SFA / CRM Solutions

[Guillermo Söhnlein]

OK ... so I've succumbed to the Salesforce.com monster at 3 startups already. Not bad, but pricey (especially once you grow beyond the initial 5 licenses for their lowest-end $600/year offering).

Has anyone used any of the open source (free?) products, such as SugarCRM?

[Michael Mealling]

I've been using SugarCRM for a while and it does everything a startup needs. There are hosted providers out there that are very cheap. But its also so easy to setup that any moderately geeky 12 year old can do it. Its also very customizable so the ISV add-on market is huge. All sorts of hacks out there to do things with it.

We also use CATS (a job board system for posting jobs and tracking applications). There are numerous free/open source ERP, HR, POS, WMS, etc systems out there. If you need help figuring out which one to use let me know. I've researched most of them.

The point is that for what a startup needs you can find almost 100% of your IT needs are freely available....

[Gregory Emsellem]

I would be very interested by knowing which FOSS ERP would have your favor for a start-up without dedicated IT people to support it. So it would have to be fairly easy to set-up and very easy to maintain and use... any suggestion

[Agravatb]

Hi
Please check out the followings:
http://www.vtiger.com
http://www.dotproject.com

[Andy Forbes]

We're rolling out eSalestrack - while it does not have the features salesforce.com has, eSalestrack does everything we need it to do.