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SugarCRM Introduction

SugarCRM is a leading Customer Relationship Management platform in a global scale. It provides its users with a huge variety of functionalities such as sales automation, customer support, creating marketing campaigns, internal collaboration and scheduled customer communication. Using the application you ca easily track and plan different events, gain information concerning the specific tasks of each of your team members, keep in touch with your customers and a lot of additional features.

The script was first released in 2004 by SugarCRM Inc., California. In the same year Josh Stein invested $2 million in the company and with this help the application gained popularity, being downloaded over 25 000 times by September 2004.

By the years of development the SugarCRM Team has grown from a few members to around 150 in 2008 and over 450 people nowadays.

In 2012 SugarCRM announced the 6.5 release of the script which is the latest major one provided both as an open-source and paid version. It provides an updated user interface, more functionalities and improved security.

The platform is available in 4 separate editions, one of which is completely free for download and use. We will now explain the difference between the available versions.

SugarCRM Community Edition – this is the free version of the application, which is open-source. This means that you can download it and start using it without any costs. The latest available version of SugarCRM CE is 6.5, having in mind that in 2013 SugarCRM 7 was announced but only in the SugarCRM hosted paid environment. The SugarCRM CE gives the opportunity to deploy it on your preferred hosting provider, choosing the plan that best fits your needs and requirements.

The other three Sugar editions are the following ones – Sugar Professional, Sugar Enterprise and Sugar Ultimate. They are paid ones and contain all the features included in the Community Edition. However they come in different price and have minor difference in the functionalities offered. You can find detailed information about the pricing and the difference between each of the three paid variations of the application here.