SugarCRM is now SugarAI, and the price list moved with it

If you searched for SugarCRM, you have found the right product under a new name. On April 13, 2026 the company relaunched as SugarAI, and old sugarcrm.com links now redirect to sugarai.com. The CRM itself is still Sugar Sell, sold next to Sugar Serve (service desk), Sugar Market (marketing automation) and Sugar Predict (ERP-driven account signals). The company is based in Denver, backed by the private equity firm Accel-KKR, and claims more than 4,000 customers in over 120 countries.

The name is the smallest change. In mid-October the Sell plans were renamed and repriced, AI was folded into the middle tier under a usage cap, and on November 5 Sugar launched a "next best sales action" layer fed by ERP data. Most reviews you will find still quote the old plans. Everything below was checked on sugarai.com/pricing and in Sugar's support documentation on November 6, 2026.

One piece of history explains a lot of old forum threads. Sugar used to ship an open-source Community Edition; it stopped getting releases in 2014 and was formally ended in 2018, and SuiteCRM is the fork that lives on. There is no free plan and no self-serve trial on the pricing page - the two buttons are "Book demo" and "Request quote".

Pricing: three published seat prices, everything else by quote

All prices are USD per user per month, billed annually. No monthly-billing price is published.

According to PricingSaaS, a third-party tracker of vendor pricing pages, the same three plans cost $59, $85 and $135 until the week of October 12, 2026. Standard went up 15% and Advanced by $13 a seat. The tracker also reports that a 15-user minimum disappeared in that change. The page now lists no minimum, but licence count and contract length are still settled in a quote, so expect that conversation to happen with a sales rep rather than on the page. Articles still quoting "from $59" with a 10- or 15-seat floor are out of date.

Put numbers on it. A 10-person sales team on Advanced+, the cheapest plan with any AI, pays $98 × 10 × 12 = $11,760 a year. Add Connect+ for call transcripts and it is $14,160. The same team on Standard+ pays $8,160 and gets no AI at all. Serve, Market, Enterprise, both Precision+ tiers, extra storage and extra sandboxes have no published price.

The AI is included, but metered and pooled

Sugar's November 5 announcement says its AI is "built into predictable pricing". The Cloud policy guide, updated October 28, 2026, supplies the condition. Advanced+ and the tiers above it get Sugar Cube, Smart Prompts, AI Analytics and the AI Summary dashlet under fair use: 1,400 questions per licensed user per month, pooled across the whole account. Unused questions do not roll over. Go past the pool and Sugar "may throttle requests, temporarily limit access to certain functionality" or require you to buy more capacity.

Pooling is kinder than it sounds. Ten seats share 14,000 questions a month, so a few heavy users are carried by the light ones. It bites when a whole team leans on Sugar Cube during a quarter-end push, because the price of extra capacity is not published. Customers on legacy licences (Sugar 14.0 or later) need a separate Sugar Intelligence licence for the AI features, also unpriced.

On data, Sugar is clearer than many CRMs. Its AI admin guide says customer data is anonymised before it is shared, is "never used for training", and that the anonymised copy is kept for one month for auditing and then permanently deleted.

Where Sugar is different: selling from ERP data

Strip away the rename and this is what Sugar is built for: distributors and manufacturers whose customer history lives in an ERP. Sugar owns sales-i, an ERP sales-analytics product, and since May 2025 its tabs (Dashboard, Sales Comparison, Spend Mix Analysis, Snapshot, Target, Campaigns) sit inside the Sell account record. A rep opening an account sees what that customer buys, what it stopped buying and the gross-profit picture without leaving the CRM.

Sugar Predict, sold only in the Precision+ tiers, turns that purchase history into alerts: churn risk, product gaps, cross-sell and reorder prompts. The November 5 launch builds on it with SugarAdvisors and Smart Prompts that warn the seller about risks and openings, Sugar Cube for in-depth recommendations, AI Analytics for plain-language questions answered as charts or tables, and Mobile Smart Notes for capturing photos and notes on a site visit. Sugar claims "180+ ERP integrations", yet the announcement names none. Ask for your ERP by name in the demo.

For a company selling software subscriptions with no reorder cycle, most of this does nothing. That decides the verdict.

Hosting, storage and getting your data out

Sugar is one of the few CRMs reviewed here that still sells on-premises installs alongside SugarCloud. The catch is the lifecycle. Each version gets 18 months of full support and 6 months of security fixes, 24 months in all. Support for Sugar 25.1 ends April 30, 2027, and anything older is already unsupported, so self-hosting means a planned upgrade project at least every two years.

Cloud storage is capped per plan, separately for files and for the database: Standard+ gets 10 GB plus 0.25 GB per user, Advanced+ 15 GB plus 0.25 GB per user, Premier+ 30 GB plus 0.5 GB per user. A 20-seat Standard+ team therefore has 15 GB, and attachments will use it up long before records do. Overage is invoiced quarterly in arrears at a price the documentation does not give. Instances are backed up daily and each backup is kept for 30 days, but uploaded files are not included in backups by default.

Leaving is where it hurts. Export in Sugar 26.2 produces one CSV per module with every field, but it "will not include any information from records which are associated via relationships". List-view Select All stops at the first 1,000 records, so anything larger goes out in batches. Moving 20,000 contacts with their linked accounts and opportunities to another CRM therefore means the API, or the full tar.gz backup that SugarCloud Insights lets you download plus someone who can rebuild the links from database tables. Admins can also remove export rights from regular users through roles.

Support depends on the plan you bought

Sugar's support page, updated November 5, 2026, defines four tiers. Basic runs 8x5 with no phone and no chat, and answers a P1 (system down) case within 4 business hours. Standard adds phone support and a 2-business-hour P1. Enhanced adds live chat and cuts P1 to 1 business hour. Premium covers P1 cases 24x7 within an hour.

The page maps those tiers only to the old package names: Basic with Sell Standard and Essentials, Standard with Sell Advanced, Enhanced with Sell Premier. It does not say where the new "+" plans land. If they follow their predecessors, a Standard+ customer whose CRM goes down at 9am waits until early afternoon for a reply, with no number to call. Get the support tier written into the quote.

What users complain about

The same themes come up across review sites. On Capterra, where Sugar averages about 3.8 out of 5 from roughly 410 reviews, one reviewer warns that it takes "a LOT of work to implement and quite a bit of training after the fact". A TrustRadius reviewer of Sugar Sell calls the back end "overly complex", full of redundant tables and columns. GetApp's review summary lists bugs and instability, painful updates and the interface. G2 rates Sell around 3.8 as well, with a busy interface and licensing among the recurring gripes.

That points the same way as the pricing: budget for an implementation partner, not just licences.

Verdict: who should buy SugarCRM, and who should skip it

Buy it if you are a distributor or manufacturer with ten or more reps, an ERP full of order history and a reorder or cross-sell motion. That is exactly what the sales-i panel and Sugar Predict are built around, and no cheap CRM puts margin and purchase gaps on the account record like this. Treat $98 a seat as the real starting price, add the quoted Precision+ uplift for the ERP signals, and budget for implementation.

Skip it if you want a CRM you can sign up for this afternoon. A small team that needs pipelines and email sync will get further, faster, with Pipedrive, or with Zoho CRM if price matters most; both publish monthly prices and let you start a trial without talking to sales. If you want a quote-led mid-market platform but have no ERP angle, compare Creatio, which is more no-code but sits behind a $10,000 floor.

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