SugarCRM Inc., announced last week (August 27, 2008) the release of SugarCRM 5.1, a new major version of the well-known commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, which has an improved reporting and analytics engine, as well as additional wireless capabilities (like the support of SugarCRM for the popular BlackBerry® and iPhone™ smartphones).

According to their press release, this new version comes after a thorough beta testing process, during which SugarCRM 5.1 was installed more than 10,000 times by over 25,000 users. Quite impressive development in the four years that have passed since Sugar Community Edition received founding, period during which this edition and additional components were downloaded over 5 million times and reached over 80,000 registered community members (including 14,000 developers that created 500 extensions and the translation of SugarCRM in over 75 languages - more infor at www.sugarforge.org). The entire SugarCRM's user base consists of over 400,000 users on 50,000 installations. 

Constant Contact and iContact are web-based email marketing solutions, that allow you to create and track HTML emails sent to a list of (manged) contacts. While both offer a core of the same CRM features, they also have different approaches when it comes to specific offerings. For instance, pricing is different, monthly email volume is different, design is different and so on.

vtiger CRM is an Open Source CRM software for small and medium businesses. vtiger CRM uses open source technologies such as Apache, MySQL, PHP (and other open source projects) to provide a powerful multi-platform CRM solution (works on Linux and Windows).

vtiger CRM provides the CRM features that other commercial programs sell for thousands of dollars, such as: sales force automation, customer support & service, marketing automation (with support for e-mail campaigns), inventory management (with product customization module), security management, and of course contact management and task scheduling.