I used salesforce.com in my last company and liked it a lot. Lots of community activity for help and some very nice features. So of course when we needed a CRM for a new company I talked to them. The version you want is about $50 / month per user ($600 per year). With a sales force of 70 people, I gulped. And don't forget, no matter what you have, you have to spend a lot of quality time setting it up and training. Otherwise it's nothing more than a glorified contact manager.
I also remember using Sugarcrm in the past, so installed the free system on my hosted server. It was pretty ill behaved during installation (especially figuring out chmod access rights) but I got it installed. Took me a couple of days and some php tinkering. But a pretty sophisticated system when done. Problem was, when you run it, it's kind of a pig and pretty slow response time.
Then I found a derivative of sugarcrm called vTiger. Took me literally 5 minutes to install on a hosting site including setting up a MySql server instance. And it's fast. However you do lose even a little more functionality in some areas, but really nice modules for thunderbird, outlook, word and even a webform which automatically populates leads.
To save time and performance, do a web search of "web hosting sugarcrm" and you will find companies which will run (and even setup) your entire system for $70 a year, for all your users. And if then can run sugarcrm they can run vTiger.
But like I said, the big thing is setting up your system. No matter what your CRM, you have many business decisions to make. More on that later.
You should take a look at http://www.myriadsuite.com . they have a decent range of applications that go well beyond your simple CRM. I heard good things about them and the membership fees are ridiculous.
Posted by: German Gomez | 27 January 2009 at 12:09 PM
Better, but that's still $240 / user a year. For 40 users that's $9,600 which is a lot more than $78.
Posted by: bruce fryer | 27 January 2009 at 01:53 PM
True, but the pricing is role based (try the membership calculator (http://www.myriadsuite.com/portal/MyriadApp/Pricing/tabid/103/language/en-US/Default.aspx)) so it might be less than 9600$ depending on the modules the users really use... Anyway, I agree that your 78$ solution is appealing but hosting your own CRM can be a hassle when it comes to support and upgrades. Basically it all depends what your needs are, what technical knowledge you have and what risk you are willing to take. Bottom line, most of the time, you get what you pay for. :)
Btw, thanks for the tip on vTiger, I didn't know the product.
Posted by: German Gomez | 28 January 2009 at 06:57 AM
I suggest NetSuite as a viable alternative. If you only need CRM, it is competitively priced to Salesforce. More importantly, once the customer commits, you have full ERP capacities. It too is a PaaS (Platform as a Service), like SalesForce.
We have written a number of good articles on our blog about the challenges of CRM implementations especially as it comes to data cleanliness. http://blog.prolecto.com
Posted by: twitter.com/martyzigman | 08 September 2009 at 12:30 PM