Occasionally developers or companies want to branch out and create their own vertical or system based off of CRM technology. Many of these companies may not have the funds or manpower to create their own system but they can easily extend an existing one. With SugarCRM being open source this means that the SugarCRM code can be used by another entity to create a new product.

There are two ways to go about doing this. The first is called a fork which means that you are taking SugarCRM code at that point in time and and your team will do all future development on their own. Therefore all of the cost and time for development of the platform now becomes your responsibility. The second way is an addon or bundled approach. This means that you aren't going to work on the SugarCRM source code but only extend on top of what SugarCRM is providing. Lets take a look at the pros and cons of both.

Fork

Pros:

1. You can change any code that you want and future versions of SugarCRM will not effect you.
2. SugarCRM changes will not break your work if/when they change architecture or functionality.
3. Save money over creating a system from scratch.

Cons:

1. You will not get any bug fixes that SugarCRM provides
2. You are still required to adhere to the licensing agreement which can be limiting in certain scenarios.
3. You will not receive any core platform enhancements the SugarCRM creates.

Addons and Bundling

Pros:

1. You get all enhancements to the platform that SugarCRM provides.
2. You can focus on your addons and not the core code development.
3. Save money over creating a system from scratch.

Cons:

1. All Sugar updates may require updates to your addon code.
2. Sugar patches may break something.
3. No control over the overall platform direction.

As you can see there can be just as many pros and cons to going either direction. Even though three were provided on each side ( pro and con ) we must not forget the number of developers that are employed by SugarCRM and working on the platform every day. This coupled with the marketing and financial backing of SugarCRM must be weighed before deciding to choose a route for your CRM addon or fork.