You'll see a lot of comments comparing these products. I just went through such a comparison on a very high level and for me a telling comment came from someone I know who had recently (about 3 years ago) gone through this review, and about a year ago done it again. His focus was as a sales rep, but he's a very practical person, and the comment was :
"I was asked to participate in the review process and we considered the following products; Maximizer, Maximizer Enterprise, Act, Goldmine and SalesLogix. Act and Goldmine are very “lightweight” and not great from a salesman point of view however they both work nicely with MS Office and other Microsoft products. The real competition was between SalesLogix and Max Enterprise. From a salesman’s point of view Maximizer is a much more powerful tool however SalesLogix works very well with Microsoft products. In the end it came down to the following. Maximizer is a great tool for sales people – it functions like sales people work – if you want to make a number of phone calls, send emails or track your contact with clients and potential clients it is great. If you want to mine data from Maximizer to use in reports it can be difficult. Maximizer also doesn’t play nice with Microsoft – so that can pose challenges too. SalesLogix works great with Microsoft, has amazing reporting functionality and is absolutely **** to use as a sales person. It is as though SalesLogix was designed by accountants to keep track of sales people whereas Maximizer was designed by sales people to keep track of customers.".
The comment about Max not playing nice with MSoft referred to version 7, and I would have had to agree. My understanding is that ti's much better in version 9, but I can't say 100% as we use version 7.
To address your comment about wanting to get away from Outlook completely, be careful. Maximizer has a built in mail client that works but has very limited formatting capabilities. Can't speak to Act or Goldmine, but be very careful here. Syncing to Outlook is very common in the CRM world, so don't count it out - if working with the two product together with is intuitive and gives you what you want for functionality, who cares, right?
For your use you'll have to decide - download the trial versions and check them out.
Good luck - and please keep us posted.
- R.