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SugarCRM Platform vs Zendesk comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 29, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

SugarCRM Platform
Ranking in CRM Customer Engagement Centers
11th
Ranking in CRM
29th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Marketing Automation (16th), Sales Force Automation (7th)
Zendesk
Ranking in CRM Customer Engagement Centers
2nd
Ranking in CRM
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (3rd), IT Service Management (ITSM) (5th), Reporting (7th), Knowledge Management Software (3rd), AI Customer Support (8th), AI IT Support (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the CRM Customer Engagement Centers category, the mindshare of SugarCRM Platform is 4.6%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zendesk is 8.8%, up from 6.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CRM Customer Engagement Centers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Zendesk8.8%
SugarCRM Platform4.6%
Other86.6%
CRM Customer Engagement Centers
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1345677 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager / IT Planning & Architecture Services at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Easily customizable, automation enhances the marketing campaigns but support is the main hiccup for us
It has been effective in managing customer relationships. It has sales email campaigns, plus integration with Active Directory. And there are centralized reports for the CEO and the general managers. We work with automation for these marketing and email campaigns. It sends out emails to prospective customers related to sales offers automatically. And it copies the sales team so that they can follow up. They are tracking the sales leads. So, the automation within SugarCRM enhances the marketing campaigns. For now, my work is done because I am the IT strategy and planning manager. I just try to deliver the solution according to the requirements of the business. From my side, it's implemented already, the requirement related to the sales funnel. But if they have any other requirement from the business side, they will submit it to me, and then I will look for a suitable solution.
AmandaSanchez - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant and Startup Founder at AimHi Enterprises
Macros and automation have streamlined workflows and reduced manual effort across support teams
The ability to communicate on the Zendesk ticket through the actual user software, so TOPs, would have been helpful. Somehow seeing a user's ticket history within our app would have been beneficial. That is the only thing that I do not think existed at the time that might have been helpful. Some people struggled with Zendesk, but it was always easy enough to show them how to use it and what they were missing. The only times we really had people report concerns about it was when they did not understand that it could do that or how to use it in that way.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Affordable and commercial open source solution is good for organizations with budget constraints."
"Good, basic out-of-the-box solution, however, in my estimation not a long term play as the design flow and user interface make it a true chore to enter data."
"The most valuable features of Sugar Enterprise are the exports of graphics, statuses, complaints, and tasks."
"The performance and stability are fine."
"Saying that, it has a small server footprint and is easy to set up."
"This solution's stability is very good, it runs almost without effort, and we don't have any support issues with it."
"By default, it comes with a really good model where you can start working with it without having a lot of developers in your team."
"It works well with Jira. You can customize it to fit your needs."
"This feature allowed our team organize and assign certain members to a particular group."
"The stability and performance have been perfect."
"It's a very stable tool, very powerful."
"Zendesk is a great product for managing and maintaining requests from users."
"It's an amazing product, it really helps out in organizing all our tasks."
"Even though I haven't tried other solutions, I think this product is very useful and easy to use."
"The most valuable features of Zendesk Support are collaboration, reports, and a self-service portal. The customer and team can see all the information needed from the portal."
"Zendesk saves us over $50,000 per year and can be maintained in-house by our staff."
 

Cons

"At the moment, there is a complicated flow in regards to the user's permissions and what they can see."
"The interface could be more user-friendly."
"Putting so many things into SugarCRM became a much-hated task, mainly because of the horrible UI."
"You cannot include all your entities under one instance at the moment."
"It lacks customization, and this is the main reason that we are switching to a different solution."
"Functionality and features are well suited for small business companies only."
"Sugar Enterprise could improve by removing bugs and glitches. For example, a comment was made but in the comment section, it was never displayed. However, the problems we faced might not be the fault of the solution."
"The UX was such that it limited the use of it."
"We work in print so being able to preview files attached and having larger files (larger than 7MB would be great) would be a welcomed improvement."
"Reporting by Tags – this is not as effective as allowing reps to disposition tickets themselves."
"Zendesk Guide could be improved by allowing us to put our assets in one location. What happens now for each article, for example, is we have to upload the images for that article to that location, so the image reuse is still not something that they have perfected. If they could allow us to update all the images in one location, and then pull the image from there, it would be easier when working on Multibrand projects. There are no Multibrand updates available—we have to update each brand manually. For my company, I have come up with an API tool which allows me to push the content to multiple brands together, but if you don't have something like that, you have to manually do it."
"The data you get when logged in to Zendesk Support differs from the data you get when you programmatically query Zendesk Support through its API because of a sync time delay."
"Sometimes if there was a way to just flag the actual issue out of those email chains - that would be really helpful."
"Support is not great. Their support is that specific support you get from a big American tech company."
"As Zendesk is an international business and has customers world-wide, it would be nice if it would provide 24/7 support."
"An area of opportunity for Zendesk is probably just when there's a long email chain and everything gets forwarded to support, I know it can be time consuming for them to extract the important information from the email chain."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"We pay for the solution on a yearly basis and my understanding is that the cost is about $30,000. That's the cost for 24 to 25 agents."
"From what I hear, Zendesk's pricing is a little expensive."
"There are different plans that are offered. We are using the entry-level plan. The overall price of the solution should be reduced. The price is too high."
"You have to pay extra for better support. So it's not only the license that you pay for, but you have to pay extra for the support as well."
"The price is very competitive."
"Zendesk's licensing is not cheap. For Enterprise, we are paying $200 per agent. It's a per-month cost, so it's pretty steep. There are some services you need to pay extra for. For example, with Zendesk Guide, we had to buy the most expensive offering in order to get Multibrand and everything. We also had to pay a lot of money for themes."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
15%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Engineering Company
8%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sugar Enterprise?
All are almost the same pricing. Maybe the cheapest is Salesforce, I believe.
What needs improvement with Sugar Enterprise?
The only challenge was that we implemented it in our on-premise data center instead of using it in the cloud. That was a little bit of a challenge. But it was overcome with the help of SugarCRM com...
What advice do you have for others considering Sugar Enterprise?
To start with, SugarCRM is a very good platform. It's easy to implement and easily customizable. Might be later when you want to scale, then I would recommend Salesforce. Overall, I would rate it a...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zendesk Support?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Zendesk shows that pricing is really affordable compared to other customer management software. The setup is pretty simple as well, but if ...
What needs improvement with Zendesk Support?
Regarding my main use case for Zendesk, it is really easy to use, but one of the cons I have with it is that it takes some time to load information. Most of the time, if a particular candidate has ...
What is your primary use case for Zendesk Support?
On a day-to-day basis, I use Zendesk to track, manage, and work on my cases. I also use it to upload information securely, and this is not only limited to documents but also to images and reports. ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Redglaze Group, TengoInternet, Hilco, Bancvue, Vet Adivsor
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about SugarCRM Platform vs. Zendesk and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
911,839 professionals have used our research since 2012.