SugarCRM is the leading open source Customer Relationship Management solution aimed at businesses of all sizes. The product began life as an Open Source project on Source Forge in April 2004 and since then has been downloaded over 4 million times.

Available Editions

SugarCRM develops CRM software in three editions:

• Sugar Community Edition
• Sugar Professional
• Sugar Enterprise.

The Community Edition is provided under a free licence. The Professional and Enterprise editions are licensed for a fee on a per user basis. Each product is produced from the same code tree with Sugar Community Edition containing roughly 85 percent of the functionality contained in Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise.

Deployment Options

In order to provide maximum flexibility, SugarCRM can be deployed in a variety of ways:

• Sugar on Demand
• Sugar Cube
• Sugar On-Site

Sugar on Demand delivers CRM functionlity following a Software as a Service (SAAS) model. This means that a fully hosted solution is made available to customers for a fixed monthly fee and removes the need for the customer to provide any hardware themselves.

Sugar Cube is a complete plug & play solution allowing a pre-installed server to simply be bolted in behind the customer's firewall.

Sugar on-site provides customers the opportunity to install the solution on their own servers.

Features

The following table summarises the key functionality of the product:

System Requirements

SugarCRM is based upon the LAMP stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. It will also run on other platforms that can deliver Apache, MySQL and PHP including as Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X. In addition to MySql, certain editions of the product can be used with other database installations, such as Oracle.