Sprout Studio

“Do NOT get this if you are B to B!

Pros

I liked (the idea) that sprout is for photographers specifically, with galleries and email newsletter capacity, as well as creating a brand aesthetic...

Cons

But I found that unless you are a wedding or portrait photographer with your clients coming in cold through website queries this CRM is NOT for you. I am B to B, working with companies, and the work arounds were labor intensive to the point of pointless. Additionally the program is really unintuitive and extremely steep learning curve. You can do almost anything on the platform, and the team is very helpful, but none of it is easy to figure out or saves you any labor/time which is the point of a CRM. I also am disappointed that it took months to build out the foundational content and try to understand how to use it, only to finally get to the stage where its clear it doesn't work for my needs. I would strongly advise against using this program and finding one which is easier and more intuitive (again unless you fit perfectly into their workflow.)

“painfully slow

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.

“All in one client portal

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.