Investing in CRM software is a big commitment. You don’t want to get it wrong. Not to worry — we’ve got you covered if you’re looking for a detailed comparison of the heavyweights. In this article, we’ll spell out the pros and cons of Microsoft Dynamics vs. Salesforce vs. SugarCRM.

Spoiler alert: While our analysis tips the scale in favor of Salesforce Sales Cloud, it’s essential to remember that not all CRM features hold equal importance for every business. Read on for our analyst insights.

Compare Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and SugarCRM Against Your Needs

Article Roadmap

• Feature Comparison
  • Account and Contact Management
  • Customer Communication Management
  • Dashboards and Reports
  • Document Management
  • Lead Management
  • Opportunity Management
  • Product Management
  • Quote, Order and Contact Management
  • Sales Performance Management
  • Team Collaboration
  • Workflows and Process Automation
• Next Steps

Feature Comparison

Getting into the nitty gritty of CRM products is a tough job, but you’ve got to do it if you want a solution that meets your needs. Tally up the pros and cons of each solution with our handy feature comparison.

Compare Top CRM Software Leaders

Account and Contact Management

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales comes out of the gate strong with AI-based sales recommendations to connect users with the right contacts, craft personalized talking points and optimize communication times. Users can create or import account records with a unified view of associated contacts and activities.

Salesforce Sales Cloud provides business and personal fields to manage accounts, viewable on the account detail page. Associate contacts with accounts or opportunities with a complete view of account history, customer communication and internal account discussions.

Sugar Sell, the sales product from SugarCRM, allows users to create accounts with records like contacts, meetings, opportunities, and cases. Convert lead records to contact records using your businesses’ qualification process and link contacts to accounts.

Winner: Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales takes gold with its AI-driven capabilities.

Customer Communication Management

Microsoft Dynamics integrates with Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo to send, view and create emails and link communication with contacts. Use pre-built templates to send bulk emails and receive alerts when contacts view emails. Set up call reminders and auto-log all calls with Dynamics Telephony.

Use Sales Cloud’s Lightning Experience to reply to client emails using Gmail or Outlook, associate interactions with Salesforce records and schedule correspondence. Templates with merge fields personalize mass emails. Set up call reminders with the Activity Reminder and Notifications features to set up call reminders and schedule video or call appointments.

Sugar Sell allows users to configure their default email to send outgoing emails. However, incoming emails are archived and related to matching Sugar records. Sync relevant data in G Suite or Office 365 using Sugar Connect and schedule meetings with a unique link to a user’s calendar and office hours. Track click-through results with tracker URLs.

Winner: Salesforce Sales Cloud’s Lightning Experience takes the crown with direct email responses and auto-association.

Dashboards and Reports

Create customizable reports on activities like emails, phone calls, new accounts and opportunities with Dynamics. Use Dynamics Sales Insights with AI to analyze call data. Customize dashboards and pre-configured charts or create new charts with various visualizations. Monitor business goals using pre-built dashboards with different views to summarize activities, leads and opportunities.

Use Sales Cloud’s standard activity reports to create reports for selected date ranges and activity statuses. Access call center reports, generate out-of-the-box reports and view email campaign reports. Customize standard reports or build reports from scratch using the drag-and-drop builder. Modify the home dashboard to display quarterly performance and provide updates on urgent tasks.

Sugar Sell provides module-based reports and dashboards with multiple views and a homepage dashboard with customizable summary views. It helps users track activities and create module-based reports. Use dashlets and views to build and display charts and visualizations. Create four types of reports: rows and columns, summation, summation with details and matrix, using the Report Wizard. Build dashboards with dashlets or access pre-built dashboards with multiple views and a homepage dashboard with customizable summary views.

Winner: Microsoft Dynamics just edges first place with AI analysis and an overview of actionable business data.

Compare Top CRM Software Leaders

Document Management

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales supports storage via Microsoft SharePoint and managing document types. Integration with Google Drive supports offline document conversion. Integrate with Microsoft Teams to share files with internal and external users. Create playbooks for best practices, archive different document versions and add documents to CRM records.

Use Sales Cloud’s document and files module to create, upload and manage document records and file types. Convert documents to web-based versions using the content deliveries feature. Share files using encrypted URLs and file attachments. Access the version history list to see current and past versions with details on who made changes.

Sugar Sell offers data-storage allowances based on subscription models, supports document conversion with third-party plugins and allows file attachments via custom fields. It supports document conversion with third-party plugin 38 Elements. Attach files by adding a custom field in your instances via Studio.

Winner: Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales narrowly prevails thanks to its playbook capabilities and enterprise suite support.

Lead Management

Microsoft Dynamics puts the AI in lead conversion with built-in predictive lead scoring and prioritization. Determine the intent of a lead by profiling and guiding it through your marketing qualification process using AI and an email bot. Auto-assign leads from workflows or assigns individual leads manually. Don’t miss a single lead with tools for lead capturing from multiple sources.

Sales Cloud’s in-house AI tool, Einstein, analyzes historical data to determine lead conversion probability. It also provides key predictions, intelligent recommendations and automation to speed up opportunity conversion. Create assignment rules to distribute leads automatically. Score leads using your criteria for factors and auto-generate leads by setting up Web-To-Lead on your website.

Use Sugar Sell’s analytics tool, Sugar Discover, to identify trends and forecast sales distribution using historical and field records. Route new leads and send alerts to owners by setting routing rules with Sugar Market Landing Pages. Tap into Sugar Market to automate lead nurturing and scoring using pre-chosen actions and scoring logic.

Winner: Dynamics 365 for Sales takes the “lead” with AI-powered and automation-forward tools.

Opportunity Management

Microsoft Dynamics Sales Insights once again brings AI to the fore to score and prioritize opportunities, increasing qualification rates. Integrate with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to create automated customer journeys using templates and a drag-and-drop builder. Create and edit opportunities linked with relevant accounts and contacts, assign opportunity sales cycles and set up activities for each opportunity stage.

Salesforce uses Einstein’s opportunity scoring and insights to provide predictions, reminders and notifications for opportunities with a higher qualification score. Integration with Marketing Cloud offers users a journey builder to trigger personalized journeys from real-time events. Track deal stages and associated activities, create new opportunities and provide critical updates.

Sugar Sell offers alerts for trending opportunities, utilizes Sugar Market Landing Pages for routing new leads and automates lead nurturing and scoring with Sugar Market. Use plug-in Adoptify to create multiple custom journeys. Multiple sales pipelines are not supported. Create opportunities and track individual sales until the deal is won or closed. Search for opportunity records across Sugar modules. Each record includes sale data, quotes, contracts and communication.

Winner: It’s a threepeat for Dynamics 365 for Sales with in-built AI and opportunity data linking.

Compare Top CRM Software Leaders

Product Management

Dynamics requires integration with Portals to create a website using data from the Common Data Service. Create products with codes, prices, notes, product bundles and families. Maintain a product catalog with multiple prices and discount lists.

Sales Cloud uses Einstein for opportunity scoring and insights. Integration with Marketing Cloud enables personalized journeys from real-time events. It provides robust tracking of deal stages and associated activities. Create a base catalog with items and services and their standard prices and custom collections for specific uses. Categorize and organize products using the product family picklist.

Sugar’s portal allows users to create a published knowledge base with custom colors and layouts. Create custom product catalogs with defined, categorized and organized lists of products and services available. Classify products into types and categories with subcategories for better organization.

Winner: Sales Cloud’s Lightning Builder and custom product categorization help it strike the winning blow.

Quote, Order and Contract Management

Dynamics Integrates with proCONTRACTS for contract creation and access to templates, reminders, and KPI reports. It offers the conversion of quotes to invoices or orders and a detailed sales order history. View your sales order history through the database log and generate quotes directly from opportunities. Auto order creation and segmentation are not supported.

Take advantage of Salesforce’s automation tools to auto-configure order registration and invoices. Use the contract module to create contract records, link opportunities and quote details and track the approval process. Generate and associate orders with contracts and view order modification in the order history list. Convert quotes from opportunities and set up supply and payment schedules.

Sugar Sell supports contract creations using the quick create menu or contracts subpanel. Users can edit contract records, view audit logs and add relevant information like opportunities, documents and quotes. Integration with Sugar Invoice provides invoice management. It allows users to track but not generate orders and create quotes using drag-and-drop reordering.

Winner: Sales Cloud strides to the finish line with its automation and association capabilities.

Sales Performance Management

Sales reps get a little help from AI with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales’ guided selling, personalized talking points and next-best actions. Set and track individual, parent and child goals with specific metrics and identify, visualize and forecast KPIs. Use three pre-defined goal metrics to base goals on cases resolved, the number of opportunity products and revenue.

Salesforce enables users to define, track, customize and measure goals with target quotas linked to individual user records. Real-time leaderboards help managers set goals and track sales reps’ performances with forecasts for sales revenue and drill-downs on territories and projections.

Sugar Sell partners with W-Systems for defining, capturing, and visualizing KPIs and goal sets. Its forecasts module uses revenue line items to build forecasting worksheets. Managers can use drill-down capabilities to track and guide sales reps and reps can view real-time performance data.

Winner: Salesforce Sales Cloud secures the gold with its real-time leaderboards.

Team Collaboration

Free, native integration with Dynamics’ Enterprise suite provides access to the Yammer newsfeed. Users can create posts, respond to messages, share updates, tag users in posts and share attachments. Communicate with team members privately using Microsoft Teams and create multiple user groups to collaborate on business records.

Stay in the loop with Saleforce’s enterprise social network, Chatter, where users can post content, comment on posts, mention users or groups and share attachments. Chatter messages provide private chat capabilities. Users with specified permission can add personal or private tags to records to streamline data organization. Create user groups to limit record visibility.

Sugar Sell’s activity feed allows users to view record activity, create and preview posts, and comment on and track posts. Send private messages using a third-party provider, Leitrim. Find, group and classify data with user-created tags from keywords or phrases. Use its teams’ functionality to create user groups with team-specific records and tags.

Winner: Salesforce’s in-built social feed and user-based tags take the top spot.</

Workflows and Process Automation

Speed up sales processes using Dynamics approval workflows to send notifications to managers for approvals. Create workflow templates to reuse in other workflows and design sales process flows, task flows and edit sales stages using a drag-and-drop designer. Set condition checks and validation rules to minimize inaccurate data in your CRM.

Salesforce’s Lightning Process Builders helps users automate and visualize business processes. Sales reps can create multiple processes to manage and modify sales processes and opportunity stages. Set up validation rules to show an error message when invalid data is uploaded.

Use Sugar’s BPM suite to automate processes to manage approvals, sales processes, call triaging and access pre-built process templates. The drag-and-drop interface helps create process definitions to determine steps in the automated workflows.

Winner: Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and Salesforce Sales Cloud tie with their automated workflows and validation rules.

Compare Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and SugarCRM Against Your Needs

Next Steps

Choosing between top CRM solutions can feel as stressful as picking a restaurant that makes everyone happy on a family vacation. But it’s not an impossible task. A happy marriage between your needs and what the vendor offers is a reality with our handy (and free!) comparison report. Get a personalized analysis of Salesforce vs. Microsoft Dynamics vs. Sugar Sell and other top products.

Which products from our Salesforce vs. Microsoft Dynamics vs. SugarCRM analysis are most compelling to you? What features make the most impact on your business? Let us know in the comments!

Top Competitors