This post is a SuiteCRM vs SugarCRM guide. We review and compare the both CRMs on various factors and how you can chose between the two. At the end of the post, we hope that you will be able to make an informed choice between the implementation SugarCRM or SuiteCRM in your organisation.

SugarCRM is one of the very first open source CRMs to hit the CRM market. It has been a popular choice as an Open Source CRM for many years now. Over the year, SugarCRM has evolved a lot of over the years and has given way to many paid versions. The open source version has been kept at SugarCRM CE with some limit on the features though.

Since SugarCRM was one of the earliest Open Source CRMs, there have been many offshoots of the Community version. One popular offshoots of SugarCRM CE is SuiteCRM. In this post, we will analyse how one can decide between SugarCRM and SuiteCRM to implement in their business workflow. Just like, we analysed the Best Free Open Source CRM, we will checkout the difference between SugarCRM and SuiteCRM on the same lines.

The parameters that we will compare include Installation Requirements, Pricing, Features and Community Support.

Installation Requirements

Since SuiteCRM is an offshoot of SugarCRM itself, the installation requirement for both of them is almost same. Both are LAMP stack based codebases so there is not much difference between the installation pre-requisites.

Also, both the CRM systems offer SaaS solutions which come at a price and dont need installation on the local/remote server.

Pricing

Both SuiteCRM and SugarCRM offer a free open source version that comes absolutely free of cost. SugarCRM CE is much limited in the functionality though.

As far as the paid versions are concerned the SugarCRM is steeply priced coming at price points of 40, 65 and 150 USD per user month. SuiteCRM SaaS solution is very easy on the pocket though and it moderately priced at 10 USD per user month.

Features

SuiteCRM is an offshoot of SugarCRM CE so all the features of SugarCRM CE are there in the SuiteCRM. SuiteCRM however has moved forward quite a lot since it emancipated from SugarCRM. It has added some real cool features to go along including but not limited to Projects, workflow, Invoices, Events etc. In fact it has become much more feature rich as compared to SugarCRM.

Although SuiteCRM is high on features, but it is highly recommended that you have a look at the extra features that the SuiteCRM offers and see if they are required in your workflow. An overloaded CRM(i.e CRM with features that your organisation wont use) would quickly become overwhelming.

Another Feature comparison would be the UI. SugarCRM CE edition hasn’t evolved much with regards to UI however SuiteCRM has evolved quite a bit and the UI is much better and useful. SugarCRM paid version has a nice looking UI though.

Community Support

Community support is one of the most important factors while implementing the Open Source Solutions since that might be the only way out once you are stuck with some problem. Fortunately, there is a tremendous support for both SuiteCRM and SugarCRM when it comes to developing extensions and plugins for various modules.

We hope you found this post useful in making your decision. Hope the new workflow brings more business to your organisation .. 🙂 !!