If your company develops open source CRM software, what's the incentive for users to pay for it? That's the question most business owners new to CRM systems ask when they first encounter SugarCRM. Developers like to bundle SugarCRM as "free software" for their clients, but companies without server-savvy professionals on staff soon fall victim to the chores of maintaining the right hardware to keep their CRM systems secure and stable.
In the case of SugarCRM, "open source" may mean that you can download and install the software for free, but that you will almost certainly invest resources into equipment and IT staff. That's one reason why the SugarCRM team launched Sugar Express, a hosted CRM platform using SugarCRM at its core.
Pricing for SugarCRM, which includes an initial base of five users and scales to a maximum of ten users, reminds many industry analysts more of Zoho's low-cost hosted CRM offering than many of the service's premium competitors.
For small shops struggling with their current SugarCRM implementation, the hosted CRM option also features paid data migration services. End users experience the same CRM applications they already know, just hosted on SugarCRM's servers instead of their own.
For prospective SMBs and enterprise customers, Sugar Express represents a gateway from hosted CRM to a full-blown internal implementation. By getting users to start with a ten-seat license of Sugar Express, the company hopes to grow the kinds of clients that will more easily migrate to the professional server editions of SugarCRM.
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