Corporate Open Source CRM Price War Begins

I get bombarded with press releases for more CRMs than I ever knew existed. Is this something worth paying attention to? As near as I can tell, the only people who think CRMs are interesting and important are the people making them.

I'm interested in CRM.

SugarCRM has quite a few things going for it. Pretty much everything except it's legacy code base. It's a *mess*. But as long as you stay out of the code and the module builder it works pretty well.

Trust me, nothing makes a CIO love FOSS like saving $35,000 a year on your CRM system :-) After that there's much less resistance when you propose FOSS replacements for other software.

So you get bombarded with press releases too? Nice to know I am not alone..

Quoting:Trust me, nothing makes a CIO love FOSS like saving $35,000 a year on your CRM system :-)

Then point them to VTiger. About the same as SugarCRM, but lots cheaper and 'built on top of LAMP'. I must admit I know nothing at all about CRM, but that's what I read (on LXer. Duh, where else?)

I looked at VTiger. It offers much the same functionality as our current Sugar 4.5.1 installation, but it has two downsides:

- Sugar 5 offers much more features than Sugar 4.5 or VTiger (we'll be moving to 5.1 when it comes out). - Sugar has much more partners. Finding a local Sugar partner/consultant is easy. Not so for VTiger.

Of course, the difference in price has to be hidden somewhere. Probably after SugarCRM 5 is out for a while VTiger will have copycatted (that's a verb?) it too.

@hans: SugarCRM is free too. Or at least the community edition is. That's what VTiger is built on. SugarPro and Sugar Enterprise are not GPLv3.

Also, AFAICT VTiger is still running on the 4.5 codebase and SugarCRM 5 has been out for quite a while. My guess is that Sugar 4.5 and VTiger have drifted so far apart that it's nigh impossible to update VTiger to the Sugar 5 codebase. Sugar 5 has had a massive internal code restructuring. VTiger is probably better off as a fork, growing new features independently from SugarCRM (and doing that in a much cleaner way that the Sugar developers did behind closed doors).