SugarCRM

I’ve been hearing a lot about SugarCRM lately. I had been seeing a lot of headlines in the Linux press about it lately but hadn’t really bothered to look into what it was all about. I finally broke down and checked it out.

SugarCRM is an open-source (OS) customer relationship management (CRM) package. It is designed to help businesses keep track of contacts and the process of communication that goes back and forth between a contact and the business. It looks like a very nice system.

What I realized after looking at this is that Fellowship One has more in common with a CRM package than it does with most church database software I’ve seen. It is designed to manage communication between church leaders and individuals, be they first-time visitors, or core team members.

So why not just use SugarCRM instead of Fellowship One? Because Fellowship One has all these features in addition to everything you’d expect in a church database plus some. SugarCRM does not provide secure child check-in, check scanning, on-line giving, small groups, families, etc. It is geared toward business rather than church.

However, I might suggest to the OS church management system developers out there that SugarCRM might be either a good place to start, or a good source of ideas for your development.