Twenty, a modern CRM alternative to Salesforce

My glib take to every CRM like this: If you don&#x27;t ship with a programming layer you&#x27;re DOA. Salesforce thrives off of Apex and friends. You _need_ to let people program your CRMs if you want to go after SFDC. Or, more specifically, you need to _host_ people&#x27;s programs so they don&#x27;t have operational questions.<p>Salesforce gets the ubiquity the same way that Wordpress does: randos can copy some code fragments off of a website and stick it into a file&#x2F;textbox, and get new functionality.<p>So... Twenty, hire one person whose job it is to layer AWS Lambda over your system :)

A few months ago I was looking for some software that was CRM-like. We are a bit non-traditional, and don&#x27;t fit neatly into the typical CRM use cases.<p>Twenty was <i>almost</i> what we needed. It was extremely easy to set up, the customization is very promising, and the REST API worked ok.<p>The main issue is that it was pretty alpha-version, and I ran into quite a few small issues that just just made it not quite work for us. Either way, I&#x27;m keeping an eye on it, and will re-evaluate again at some point. Hopefully it keeps its customizability.<p>Never found anything more suitable, though.

You buy Salesforce for the ecosystem not the CRM technology. I&#x27;d want to see a much stronger emphasis on integrations to feel better about this.

Nice! It&#x27;s great to have more open source platforms in the CRM space.<p>This feels a lot like Directus [0] except that the latter is a more general data platform you build upon. They have a 100 Apps in 100 hours playlist where they build sample apps on top on Directus, even a simple CRM [1].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;directus.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;directus.io&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;tTrBn9Wvko0?si=IoqQ7o7Y8czfxB31" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;tTrBn9Wvko0?si=IoqQ7o7Y8czfxB31</a>

I wonder whether it&#x27;s possible to write custom code on the platform (to automate processes)? In Salesforce, it&#x27;s called Apex, a Java like language which allows to write trigger, and is the server-side language for frontend interfaces (written in LWC, Visualforce, etc.). Speaking of, is it possible to extend also the Twenty interface with custom written code?<p>Salesforce has barely evolved in the last 15 years. Apex (as mentioned previously) has not changed the slightest. In 2010, there was Visualforce, it&#x27;s been pretty good despite a bit slow. LWC just got slower in general while trying to look fancy with some CSS. And the rest has been the lack of competition making the success of Salesforce, or, in the defense of Salesforce, Salesforce has been way ahead of the competition 15 years ago. And maybe the competition is finally catching up?..

I am looking for a personal contact manager that has integration with a personal calendar. I have talked about this with my wife who has moderate ADHD: it is harder for her to manage relationships, because she generally lacks a perception of time. Getting gentle reminders to follow up with a friend or acquaintance would be very helpful. But none of these are business relationships, so maybe looking for CRM software is barking up the wrong tree, even if open source and extensible. Is there anyone in a similar boat that has found a good solution?

If only Salesforce was better software, billions of capital funding “a better Salesforce” could be deployed in more productive ways.

How does this compare to all of the other &quot;#1 open source CRMs&quot;

How difficult is it to roll your own CRM these days? On the surface it doesn&#x27;t seem that difficult.

Excellent, I wish we saw this a few months ago, we just bought Freshsales.<p>In terms of Wishlist we’d love to see: quotes&#x2F;invoicing (support for product SKUs etc), document generation on deals (NDAs, proposals etc)<p>I think that’s the extent of the gap between Freshsales and this that we actually use.<p>In terms of integrations it’s great that Twenty supports webhooks. Any idea a good starting point for integrating something like Xero? Is there a repo of integrations other people have mangled with that we can tweak or reference?<p>Disclaimer didn’t actually take it for a spin yet.<p>Just again for emphasis.. so happy to see a really good open source option for CRM that isn’t designed like it’s from 2000s. Flamin’ hubspot and salesforce wanted circa 2% of our ARR per year and fresh sales was a compromise.

Hmm it&#x27;s kinda hard competing with the big dinosaurs because enterprises are so incredibly locked into them.<p>And salesforce at least innovates with modern interfaces. It&#x27;s not legacy trash like Siebel.<p>Salesforce is pretty good all things considered. When we had siebel, we&#x27;d lock all the new callcenter agents into a sweaty training room for a week, where a boring old guy would endlessly drone on which button to push in which scenario. Unfortunately this was actually needed. It was that bad a product, and it was completely unusable due to all the horizontal scrolling everywhere. It&#x27;s just as bad as SAP (these guys are also soooo bad at UX).<p>Salesforce by comparison works a lot like facebook. People grok that naturally.

Note that if you self-host this, that you are bound by those code publication requirements of the AGPL 3.0 license that apply to your specific circumstance.<p>Does the $9&#x2F;user&#x2F;month plan exempt paying self-hosted users from those requirements?

I love the uptake of neo-brutalism in web design. This site is a great example.

Would love a product like this that offered pricing on a concurrent user basis or similar.<p>We have 15 people on our team but 90% of people might only log in once a month to have a look at the pipeline - don’t want to either have a shared account or to pay $150&#x2F;month so we stick to a spreadsheet.<p>Lots of people on this thread saying you need a full programming language integrated - I’m not so sure HN is fully representative of real end users.

Very cool and promising.<p>Currently the biggest blocker, even for simple use cases that don&#x27;t have to add automation (there is no clear way to add customized automation), is the lack of permissions. Everyone has the same access to all the data!<p>User permissions: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;twentyhq&#x2F;twenty&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;209">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;twentyhq&#x2F;twenty&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;209</a>

no comment on this product specifically, but large takeaway from hitting a point where my side thing had actual users + communication -- CRM is critical<p>if you asked me 24 months ago I&#x27;d tell you CRM was a BS category, now I think of it as a backend component on par with the DB

Your core rest api page link is broken: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twenty.com&#x2F;developers&#x2F;section&#x2F;rest-apis&#x2F;rest-api&#x2F;core">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twenty.com&#x2F;developers&#x2F;section&#x2F;rest-apis&#x2F;rest-api&#x2F;cor...</a>

Previous discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37805520">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37805520</a>

Is it planned to add support to CalDav and other Emailproviders? We are not using services from the Google universe but are thinking to switch to twenty

I&#x27;m shocked no one has mentioned Close.com<p>I&#x27;ve been using it for close to ten years and can&#x27;t imagine using another CRM.<p>I believe they were an early YC company as well.

I love the logged out experience in your app; super creative to display your app, just slightly dimmed. Super smooth and neat flow.

&quot;Frequent updates&quot; is something that I would like to avoid in a CRM. Unless you have a team dedicated to update, test, migrate and fix.

Does the email integration only support gmail?

Among the modern CRM players like Attio, Folk, Clay, etc. how does this compare?<p>Anybody tried all of them? It’s impossible to get impartial info on software these days due to all the scummy affiliate marketing&#x2F;paid-influencer&#x2F;“Top 10 Best” crap that has taken over Saas.

Does it have HubSpot (etc.) import functionality?<p>Otherwise the switchting-costs are probably too high for most companies.

I think you want Salesforce because of how reliable and secure it is, also because of the cute mascots.

I wonder if they could get the setup and updates to be as easy as once.com?

Is there some other “arbitrary entities with arbitrary fields” builder webapp like this that isn’t Drupal?<p>I have a number of simple database apps&#x2F;sites I want to build that don’t warrant dedicated CRUD apps.

title should really be changed to &quot;Twenty: an open-source CRM alternative&quot;

To beat salesforce you need to win over the admin&#x2F;rev-ops or trailblazer as SFDC celebrates them. They throw monthly events in their skyscraper in every major city globally and an annual retreat&#x2F;festival called Dreamforce to keep them loyal. It&#x27;s not a better tech problem, it&#x27;s a network effect. Good luck ripping them from the church of benioff.

I see alternative to Salesforce I up vote

80&#x2F;20 rule.<p>What most startups &#x2F; new products fail to realize is that you can get 80% of your needed CRM capabilities just from a shared Google Sheet.<p>But that last 20% is brutally difficult and long.<p>It might be:<p>- sales rep compensation<p>- customer billing<p>- contracts management<p>- eSign<p>- usage reporting<p>And much much more.<p>Salesforce has most of this. And for what they don’t have, they created their platform so 3rd party’s can add it.<p>You’re not competing in having a “CRM alternative”.<p>You’re competing on having that long tail of 20% other functionality that’s core and critical.

I&#x27;m no fan of Salesforce.<p>Any HN submission with the word &quot;modern&quot; in the title should be shit-canned.