Why are people leaving SuiteCRM?

Iā€™ve had a few (enough to worry) clients this year and just another one today who are making the decision to move to Hubspot and the like. Even to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year instead of stay with SuiteCRM.

Many of them didnā€™t even start with a CRM. Once they became educated on how awesome a CRM is and all setup on SuiteCRM, they tend want something better.

Iā€™m not sure if this is the right place for this discussion, but is anyone else seeing this? What are some of the features you are seeing that are getting people to really be willing to spend a fortune to change?

Some of the general issues people have with SuiteCRM:

  1. Email - the email client is just not useful. Most are on O365 or Gsuite (corporate) and there just isnā€™t a great solution to get emails into the CRM. (yes I know there are plugins which improve the situation, but are not ideal either).
  2. Email campaigns. Other platforms allow sales reps to put together ad-hoc campaigns like ā€œlist of calls this weekā€ to send out a preemptive message. I know this could be accomplished in SutieCRM with workflow, but thereā€™s no way Iā€™d want the average rep to have full access to the campaigns module!
  3. Website/lead tracking/lead scoring - I generally integrate Mautic for this, but itā€™s definately lacking in SuiteCRM.
  4. Social Media integrations - I know things like linkedin are proprietary now, but the Hubspots and Salesforces have these pretty locked up.
  5. Management Reporting - In a few cases the change was driven by upper management (board level) because of the fancy reports available in Hubspot and Salesforce (again I know these can be customized with google charts, etc).

Just wondering if Iā€™m the only one? If there are more factors that others are seeing?

Not trying to create a ā€œcomplaintsā€ thread, but maybe some valueable insights that could be incorporated into the roadmap for the future.

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I totally agree with you. While SuiteCRM is free, it lacks many advanced features, such as comprehensive reporting and marketing tools like the Mautic email editor.

As a result, many users opt to invest in better visualization and marketing solutions. The @suitecrm_team should consider adding these features to retain users.

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Hello Paul,

it seems like Hubspot is killing it:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0yxz88w,ZohoCRM,%2Fm%2F02yxmbc,%2Fg%2F11cn5kvgkn,%2Fg%2F122kzl6y&hl=en

If you remove it (and maybe Pipedrive) Suite isnā€™t doing as bad anymore :wink:

The points youā€™ve listed hit home.

  • Everytime a prospect calls about SuiteCRM and mentions Email, I wince a bit. Email wise Suite (mostly) works technically and the UX is somewhere at 1998. :frowning:
  • Campaigns again - they work technically, but they seem to be made by developers for developers. Iā€™m hoping for something much better in 8.9.
  • Reporting: For the standard and ad-hoc stuff, SuiteCRM can do a lot. If it comes to advanced reports, BI, dashboards etc. I wouldnā€™t even look at some plugins or anything but just access the DB with Metabase or Redash.
    After all: Thatā€™s one of the Super-Powers of SuiteCRM - REAL data access to the DB.
  • Hubspot is doing an amazing job when it comes to marketing. SuiteCRM is rather a Sales Software.
    The question is, whether those companies which are changing, have made the right decision in the first place?
    If theyā€™re unhappy about Suite and change to Hubspot, they probably havenā€™t done a proper CRM evaluation in the first place and now notice, that they need more marketing and not sales?

I had a couple of customers as well using Hubspot now - but often integrating, rather than moving. Hubspot for the marketing processes and CRM for sales and automation.

Maybe Mautic is the right answer for some. If the marketing has a user friendly and powerful tool they can use, it helps with the KPIs.

Iā€™d add something like n8n into the tech stack, in order to really integrate, automate, use AI etc. with SuiteCRM together.
As an individual software, Suite is just too limited for todays fast moving tech requirements and integrated processes.

The question that remains would probably be:
Are the price and the data privacy benefits enough to stick to self-hosted open source?
If the IT department has no time, than SaaS is the answer for the marketing department.
For smaller companies, I can see the challenge - Hubspot which can do it all with not IT vs. Suite + Mautic + ā€¦ + different users, different permissions, multiple software to learn etc.

There are some pain points in Suite, but it is evolving as well.

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@BastianHammer thanks for the thoughtfull reply.

@BastianHammer , Thank you for creating these two videos:

Key CRM Features Every Business Needs

When to use SuiteCRM? 8 business cases that fit SuiteCRM

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Hi Paul. I hope you are well.

My experience is slightly different but I absolutely share your views and below is a little bit (actually, a lot :slight_smile: ) of what I did to overcome some of the shortcomings. I am now fully retired and have left my customers to press on, as they are all now pretty much self sufficient, but I experienced some very similar feedback to yourself. What I did to move these to positives and stay with Suite were pretty basic but here goes.

Firstly, I created a customised version, as I am sure we have all done for customers, but I did this at the outset, before I had any. Out of the box, even today on version 8.x, I regard Suite as a toolkit with a huge amount of functionality but which needs to be identified and properly harnessed.

So, using my 40+ years of experience in mainly the enterprise space, I created a front screen menu layout that made sense to the sales and marketing process, using terminology and logical function flow that you would expect from prospecting through to billing. This was as much for me to identify gaps and see how best to fill them, which I think I did listening to the prospects and their needs and feedback. It is all in there but sometimes wasnā€™t obvious to me, let alone a prospect.

In regards to email, I did a lot of ā€˜messing aboutā€™ as all of my customers are MS houses using Outlook. After a few weeks of trying to get a smooth integration, even trialling some of the chargeable plug-ins, I gave up. My marketing pitch to prospects was to stay with Outlook and I use a simple (free) transport package to sync calendars both ways but with Outlook as the primary email client. This was actually viewed by all of my customers as a good thing. A bit of a cop-out but they didnā€™t see this as an issue. Learning a new and very clunky email service was not viewed as a benefit but they all knew Outlook so well that this was a comfort factor and it was their Corporate platform, fully supported etcā€¦

Marketing - campaigns and all of the associated functionality are pretty basic and the editor(s) available within the package are positively from the stone age in my view. Most of my customers were streets ahead of where Suite is even today. They have used it for mail-out campaigns and basic tracking, which works quite well once set up correctly, de-duping and correction of their database and sending what they view as basic marketing collateral, compared to what they can produce with other products. Some of the other CRM solutions do allow integration of many of these so that you can keep this within the family, so to speak. This area needs improvement to allow better content creation and more flexibility but the hard work has all been done. More a case of developers not really understanding the business function that they are developing for, in my view. This can be easily solved, as there will be willing clients out there happy to provide the input.

I use Google Charts for all of the visual reporting and dashboard tabs as well as a couple of other external products occasionally, as the graphics in general are pretty basic in Suite. All of my customers wanted more than I could produce with the standard system but Google Charts does a great job but as you know, requires some technical knowledge to integrate and customise. I put the time in on this to generate business and individual forecasting and performance reports mainly, plus some trending and historic analysis. This started with a tip from someone on the forum way back, which I took to the next level as a business tool which was key to all of my customers. This is another area where Suite could use a major boost as the competitors you mention are just more savvy in producing and presenting tools that have sex appeal to the C-level Sales and Marketing directors, VPs and dare I say even accountants. This wouldnā€™t need a huge amount of effort with some thought and planning and there are some free tools out there such as Google Charts, that the developers could harness and produce a simple front end for, which would make a massive difference.

Social Media is not such a big thing for my customers as none are B2C, all B2B so their Social Media focus tends to be on the marketing of their messages, as well as products and services but this is something that could be integrated into the marketing modules with some thought.

This is already a tome but also meant as a constructive view, as this is, like yourself, based upon real customers and their business needs. Personally, I think that Suite is a great product with masses of capability and with a few carefully targeted developments could really push back at the Hubspotā€™s of this world.

For customers who are sick of a six figure annual SalesForce bill and Hubspot can get up there quite quickly as well if you use their enhanced functionality, Suite is a major, major cost saving, as we all know. However, a bit of gloss added to the front end at relatively small cost would make a huge difference in how it is perceived in an evaluation, and allow a real targeted marketing challenge to those customers with the big bills.

I have gone on far too long but hopefully this will send the right, positive message to support your points.

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This thread is a great read (and honestly, to me) a reason to ā€œstickā€ with SuiteCRM and offer improvements. I was wondering @ggraynoth - for the UI/UX you were referring to and the Outlook transport package - are you able to share those with the community with a GIT repo or anything? Or are they just more proprietary? Thanks!

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@ggraynoth and @swhitlow +1 for me, what are you using for the outlook calendar sync? That sounds interesting. PS thanks @ggraynoth for the thoughtful response.

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If I may be immodest, I believe that the features from my add-ons that are coming into a future version of v8 will be excellent additions. Theyā€™re really powerful.

And the main dev is now working on Email and Campaigns, which I agree is a major pain point and a highly significant issue for SuiteCRM overall. So things are moving :rocket:

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You may :smiley:
Do you have a timeline or a target CRM version, when the merge shall have been completed?

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Thanks @pgr that sounds really positive.

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We donā€™t have timelines yet, but ā€œquite soonā€ is approximately true :slight_smile:

Or @ggraynoth -could you share screenshots - that would be helpful too

thanks@swhitlow and all. I will try and pull something together on this and post a few screenshots of how I have structured the interface.

Regarding the transport, to be honest, I have forgotten the name of the app, so will dig this out and post - pretty easy to set up and free for a limited amount of two way synced calendar entries, which would be plenty for most people (I think it is free up to 100 entries/month from memory and none of my customers users have ever gone beyond this, or havenā€™t told me).

In regards to Google Charts and the like, I did post a few screenshots and some instructions a while back. However, I have moved this on much more since then but most of the output is very customer specific and is hosted on my customers own platforms in test and production, using their DB. I wouldnā€™t be able to share these with you, but that said, it is simply a matter of getting familiar with Google Charts and its linkage, all documented by Google. Then integrating it, again, info already posted on this forum.
You will need some SQL capability in order to create the SQL scripts to extract the right data from the right tables and store them in accessible variables, which can be a little tricky. Plus some basic scripting capability to edit the output formats to meet your needs. Some of this was trial and error with me around things like performance meters (dials) to get the sizing right for frames in the dashboard tabs and things like combo charts etcā€¦ but it is relatively straightforward once you have got the basics clear.
This link will take you to a useful starting place for Google Charts.
https://developers-dot-devsite-v2-prod.appspot.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery

Hope this helps.

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Hello,

Iā€™ve just come back to the project after six months to see whatā€™s new.

Suitecrm 8 has such great potential and could be one of the great open source success stories however there is no focus on fixing bugs or adding new CRM functionality to make it even better driven my the community.

How long has V8 been out and it still does not have the same functionality of V7. Look how many V7 users are struggling to migrate to V8 who are posting to the forums. Iā€™m glad I did not rollout V7.

Iā€™ve reported bugs in the past and it took an age for them to be fixed.

What new CRM functionally has been added to V8 in the past two years ? Can anyone tell me ?

If you look at the roadmaps its all about look and feel. There is no plan therefore there is no progress sadly.

Iā€™m not surprised end users are leaving when there are other alternatives out there even if they have to pay license fees etc. To make SuiteCRM 8 usable you have to buy third party plugins which should be in the core feature set. Might as well buy a supported commercial CRM.

For me SuiteCRM 8 has a limited set of core features that kind-of works which I will use without modification. Iā€™m lucky as I can code all the functionality I need to make it work for my needs at the database level.

Thanks.

The money isnā€™t flowing to SalesAgility (SA). People use SuiteCRM, sometimes in big profitable businesses, but for 99.99% of them, SA doesnā€™t get any $ from it.

So that limits the amount of money that SA can invest in the Product Team. The rate of development that you observe in the project (which everybody, including SA, wishes was greater) is a direct consequence of this limitation.

This, of course, is a typical open-source project problem, weā€™re all familiar with it, but that doesnā€™t mean it is easy to solve. If anybody has ideasā€¦

We should actively encourage both companies and individual users to support the project financially. This will help accelerate the development of new features and improvements, benefiting everyone in the long run.

Asking For Support GIFs - Find & Share on GIPHY

Iā€™m not an expert in Open Source development and managment, so Iā€™m not sure I have alot to offer in that regard (Iā€™m going to share my thoughts anyway, they may be way off). One thing I do see is another CRM/ERP that is free and open source (Dolibar) Dolibarr Open Source ERP and CRM - Web suite for business

They seem to be getting funding through their Foundation and really driving things forward. Iā€™ve installed it and it works really well, plus has accounting and the like all integrated. I did find it a little overly complex if youā€™re not using ERP funtionality and focusing on traditional CRM stuff. I just use them as an example of how they seem to be positioning themselves as a ā€œfoundationā€ and getting funding.

What are they doing differently? How are they able to fund all this development? (Again Iā€™m not an exper in this space of developing open source software). Maybe a SWOT analysis might help find gaps where SuiteCRM could be doing things differently.

From the outside, personally, I see SalesAgility taking on WAY too much responsibility and financial burden. There must be a better way to break up the project into small bites that can be outsourced to the community (again I donā€™t manage development on this scale so maybe this is a crazy idea). For example, the recent O365 update that integrated Oauth. For a while there was kind of a game of ā€œchickenā€ going on (at least thatā€™s how I saw it from the outside) where I guess there was a hope a user was going to develop the whole thing. I really didnā€™t see that happening. In the 11th hour SalesAgility stepped in (thank you!) and developed the whole thing. Could not SalesAgility maybe broke it up in a few logical parts ie: The auth, the front end, the backend, etc. in managable chunks and then ask for volunteer teams to work on various parts and then maybe SalesAgility would just manage the ā€œprojectā€. Again, Iā€™m not an open source dev, but Iā€™m thinking thatā€™s with Github and merging different parts together along with different small dev teams of volunteers working on different chunks, this could be accomplished and possibly with less time/$$ than SalesAgility having to do the whole thing? I always thought this is how OpenSource was supposed to work. Again, I donā€™t know if this would end up being more costly than just doing it.

PS - Iā€™d be happy to volunteer for some chunk that falls within my skillset!

Hereā€™s another GREAT idea that Mautic is doing to generate income to fund development.

https://www.mautic.org/blog/rfp-certification-provider

Not sure - probably not my place to judge / point out or similar.
But is it possible, that the most active users in the forums are all not related to SA? Forum team - SuiteCRM
And other than the roadmap / website, I see little involvment from SA here in the forums - maybe itā€™s more in Github or somewhere, where the community is more techy / less businessy?
Whatā€™s the idea here from SA? Is there any community strategy in place? Is that all a concern in the first place?

Maybe SA sees Suite only as ā€œtheirā€ CRM that they share and do projects around ā€œtheirā€ CRM?

Mautic has Ruth Cheesley.
For n8n Iā€™ve got the impression that theyā€™ve paid people for forum support to engage and foster growth.
For Drupal it seems to be a bit more difficult but community driven and kind of well governed.
Other CRMs which have been forked out of Sugar charge for parts of the Suite core system (which make them rather unattractive compared to Zoho etc. offerings).

We could bounce ideas around all day long here, the question is basically who would be able to own community initiatives?

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