Is SugarCRM free to use?

[tottakai]

hello,

What does Commercial open source CRM software means? Is SugarCRM free to use or do i need to buy expensive license
to use it. Commercial word got me confusing and on sugarCRM site they have demo software. So, it looks like it is not totally free as other open source software. We are couple of college students starting a new company marketing and distributing toys. So we are not going to edit SugarCRM source code butwe will hostteh application online.so we will be the end users.

I am sorry, but we are little worried now as we already purchased the hosting place from our small budget and now a friend who was responsible for setting this up is not so sure about the meanining of FREE in his sales pitch.
We will highly appreciate any kind of help on this.

Thank you.
Miika

[susiewilliams]

Hi there,

SugarCRM has an Open Source edition that is free, along with Professional and an Enterprise editions that cost money. You can find out about the differences between the editions by visiting this page on the SugarCRM website.

There's a podcast that describes what Commercial Open Source business model. Go to this link and scroll down to the third podcast from the bottom.

Finally, though the Open Source edition is free from fees, you'll need to budget time and/or money in maintaining and administering the system, making customizations to tailor the system to fit your business needs, backing up data, and all those other tasks that you would do with any business system.

[Markku]

I'd suggest also to get familiar with Sugar Public License:
http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/open-sou...c-license.html

[tottakai]

Thank you for the pointers.