Pros & Cons
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- Fully customizable dashboards for teams and employees
- Detailed and flexible profiles for accounts, contacts, and leads
- Advanced AI summarization and analysis features
- Focus Drawers allow you to perform most tasks within the dashboard
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- Expensive plans with a minimum user requirement
- Integrations with popular tools require a higher-tier subscription
- Can be overwhelming for beginners
SugarCRM Sugar Sell Specs
| 24-Hour Support | |
| Analytics | |
| Custom Dashboards | |
| Document Library | |
| Email Routing | |
| Integrated Email Marketing | |
| Live Chat | |
| Multi-Currency Support | |
| Phone Support | |
| Pipeline Management | |
| REST API | |
| User Forums |
SugarCRM's Sugar Sell, one part of the company's larger sales platform, provides all of the tools you need to manage accounts, contacts, and leads for your business. The customer relationship management (CRM) software focuses on B2B features, but customization options for its dashboards and other interface elements mean it can also confidently handle B2C interactions. Furthermore, AI features for characterizing client relationships and prevalent reporting tools give you a comprehensive view of your business's network of customers. That said, Sugar Sell is somewhat pricey and not particularly welcoming to newcomers. Zoho CRM remains our Editors' Choice winner because it costs less while offering similar functionality and customizability.
Pricing and Subscription Plans: Some Restrictions
Sugar Sell offers four tiers but no free trial. The Essentials plan ($19 per user per month, billed annually) includes account and contact management, activity management, and lead and opportunity management components. You also get advanced (and customizable) reporting tools and access to online support during regional business hours. This tier requires a minimum of three users and supports a maximum of nine users.
(Credit: SugarCRM/PCMag)The Standard plan ($59 per user per month, billed annually) has a 10-person minimum (all of the plans from here on up have the same restriction) and adds mobile app access, omnichannel marketing, pipeline management, and sales forecasting. You also get tools for building automated business processes and support for integrations with third-party document management services, such as Dropbox and Docusign. Mail and calendar integrations with Google and Microsoft services are available for an extra fee.
The Advanced tier ($85 per user per month, billed annually) includes integrations with Google and Microsoft mail and calendar tools. You also get bug tracking capabilities, case management features, and live chat tools for providing customer support. Based on regional business hours, you can access online support for 12 hours a day, five days a week.
Finally, the Premier plan ($135 per user per month, billed annually) adds enhanced sales forecasting, geo-mapping data for customers, more data and file storage, and a news feed based on customer intelligence. You also get the opportunity to create Smart Guides to help employees learn your business processes quickly. This tier unlocks enhanced support, which is available 12 hours a day, five days a week via both online chat and phone.
SugarCRM is significantly more expensive than other CRMs I've reviewed. The minimum user requirement for the starting tier means you need to pay $57 per month at a minimum. Apptivo, on the other hand, starts at $15 per user per month (billed annually), with no minimum user requirement. Similarly, Zoho CRM's base plan goes for $14 per user per month (billed annually). Neither restrict integrations to higher-tier plans, either. Of course, Sugar Sell will likely appeal more to larger SMBs anyway, whereas Apptivo and ZohoCRM can scale down. For reference, Creatio, which also suits bigger organizations, has a much, much steeper minimum buy-in ($840 per month) than Sugar Sell.
Interface and Ease of Use: Could Use More Guidance
Unlike most CRMs, Sugar Sell doesn’t let you buy a plan and create an account right away. Instead, you need to contact sales to book a demo and have them set up an account for you. This might be frustrating if you want to get started right away, but it can also be helpful, since it means you get someone to walk you through the complex interface.
When you log into Sugar Sell for the first time, it takes you to the default Sales Rep dashboard. This presents a lot of information, with an emphasis on your accounts, sales pipeline, and schedule. It's convenient to have immediate access to this data, but all this data can be overwhelming. The interface generally doesn't provide any immediate guidance, and the icons on the right-hand menu might not be obvious if you haven't worked with CRMs before.
The dashboard is the core of Sugar Sell. My account automatically directed me to the Sales Rep dashboard, as mentioned, but you can switch your default view to the Manager dashboard or a custom one. You can also modify your dashboard with Dashlets, the Sugar Sell equivalent of widgets, to ensure that it displays all of the information you need. Focus Drawers let you view more detailed information about a task, contact, or opportunity without leaving the dashboard. This reduces the time it takes to switch between and complete tasks.
You can create multiple dashboards to ensure that everyone on your team has immediate access to the tools they need. For example, you might create distinct dashboards for sales reps and team managers. You can even build unique dashboards for individuals with highly specific duties. Zoho CRM offers similar flexibility.
To get started with the software, I first went to the Contacts area. However, I ran into some trouble—I couldn’t find the Import button. After some searching, I realized it was within a sidebar sub-menu; you have to hover over the contacts icon and click the “...” icon to get to it. Other apps, such as Freshsales, make this more intuitive for first-time users.
(Credit: SugarCRM/PCMag)When I tried importing a CSV of contacts, Sugar Sell automatically mapped most of the columns to relevant fields. However, a few columns didn’t have exact matches within the system, so I had to map them manually. For example, I had to connect “Company” to “Account Name.” After those fixes, the software imported all of my contacts in under a minute.
Alternatively, you can import contacts directly from Gmail or Microsoft Outlook. Just keep in mind that the official SugarCRM documentation recommends importing contacts from a CSV file.
Sugar Sell offers extensive tutorials, including some video tutorials, which you can access via the sidebar. You can also find links to relevant tutorials in certain areas, like the import page for contacts. Still, I wish these were more prevalent throughout the CMS since it’s a fairly complex program.
Contacts, Leads, and Accounts: Attractive, Detailed Profiles
Contacts are individuals with whom you have long-standing relationships. They appear in a table, along with key details such as assigned sales rep, contact preference, and relationship status. You must connect Contacts to an Account, which also shows up here. If you don't like the default display view, developer tools let you switch to a Kanban view.
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Each contact has a Business Card, which is equivalent to a profile in other CRMs. Related tasks, such as calling the contact, appear in eye-catching buttons across the top of the Business Card. Contact information shows up below these action buttons. Below that, you can enter notes. These Business Cards don’t sacrifice visual appeal in favor of features. They’re just as attractive as those in Freshsales and as functional as those in Apptivo.
(Credit: SugarCRM/PCMag)Leads, meanwhile, are people who require further vetting before you invest significant time (or money) into building a deal for them. These are typically people who have responded positively to a campaign but not yet shared much information about themselves. You connect Leads to Campaigns or Sales Pipelines rather than Accounts, and they show up in a Kanban board by default. This is reminiscent of the Leads area in Apptivo, which I found somewhat nonintuitive, but it shouldn't pose an issue if you are used to working with CRM software.
Each lead also gets a Business Card that includes much of the same information as those for contacts. That said, they do have some additional elements, including a “Prediction Conversion” feature that estimates how likely a lead is to convert by comparing their information (including demographics) to previous ones.
Accounts are companies you have relationships with. Like contacts, Sugar Sell organizes them in a list. However, this page also includes a sidebar with pipeline numbers by sales reps and the locations of important accounts. This section highlights accounts in “poor health”—companies you need to reaffirm your relationship with, too. This helps you and your team understand where to focus your efforts.
(Credit: SugarCRM/PCMag)Business Cards for accounts also have an extra module: the AI summary. Sugar Sell's AI uses available data to summarize your overall relationship with a company, its sentiment toward you, and steps you can take to increase the likelihood of making more deals with it. This AI feature generates assessments that are just as detailed as those from Creatio and Zoho CRM.
If you don't like something about this setup, don't fret. You can customize nearly every aspect of the dashboards and Business Cards. You can even configure your interface to focus on individual customers rather than companies if you’re running a B2C business.
Opportunities: Helpful Visuals
For a broad overview of your company’s open deals, head to the Opportunities area. This page shows all your deals in a table by default, though you can easily switch to a Kanban view. Like the Accounts section, the Opportunities page has a sidebar with visual elements that contextualize key information and your pipelines. You can easily switch the details you see here by modifying the Dashlets.
(Credit: SugarCRM/PCMag)Email: Basic Tools
You can connect Sugar Sell to your email account and then pull data from the CRM whenever you send an email from Gmail or Outlook. This is convenient since you don't have to move away from the email client you prefer. It's also possible to archive emails you send via your email client in Sugar Sell, which automatically connects them to the relevant accounts and deals.
Sugar Sell has tools for creating email templates using text and HTML. You can also create email signatures to automatically attach to every email you send. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in mechanism for bulk emails—for this, you need to buy SugarCRM's Market tool or integrate some third-party email marketing service. For comparison, Freshsales includes bulk email capabilities.
Another feature Sugar Sell (and Sugar Market) lacks is generative AI for email. Most other CRMs for medium-to-large-size businesses, including Zoho CRM and even Pipedrive, include some type of generative AI tool for email.
Reporting and Analytics: Data Is Everywhere
One of the best things about Sugar Sell is the consistent availability of data. You can view basic reports in almost every area, from the dashboard to the opportunities page. For more detailed information, head to the Reports area. Here, you can create an unlimited number of custom reports using the Reports Wizard.
(Credit: SugarCRM/PCMag)You can choose how to display data, the type of data you want the report to include (such as opportunities), and the modules (such as the AI summary) you want to pull data from. The creation process can feel overwhelming at times, but it's incredibly powerful if someone on your team has the technical expertise to use it effectively.
Additional Features and Integrations: Helpful Guides
One excellent feature of Sugar Sell is Smart Guides. These are step-by-step visualizations of your business processes that you can use to improve your training processes. You can assign each smart guide to a specific user or set it to auto-assign after certain actions occur (for example, when someone joins a specific team). Employees can use Smart Guides as many times as they want to master a task.
Sugar Sell also offers numerous integrations for your existing business systems. The variety of integrations isn’t as impressive as what you get with Apptivo and Zoho CRM, but common business apps like Slack and QuickBooks Online are available.
Mobile Experience: Full-Featured
Sugar Sell's mobile app (available for Android and iOS) lets you access all the information on the web interface and input new data. The app supports offline access and can automatically update the CRM database once your device reconnects to the internet.