Sprout Studio

Pros

There are a few decent features in it especially the booking proposals which do look really polished and attractive but that's about it.

Cons

Don't even know where to start. Firstly almost everything takes an absurd amount of time to load. I recently waited a full two minutes just for an email drip campaign to open. Active shoot dates can take around 30 seconds to appear and searching for a specific client takes about 20 seconds. It's genuinely shocking that a web based platform in 2024 performs this poorly. We have 1 gig fiber internet and this still happens on every computer in every location for all of our staff. Secondly there are constant bugs. The number one thing a CRM should provide is confidence that the system is stable and this one absolutely does not. A shoot date disappearing hasn't happened to us yet but with how often other issues come up we wouldn't be surprised. The latest disaster was that they sent a marketing email to every email address that has ever contacted us (past wedding clients, couples whose weddings are still coming up, even people who never booked with us). It caused confusion and upset a lot of people. Thirdly none of the workflow items are dynamic or updated across the system in real time. For example if you have 100 upcoming shoots and a questionnaire scheduled to go out six weeks before each wedding then you add a new question to that questionnaire template the update will not apply to those existing weddings. It only affects brand new bookings made after the change. So if you need to make an important change to questionnaires or email templates set up basically ends up being a year behind. Lastly support is another major problem. Chat responses often take hours and when they finally reply the answers usually are not helpful. They come across like they really do not care about their clients. Feature requests don't seem to go anywhere and instead they keep focusing on unnecessary additions. Unlike other CRMs there is no voting system for feature requests so they just build whatever they want instead of what paying customers are actually asking for. After the major email mistake mentioned above I even suggested a simple way they could provide the affected email addresses using ChatGPT and they told me they were not allowed to use ChatGPT to assist. I could keep going. Save yourself the trouble and stay far away from this company. It may seem appealing when you are comparing options at first but I strongly believe you will regret choosing it later and switching CRMs after you are fully set up is a massive headache.

Pros

Having gallery delivery built in is my favorite part. My clients only need to use one portal for everything from signing the contract to making payments and receiving their gallery which keeps the whole process much more convenient.

Cons

Something I really wish it had is an automatic payment option. I'm not a fan of clients having to go in and manually submit each payment one by one.

Pros

There's definitely a lot of potential here and the core idea behind the platform is solid. The client management tools, automation and drip campaign features are all appealing and are what made the software promising in the first place.

Cons

Still the platform has been extremely unreliable and the integrations feel outdated. Bugs are frequent and customer support is frustratingly slow. When they finally reply the answers are often generic or they restrict you to 15 minute chats that get used up just troubleshooting the connection only for you to have to start over again afterward. One major issue was that SPF records were never created until it was already too late which meant my emails weren't reaching clients for the first two months and cost me thousands of dollars. For six weeks I kept being told it was a hosting or domain issue and then that it was somehow Google's problem and I should contact them which was basically impossible. In the end I hired my own tech team and they traced the issue back to them never having set up the SPF records at all. After I reported it the response was essentially just a thank you for finding the problem. The Facebook community was also confused and asking for answers but the issue was never publicly addressed. Around that same time comments were locked down. At the same timeI had spent about six weeks building my storefront and right after I finished I noticed the thumbnails were completely broken. When I contacted them they said it was an unfixable bug and told me to upload every image again. Just like with the SPF issue they already knew about it but users were left to discover it themselves. I wasn't willing to pay engineers again so now with 7 storefronts and around 60 to 100 items in each one I'm already a week into redoing everything and I'm still not even halfway done. Over the past three months I've been opening 1 to 3 support tickets every week. At this point I'm just looking forward to getting enough time back to finally move on from it.