We used Salesforce as our first CRM.  It was awful.  Way too complicated for someone that isn’t running a huge sales force.  For us it’s about keeping activities and information, not pipeline projections and complex sales metrics.  And yeah, the price is just insanity.  After a year of that we went to SugarCRM, and used that for a couple years.  Meanwhile we also did a trial of Highrise and have run a few projects in Basecamp.  We didn’t like Highrise at all, and Basecamp is ok but I always felt it was not quite right.  Sorry I can’t give you something more concrete.  I have a background in project management, and their philosophy was just overly simplified and far from real PM basics.

We started the demo of Solve360 about six weeks ago (along with Google Apps and Zendesk).  We already use Freshbooks, have used them for years and absolutely love that product.  Last week we completed the final data import to go live, and this week is our first full live usage of all the products together.

I spent many weeks trying out other products.  I’ve tried at least 15 CRM/PM products, and every single one was missing something or had annoyances except for Solve360.  So here we are.

I think it’s far more intuitive and manages to be both more powerful and simpler to use than Basecamp/Highrise.

I forgot to address support.  Salesforce had amazingly bad support.  Broken English, lacking details, and slow.  Sugar support depends on what you buy and from who.  We ran the community edition for a while, no support.  We then bought a hosted service called Datasync Suite.  Their support was decent; until the excrement really hit the fan, and then it was horrible.  They did a data migration that was a total failure, and left us down for days.  We’ve still got missing data.  No warning beforehand, no communication during or after, no replies to multiple e-mails sent.

So far Norada support has been fast, and just as importantly, in proper English with an excellent level of detail and care.

Carlos, I’d be interested to know how you got your Salesforce activities (e.g., tasks, notes, etc.) into Sovle360.

Sorry about the late reply, was traveling and then forgot to get back here.

We went from Salesforce to Sugar, then to Solve360.  I did a full data export from Salesforce, then the same again from Sugar.  It was fairly painless, though I did do a number of trial syncs and read the docs.  It was easy to import, see that I didn’t get what I wanted, delete all, and do it again.  I would say I spent 2-3 hours for the process, mostly in understanding how I wanted to map fields from the old names/conventions to Solve360.

I’ll add that I’m still 100% happy we moved to Solve360.  I still find myself working in it and thinking, “I love this.”  Managing customer data is no longer a chore but a pleasure.  The integration between Solve360, Google Apps/mail, Freshbooks, and Zendesk just sweetens it up even more.