There is alot of noise around what SugarCRM Community can’t do, but this is all noise!! Here is our take on the things they say you can’t do with SugarCRM Community Edition, but you can:
No customisable reports
Not only can SugarCRM Community Edition do customisable reporting, but it can do it far more powerfully than the native SugarCRM Pro Edition.
Community Edition has a number of options for reporting. Each of the options delivers flexible and powerful reporting. Here are SalesAgility’s favoured solutions:
- ZuckerReports – Zucker is German for Sugar. ZuckerReports is an integration between SugarCRM and iReport. iReport is a free, open source report designer for creating very sophisticated layouts containing charts, images, subreports, crosstabs and much more. Access your data through JDBC, TableModels, JavaBeans, XML, Hibernate, CSV, and custom sources. Reports are uploaded into SugarCRM and run on-demand. Output options include PDF, RTF, XML, XLS, CSV, HTML, XHTML, text, DOCX, or OpenOffice. Try doing that with the SugarCRM Pro Report Writer – you can’t!!
- KinamuReporter – KINAMU Reporter is a flexible tool for analyzing the data in SugarCRM and allowing users to intuitively build queries and reports to their own specific requirements. It is built on state of the art technology and supports full charting capabilities supported by a snapshot function.
No workflow automation and rules
Again, not only can you do workflow with SugarCRM Community Edition, Advanced OpenWorkflow (AOW), SalesAgility’s workflow engine is at least as powerful as the native SugarCRM Pro workflow engine.
AOW is a powerful business process management module for SugarCRM. AOW allows you to model simple or complex business processes rapidly and easily.
Market reception for the release of Advanced OpenWorkflow has been overwhelmingly positive with some commentators remarking that “it made SugarCRM’s own workflow engine seemed flat-footed and ugly”.
No Sales forecasting capabilities
If you have enterprise-class reporting, then by extension you have forecasting capabilities. Simply setup a custom module that creates and stores quotas for each sales rep.
Then write the report that analyses performance against target. The report can be against Opportunities that are at Status=Closed Won or by Quotations with a similar Status. We’ve done it. It’s really not difficult and it’s absolutely not worth paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for.
No marketing reports
Community Edition comes with a plethora of marketing reports and metrics in tabular and charts form. These include Campaign Performance & ROI charts, Messages Sent, Messages Viewed, Messages Click Through, Opt-outs, bounces and more.
No contracts or quotes
In Advanced OpenSales (AOS), there’s a powerful suite of modules that delivers Quotations, Products, Invoices, Contracts and PDF Template modules for Community Edition.
AOS is so rich and powerful, that many Pro users use it in preference to the Pro functionality.
No Email and social plugins
There are stable and functional email connectors to Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Google Gmail. Community ships with LinkedIn connectors. There are projects for Facebook connectors. If you want to roll-your-own, there are code examples for Facebook integration.
No project management module
This really is complete rubbish. SugarCRM Community Edition ships with Projects and Project Tasks, exactly as does Pro. Though why anyone would seek to differentiate on this is beyond us. There’s no task relationship or critical path analysis functionality here in either version so SugarCRM’s usefulness for true project management is limited.
No mobile CRM
So, what’s that lovely app that our customers are using on their Apple and Android phones doing? Oh yes, it’s delivering SugarCRM Community Edition to them. As an app, it’s fast, it’s customisable, it works with custom modules and as of Q3 it will work off-line.
No hosting choice
Well blow me down with a feather. Just what is this supposed to mean? Currently we’re hosting about 60 instances of SugarCRM Community Edition for our clients. They chose to use us for hosting. They could equally have used a number of commodity, less-specialist providers. You can deploy Community Edition in a couple of clicks on Amazon’s cloud.
If anything, there’s too much choice. Perhaps that’s what the author of the article meant to say.
No Support
Here’s the rub. If you have Community Edition you can get support from wherever you want it. Currently we support more than a hundred instances of SugarCRM, some of which we host and some of which our customers host themselves.
One of the most frequently made observations that customers who have used SugarCRM’s own support and our support is how much faster to respond and more knowledgable we are. Ho hum!!
The Last Word – Open Source
SugarCRM Community Edition is Open Source
SugarCRM Pro is conventional licenced proprietary software. SugarCRM Pro is not Open Source.
