Given a company that might buy licenses for 50 salesforce users, I make this case: That company can expect to pay $75,000 per year simply for licenses, that's before bringing in a salesforce developer for $75-250 per hour for setup and support.
So instead, give me the $75,000 to build a django web app that does everything you wanted salesforce for and then some + get better support than you would from Salesforce.
The trouble with solutions like Sugar and VTiger is they try to do what Salesforce does but they do it worse, and in the end just make a bad product. All of the complaints about Salesforce rollouts people talk about, 10x them for the open CRM alternatives.
If what you want is a fully integrated CRM platform (for whatever reason) Salesforce.com is the best choice. Otherwise build custom. Most companies are using 10% of the features of Salesforce, hence why I argue they could get away with something a lot simpler.
Last I checked CoreBOS (forked from vTiger, who forked from SugarCRM a few years earlier) seemed very promising, having cleaned up a lot of old php mess.
Also Odoo, formerly openERP, is something I would like to take a closer look at. Edit: especially now that they have updated their license terms.
Some of my colleagued evaluated Odoo recently and found it to be a slow, buggy mess. It has everything but even the hosted version did not work well at all when they used it with a few people. Anyone have a better experience?
My reason so far has been the AGPL license that I have shunned so far but I was really hoping for the next release that I understood should be under a liberal license.
