I love Highrise . For a small fast growing start-up, the workflow is wonderful.

The problem with most CRM systems, including Sugar and Salesforce.com is that they are not designed to help you get work done. They are simply designed help gather and organize data for upper management.

Here is a workflow that I do ever day, and something that is really painful in Sugar.

• Someone emails our support address. They clearly want to be a customer.
• I have to create an opportunity in Sugar - but I can't because opportunities require accounts
• So, I create an account
• Then I create the opportunity
• Then I email the client using my regular email client
• Then I copy the email into Sugar. I could have used Sugar's email client, but it is DOG SLOW.
• Then I create a follow-on task

This takes 20 minutes of data entry. In Highrise, it would be 30 seconds to cc the special email address.

It gets worse when I want to quickly review the status of each of our top accounts. When you open an account in Sugar, you then have to click on every action item and click on every note just to see the current status. In Highrise, you see that all right away.

Why aren't we using Highrise now? We'd like to extend it in some ways, customize it in others and integrate it with many aspects of our operations. For our purposes, an open source solution would work better.

Sugar is open source, but it's work flow sucks. I would hate to have to build a clone of Highrise from scratch...

It would certainly be worth it to us to pay for a license to source code. We'd pay more than it costs to on the site.