GoldMine Software (FrontRange)

GoldMine is a great work group contact manager but was never really CRM. GoldMine fell under a different category called Sales Force Automation. When the owners Jon and Elan sold the company it was in hopes to create a CRM suite know as Front Office. They never really quite got it off the ground. They failed mainly to provide working online CRM software. Although they did produce a couple versions of GoldMine HTML later called something else it was problematic and used BDE inside the IIS process which caused it to crash all the time. When I resigned from GoldMine (post Jon and Elan leaving) in my resignation letter I told my boss I don't want to work for a Company that would build a product and ship it knowing full well it would not work. That's not something Jon and Elan would have done purposely providing poor CRM support.

SugarCRM

Uses an open source approach to CRM and is under the public license. Simple to use and offers all base functionality. The underlying code is written in PHP and uses MYSQL. For a LAMP environment this ia a decent feature base for extending it. They offer an array of CRM hosting options a little on the high price side for an open source application.

SalesForce.com

Very popular and seems to be what people use when they are not sure what to use. Feature rich but is not open source and hard to integrate with. Although there is a tool for integrating it's not the same as a rich desktop environment. You really can't extend it for special features only develop add on type scenarios. It's easy to get in to but also easy to get out of compared to a desktop application like GoldMine.

SplendidCRM

Our product after my own heart, they took SugarCRM a PHP application and rewrote it to use MSSQL and .Net 2.0. It's a great success and we offer and service this product for hosting etc. This product was modified to create VoodooCRM and other CRM products out there. This is great for vertical applications where a base can be outfitted for specific industries. It's easy to offer a CRM hosted solution with it.

Microsoft CRM

The newer version of this product is okay. I was in the Titan beta program but stopped participating because the CRM is basically some clean up of the old version. It's over engineered and will cost a fortune. If you have money this is the way to go but starting at 5k and then not to mention training and customization it's not the best scenario for many companies.

Seibel

Do not buy this product if you don't believe me try talking to some of their customers. In the cases where I have surveyed situations development is Indian based and years away from being a viable product. Even when it was stable it was always way over priced. They did manage to pump out one super bowl Ad with all the extra fees they charged.

SalesLogix

Don't get me started. Sage picked up this product after it started to fail. It's hard to say what happened to them exactly. They still claim to have a large user base.

VoodooCRM

It's really just SplendidCRM with some ProjectThunder add-ons.