Mailchimp vs SugarCRM: Which is a better fit?

Duncan: My name's Duncan. I'm the community editor with Pullman's Weekly News and Advertiser series. Our company's a news company with an employment size of 14, and I would give MailChimp a user rating of five out of five. Our company uses MailChimp on a day-to-day basis to reach more readers and an audience digitally. Obviously, the newspaper business as a print business has declined significantly in the past years. It's essential for us to communicate to our readers through digital means, and as such, MailChimp proves an excellent provider. The reasons I personally like MailChimp is it's very easy to use. You can have a drag and drop system for placing the templates in emails. You can select photographs to go with news stories very, very quickly. There's no need to download any complicated software. The platform of MailChimp contains all of the necessary infrastructure. I simply upload the database of our readers, and these readers receive the email through MailChimp servers. Some of the cons of MailChimp are its cost. Obviously, the more users you have, the larger the subscriber list, the larger the cost incrementally. It would also be nice to be able to send videos of a longer duration through MailChimp. I'm sure that would be achieved at some point, but that's one of the requests I would make.

Shanie: So my name is Shanie and my job title is CEO. I manage multiple companies, Elevation Global Group, Legacy Consulting Firm, and Shanie Salmon Enterprise. And my companies are in media, transportation and entrepreneur academy. And I rate SugarCRM five out of five stars. I tried so many CRMs to the point where I even forget some of the names. But the one that I was using before I migrated was HubSpot. And one of the reasons why I switched was the collaboration. As I grew my team and got in different industries, it was very difficult to manage. And aesthetically, I'm visual. I have to see it in a way that's easy for me to follow and for me to use the software. And it was just so much just black and white. It was not as user-friendly for me using HubSpot. So that's why I switched over to Sugar. It was the ... Not missing anything, the analytics report. And analytics for me is not something that was easy to understand or even follow. I tried Google Analytics and this analytics, that analytics. But they make it so easy for you to track the life cycle of your leads and your contacts and the marketing piece, the sales piece. And I've used Salesforce before in my career before I started my own business, and I really liked it. So Salesforce by itself is a little pricey. But with Sugar, they have a similar feel of using Salesforce. So it was just the overall all-in-one software that you can manage your entire company, as well as you grow your team, they can also be a part of the customer's journey along with you in that software. It wasn't difficult. If you're not someone that's tech-savvy, you'll be fine. Of course, you do want to take the time to look through all the features and see how your company's going to use the software. So it was easy-ish. It wasn't completely easy, but it wasn't difficult. It's a matter of knowing what your company need before actually diving into the software. And once you have a plan, "I'm going to use it for marketing", whatever it is. Once you have that down pack, then onboarding is easy. It's the figuring it out as you go, with what's this, what make it hard. I would use SugarCRM. But first, Sugar don't have a free version. They don't. So I would have a plan for what is it that I want from my business and how am I going to use that CRM to make my workflow better, to scale my business to the next level, and then I will make the investment. But if you are brand new, never used a CRM before, check it out. Go on their website, do the demos. They do have demos. And see how it is that you can implement it into your business. And it is worth the investment. And you can scale your business with the right software. And sugar is definitely one of those softwares that you can use that to scale your business to the next level.