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SugarCRM Workflow Manager Is Being Removed And That Is OK

Posted by on February 26, 2016

tl;dr - Can't upgrade? Need workflows? Convert to Process Manager

If you are like thousands of the other SugarCRM Professional users out there you will soon be without Workflow Manager. By the end of 2016 the Workflow Management tool will be removed from the Professional edition. In fact, you may have already seen a message within Workflow Manager about this news already.

OK, But We Use This!

Good! Workflows are unfortunately often underused. That is sad because when used it can drastically alter and improve businesses. It can:

  • Reduce the amount of paperwork
  • Reduce lead-to-sale times
  • Automatically identify at-risk opportunities or customers
  • Escalate cases based on certain criteria
  • Auto-convert leads
  • Run drip campaigns throughout the customer's lifecycle


And so on. What is great about automating your company's business processes is that it allows employees to focus on providing a better experience throughout the life of both sales and customer service. When executed with your best practices the result is happier customers and more sales.

Exactly! What Are My Options?

At first glance it seems like the only options are to either:

  • Upgrade to Enterprise
  • Shop around for a new CRM


Both of these options come with their own difficult challenges, including cost. Not all businesses are ready, or large enough, to make the jump to Enterprise and switching CRMs is both very time intensive and carries a high level of risk.

Right and I Like Sugar. So What Should I Do?

Thankfully there is a popular 3rd party option called Process Manager which is an add-on for SugarCRM. Built by SierraCRM, this workflow solution has been around for 10 years and constantly being improved. We have extensively tested this add-on and it does everything that Workflow Manager does, plus a whole lot more. Bonus: at a fraction of what the other above two options would cost.

In addition to what Workflow Manager does, Process Manager also can:

  • Send Emails to any email address stored in Sugar or fixed email addresses
  • Update Related Records from Related Records
  • Query any data anytime and do something with that data such as create reminders, send emails, schedule call and tasks
  • Extensive filtering capability using AND / OR and grouping of Filters
  • Cancel a running Process
  • And much, much more


On top of this, there is a conversion tool to take your existing workflows and copy them over to Process Manager. When compared to the cost of Enterprise it just makes sense to use Process Manager. Take a look yourself and let us know if you have any questions.

Editor's Note:

It came to our attention that the previous revision of this post was being used by CRM vendors as fuel against SugarCRM. Typical sales teams doing typical dirty sales team practices. That's not what we are about. We've been around SugarCRM for over a decade now and couldn't be happier with how the product has constantly improved and evolved. It runs tens of thousands of businesses for a reason and because of the company and product we built a whole curated marketplace around SugarCRM just for guaranteed-to-work add-ons.