 

If you ever thought it was too complex to get a feel for how well your campaigns are landing, Sugar has a tool that does AI lead interest analysis that makes it easier to know what might happen. 

Finally, with regard to marketing outreach, with SugarCRM, you can advertise on many popular social media sites as well. All in all, any marketing automation platform comparison will likely praise Sugar. And, it’s not unlikely to find SugarCRM on the best marketing CRM lists.
 

6. Customer service

After marketing and selling, customer support is the next big important department that Sugar and other CRMs aim to streamline for its users. 

Currently, the best customer service software helps support agents with a slew of productivity-boosting features, and Sugar is no exception. As mentioned regarding CRM and sales, users seeking support can reach out via omnichannel methods. You can also implement sentiment analysis when dealing with a customer who needs help. 

The platform can use workflows to automatically route service requests to the rep whose skills best fit the issue. Workflows can also aid in escalating tickets if any use case problem needs extra special attention. What's more, with Sugar, you can easily build self-service tools like a knowledge base.
 

7. Integrations

If you, or the developer on your team, is seeking to add extra functionality to your SugarCRM platform, then you got options.

Firstly, Sugar makes its API documentation available to the public with just a simple web search, so one can develop and tweak the tools to their unique liking. Additionally, the Sugar Marketplace, otherwise called SugarOutfitters, is where you can peruse a wide list of third-party integrations and external add-ons. 

There is no need to know how to code as most integrations can be set up with a few clicks. This software, however, is not open source.  
 

8. Mobile apps

You know what makes my life easier, having my comprehensive CRM platform in my pocket at all times.

SugarCRM has great mobile apps for iOS and Android. It has cool features like an interactive map interface and sales route planner; you can customize its interface and dashboards. You can also use smart folders, filters, and search features to quickly get access to any contact, deal, or meeting information. 

Mobile app data also syncs any changes the moment you start using it so that it even works offline.   

SugarCRM pros and cons

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of SugarCRM:
 

SugarCRM advantages

• Ease of use: SugarCRM’s set of tools are intuitively designed and simple to learn

• Pricing: There are many pricing options for Sugar Sell, with the lower price being quite affordable

• CRM: The customer relationship management module of Sugar is a leading option for organizing your contacts

• Pipelines management: Sales teams find Sugar Sell’s pipeline tools a powerful resource to help with selling

• Artificial intelligence: Sugar employs a solid amount of AI to its features and tools to help with automations and predictive analysis

• Mobile apps: The Sugar apps for Android and iOS have clean interfaces and are a delight to use

• Languages: SugarCRM’s system can support over 30 languages
   

SugarCRM disadvantages

• No free plan: It is unfortunate there is no bare-bones Sugar plan for free to help entice new users to learn the platform

• Mail and calendars: If you want to integrate your own calendar or mail apps, you need the premier package

• Not open source: Some users, especially developers, lament the fact that this is not an open source software

SugarCRM complaints & praise (SugarCRM reviews from real customers)

Online reviews of SugarCRM generally fall into the category of being quite positive. 

Most users absolutely love this platform because of its simplicity and elegance. Some of the positive reviews praise the marketing campaign builders; others adore the omnichannel communication dashboards. According to many Sugar reviews, the sales forecasting feature is also one of the winners. 

Now, if we move on to negative SugarCRM reviews, you will find much fewer complaints. 

Some online reviews of Sugar criticize the fact that most of the best AI-based tools are reserved for the pricier package, but this is par for the course. Other negative reviews of Sugar have stated some issues regarding the siloing of sales, marketing, and support modules, wishing there were more options to have a flexible package.

If this is a deal-breaker for you, we suggest looking at alternatives, such as Salesforce. Although they’re similar tools, these two solutions still have their differences. You can learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of both CRMs in our SugarCRM vs Salesforce comparison.
 

Review of SugarCRM support

SugarCRM has many services for its users. 

There is a global customer experience team to offer help with complex issues. There is also more basic product support to handle break-fix requests and other simple problems.

What’s more, there is a Sugar Community where users can go ask one another for tips and advice. You can find articles there that sort of serve as a SugarCRM blog with lots of useful information. 

Is SugarCRM worth it? Our key takeaways

We’ve arrived at the end of this article. We hope nobody out there is still wondering, is SugarCRM worth it? This article has tried to make it clear that, yes, SugarCRM is worth it. 

That is not to say you should ignore the many great SugarCRM alternatives. If you don’t know about them, go ahead and read on. 

But if you don’t want to confuse yourself or waste any more time, you can feel confident that Sugar can take care of all your marketing, sales, and service needs. 
 

Our final SugarCRM CRM rating

3.9 out of 5 stars.