We used SugarCRM to develop a physician-physician collaboration platform and pilot. It was free to use, deploy, and customize and provided a great platform prior to exploring a more robust solution such as salesforce. We had a skilled developer who didn't have prior experience with sugar but was able to pick it up quite quickly

Not as robust as salesforce, but it works just fine for a pilot installation

Take a close look at the changes in the payment models as the free community edition is being increasingly replaced by the subscription models. Likely the venture investors are demanding a growing subscription base.

First off, you can't beat the price. Secondly, the open source CRM can be customized easily right out-of-the-box. Furthermore, if you're willing to shell out a little extra money to a third-party Sugar vendor, your options are endless when it comes to customizing your CRM to meet your needs.

Speed has probably been the biggest downfall within our organization, but that's improved slowly over the past year. Migrating our data from Salesforce.com to SugarCRM was a nightmare as well.

I would definitely recommend Sugar for anyone getting started with little to no data that needs to be imported. If you're migrating large amounts of data with custom fields and what not, I highly recommend planning your implementation a few months prior to your deadline for switching CRM's.

Support is very alert. It is very convenient for us to use the app.

The implementation was a bit bumpy as we had a very bad CRM in the first place.

We were stuck with a bad product before, waited too long to change. If you are in that situation don't wait. Spring to action asap.

The sheer breadth of functionality in SugarCRM puts it streets ahead of any of the competition. The ability to then customise the code, and host onsite, makes it virtually unique in the CRM world.

Sometimes the breadth of functionality leads to a lack of depth.

For the price (even the paid for versions) you'd be hard pressed to find anything else half as flexible.

We found the ease of customization to be the most important factor that draws us to SugarCRM. Our developers who had not been exposed to SugarCRM previously found it relatively effortless to customize and get going in no time.

The mobile app could have stronger features, I look forward to the new and improved mobile app due to be released soon.

Look for flexibility in a CRM, as your needs become sophisticated you need a CRM that can accommodate hassel-free growth