Having been shown what SharpSpring can do out of the box very recently, I am now re-assessing our decision to move to SuiteCRM and I wanted to find out from the community, what it would take to get SuiteCRM to a SharpSpring-like platform?
Out of the box, it is absolutely amazing what SharpSpring can do and I would seriously have been willing to pay a premium price for Suite at the time if there was a bundled SuiteCRM option with all the extensions that would make Suite more into a SharpSpring platform.
Is that an option? What are all the extensions I could bundle to make it more into a SharpSpring and sell that bundle to clients?
Well Suite has many capabilities and is flexible enough for changes as well. I am not sure of what SharpSpring does, but here the community is strong, active, and involved. Also there is a market place with bundles of addons to choose for.
Personal opinion here, not speaking from a company point of view.
SuiteCRM is Open Source. Even if you contact us and pay us as a company to make changes to the software every last bit of code is owned by yourself. You want to move off our hosting we provide a full package with codebase (Even if its core with no modifications) and your data.
I have a biased view (work for SalesAgility the makers of SuiteCRM). Maybe out of the box functionality may look nicer in other “premium” programs but most things are possible with SuiteCRM. You want that nice looking dashboard meant to wow from SharpSpring, pay some devs with the money your saving from not having to buy a core product (Yes just in case your not aware SuiteCRM is completely free) etc etc. Possibilities, in my opinion, are endless. To say I’m looking forward to SuiteCRM 8 is an understatement also, massive improvements across the board that all will appreciate from developers to front end users and everyone in-between 
Thank you @Mac-Rae, I appreciate your input. I know that you can bend most open source to do what you need it to do but it was just that out of the box, SharpSpring has a hell of a lot that is incredible.
Like I said, I would actually pay a premium price if there we self hosted version bundled with all the extensions to make it a SharpSpring.
It is obvious that SharpSpring needs to have an appealing layout and ease of use - things that even SuiteCRM is lacking to some extent - to be able to persuade anyone to subscribe to their offering.
I’m not saying this to criticize anyone, but I think lack of polish and ease of use are common shortcomings among many community-driven open source projects. The huge potential is often wrapped in an unappealing package (e.g. Gnome) that is unintuitive to use and painful to install and/or maintain (think Gentoo).
While SuiteCRM is easy to install and maintain, its design is aging and requires a lot of page loads, and I can easily see the appeal of slicker, newer interfaces of proprietary software. I think everything that SharpSpring does - or any other CRM system to that matter - could be done even with current SuiteCRM and more simply (I hope) with v8 and Angular, but it requires some effort on your end. You could pay any number of developers to do the customizations, and as @Mac-Rae pointed out, you’d then be left with customizations you own and could use for an indefinite amount of time - not just for the duration of your subscription. But you’re right that straight out of the box SuiteCRM isn’t that appealing at this stage.
Just to be clear, I’m very much pro-OSS and even used Gentoo with Gnome as my sole desktop system for a few years.
Thank you @TLi and @urdhvatech - I am keen to see what version 8 brings with it.
Out of interest, I am keen to find out how decisions are made about next releases of SuiteCRM and if the community is involve at all or does SalesAgility hear all the requests and the build it out from the income it generates from hosted versions of SuiteCRM? @Mac-Rae?
@Grow sorry for the delay on getting back to you. It has been a busy few days.
There are a few parts to that, and all of them have a margin of inconsistency much higher ATM due to the pandemic.
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Community PRs
Anyone can raise a pull request to the public GitHub which will be reviewed and assessed and make its way into the core product. These range from critical fixes thought to enhancements, all of which are considered. We appreciated the work the community put in not just making the product better, but there own
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Company Goals
These pull requests made by the core team which, as part of SalesAgility, focus on specific aspects of the CRM. For example, we may set aside time to fix a certain few issues specifically. These are often chosen from a list of topics found by the community or our internal devs, most of which can be seen on the GitHub issues page.
Sometimes these are worked on within what is called our community sprints where our internal Devs and our community Devs work together over two weeks to tackle issues. We appreciate the support we get while running these and will aim to do many again soon in the future.
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Company Development
This would cover issues or enchantments made internally for clients who may benefit the community and therefore, are fed into the main product also.
There are a few wee bits elsewhere, but this covers our three main sources of pull requests, one and two being the most prominent sources. If you have any further questions, please let me know ps sorry about the level of detail but I felt it’s worth having it written down somewhere 
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Thank you @Mac-Rae - much appreciate the deeper insight as to how things are done.
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