7 ms·

Twenty, a modern CRM alternative to Salesforce

378 points by client4 2y ago

wilsonfiifi 2y ago
Nice! It's great to have more open source platforms in the CRM space. 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]. [0] https://directus.io/ https://directus.io/ [1] https://youtu.be/tTrBn9Wvko0?si=IoqQ7o7Y8czfxB31 https://youtu.be/tTrBn9Wvko0?si=IoqQ7o7Y8czfxB31
sseagull 2y ago
A few months ago I was looking for some software that was CRM-like. We are a bit non-traditional, and don't fit neatly into the typical CRM use cases. Twenty was almost what we needed. It was extremely easy to set up, the customization is very promising, and the REST API worked ok. 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'm keeping an eye on it, and will re-evaluate again at some point. Hopefully it keeps its customizability. Never found anything more suitable, though.
- bossyTeacher 2y ago
  > We are a bit non-traditional That's what your standard business says and it is often business with bad practices that say that
  - Propelloni 2y ago
    LOL, that struck a chord. And the way things are is for historical reasons. Man, I wish I had a dime for every time I hear this.
- darraghmckay 2y ago
  My startup [0] works with a lot of companies that are non-traditional, as you put it, and gives you the tools to design a CRM (and other business tools) that actually suit your business, if you want to check it out [0] https://noloco.io https://noloco.io
- Uniquenl 2y ago
  What features were you missing? Currently Im part of a team making a CRM based on more niche kind of customer and were trying to retrieve more information about what other CRMs lack
- tiffanyh 2y ago
  > We are a bit non-traditional I'm curious to understand more. Do you mean you're non-traditional in how you track Pipeline and working a customer through your sales funnel to Close? (which I am struggling to understand what could be non-traditional about that) Or are you referring to something else? Genuinely curious, which is why I ask.
  - sseagull 2y ago
    Because we aren't a business :) We are academic group who is looking to increase collaboration both in industry and academia. While we have "products" (which we don't sell), we also have other initiatives like an education program. We also may want to set up a consortium with industry, which may include them giving us money, but not in a "buy a product or service" sense (but still needs to be thoroughly tracked). So I'd really like a platform that holistically tracks people and our engagement with them. Some of this is done by traditional CRM, but the focus on selling products & services is too narrow. Some desired features: * Tracking our contacts, so we don't forget to follow through on something (CRM generally does this) * Tracking people through time. If/Where they did their PhD, postdoc, are they in industry now. CRM I've looked at tend to be very fixed-point in time. * What their research interests are and have been. Are they in an area we are looking to expand into? What conferences do they typically go to? * How they have engaged with us before. Was it through an educational workshop? Did we mentor them in a mentorship program? Just someone we met sometime and seemed interested? People can be part of multiple groups. * If they are using our projects, how are they using them? We are looking for good stories to give to our own funding agencies (and for general marketing). * If they are interested in giving us money, what is the status of those talks? If there's a better term for software that does this kind of thing, I'm very open to ideas. This isn't a strength in academia, as is pretty obvious, and I'm very new at this :)
    - tiffanyh 2y ago
      Super interesting. Thanks for sharing the detail. The trouble that you’ve probably felt is CRM are sold to sales exec and as such, focus on sales exec needs. You’d be better served not with CRM, but a personal contact management system. Something like https://www.monicahq.com/ https://www.monicahq.com/
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Consider Attio. Unaffiliated but a very happy user, also with a fairly unique business to keep track of.
- iFelix 2y ago
  That's my main frustration every day too. The vision for what we're building is very clear but it takes time to build it right. We'll get there :).
- rushabh 2y ago
  Checkout Frappe CRM (https://github.com/frappe/crm https://github.com/frappe/crm). It is built on a customizable web framework and there is a reasonable community as well.
tiffanyh 2y ago
80/20 rule. What most startups / new products fail to realize is that you can get 80% of your needed CRM capabilities just from a shared Google Sheet. But that last 20% is brutally difficult and long. It might be: - sales rep compensation - customer billing - contracts management - eSign - usage reporting And much much more. Salesforce has most of this. And for what they don’t have, they created their platform so 3rd party’s can add it. You’re not competing in having a “CRM alternative”. You’re competing on having that long tail of 20% other functionality that’s core and critical.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- listenallyall 2y ago
  > You’re competing on... Purchase decisions for products like these are almost always at the C-level. Very rarely do they actually understand the details of each product's feature set, especially the deepest 20%. You're competing on your ability to convince that decision maker to commit to a new product, as opposed to "nobody ever get fired for buying IBM (Salesforce in this case)" syndrome.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    It's the same thing, by proxy. They may not know the details of that 20%, but they can be comfortable knowing it is capable of accomplishing it because of its use at other orgs.
- codegeek 2y ago
  You are also competing against a beast that locks in multi year contracts and is embedded so much within a company's ecosystem that it is almost impossible to replace them. Sorta like JIRA/Confluence.
  - pantulis 2y ago
    Sorta like Oracle, I'd add.
pbreit 2y ago
I wonder if they could get the setup and updates to be as easy as once.com?
altairprime 2y ago
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. Does the $9/user/month plan exempt paying self-hosted users from those requirements?
- g15jv2dp 2y ago
  I don't get what you're saying. Why would a self-hoster care about the code publication requirements of the AGPL? It's an OSS project, the end user doesn't care if the code has to be redistributed, they're not profiting from it remaining closed.
  - tiffanyh 2y ago
    It's not uncommon for people to link their core product into their CRM (for billing and usage). Which could in turn "infect" your core offering to now become AGPL (and now you're having to release your core product IP to the public).
    - g15jv2dp 2y ago
      Two services talking to each other doesn't mean that they have to use the same licence or that AGPL "infects" the other.
      - tiffanyh 2y ago
        It’s a risk most companies don’t want to chance.
        azemetre 2y ago
        I mean GitHub was literally built off of Git (GPL) and they had zero issues being acquired for $7.5billion.
        tiffanyh 2y ago
WinstonSmith84 2y ago
I wonder whether it's possible to write custom code on the platform (to automate processes)? In Salesforce, it'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? Salesforce has barely evolved in the last 15 years. Apex (as mentioned previously) has not changed the slightest. In 2010, there was Visualforce, it'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?..
- bluelightning2k 2y ago
  You could suggest they implement moddable.app so that you can write custom React components
- arach 2y ago
  there are now systems of engagement that help author / manage salesforce - https://www.swantide.com/ https://www.swantide.com/ - https://www.sweep.io/ https://www.sweep.io/ pretty cool but obviously an automation native platform would be cooler and I think Attio is the contender for this - https://attio.com/templates https://attio.com/templates - https://attio.com/blog/introducing-attio-objects https://attio.com/blog/introducing-attio-objects
redwoolf 2y ago
I love the uptake of neo-brutalism in web design. This site is a great example.
samanator 2y ago
Very cool and promising. Currently the biggest blocker, even for simple use cases that don'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! User permissions: https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/discussions/209 https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/discussions/209
- trollied 2y ago
  Any user being able to alter the data model is just a fundamental design flaw. Other than that, I'd expect segment-based permissions (sales team/territory etc) as a minimum.
dataminded 2y ago
You buy Salesforce for the ecosystem not the CRM technology. I'd want to see a much stronger emphasis on integrations to feel better about this.
- leeter 2y ago
  I wish them the best, but I think they would have been best not drawing the comparison to Salesforce. IME people buy Salesforce not for the CRM but for the force.com platform. The ability to seamlessly build business logic over the entire flow of a business is Salesforce's bread and butter. CRM is a small part that definitely gets heavy use, but it's only a small part of the larger picture. If they had a way to quickly spin of LOB apps like Salesforce does, and had implemented a CRM on top of that... I'd say they would be much more apt drawing the comparison. Particularly if that doesn't require code to do. I know a LOT of companies that would pay dearly for such a hosted platform, GPL or not.
  - pantulis 2y ago
    > The ability to seamlessly build business logic over the entire flow of a business is Salesforce's bread and butter. While being able to update the platform seamlessly without breaking that logic.
  - arach 2y ago
    It's probably wise as a startup to not go for Salesforce parity while building out the core roadmap. You can build a decent business catching new companies and paying attention to their needs unencumbered by the expectations of "switchers". I agree with your points about what people want / expect from Salesforce. Would kind of be cool to see a CRM have AppExchange + SF data model interoperability.
    - leeter 2y ago
      I agree... with the exception of PersonAccounts... those need to go die in a dumpster fire
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
m1117 2y ago
I think you want Salesforce because of how reliable and secure it is, also because of the cute mascots.
danielmarkbruce 2y ago
How difficult is it to roll your own CRM these days? On the surface it doesn't seem that difficult.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  If you're modeling one workflow for one team at one organization, it's always been trivial. Same as making an issue tracker. The complexity arrives when you need to support complex and branching workflows, teams that model things subtly differently, organizations that model things radically differently, strongly opinionated stakeholders at key teams/clients, endless demands to integrate with external systems, etc
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    Right - for most companies, they are one org. The complexity of "product CRMs" as opposed to "roll your own CRM" seems to come from trying to satisfy mulitple orgs. A CRM that can satisfy two orgs seems about 10x more complex than a CRM that can satisfy one. LLMs might tip the calculation of buy v build enough that "roll your own" becomes the standard for most business apps.
- pnut 2y ago
  Major mistake, unless your company is building and selling CRM software. Focus engineering resources on core competencies and buy everything else off the shelf.
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    That's fortune cookie wisdom.
  - pphysch 2y ago
    > Focus engineering resources on core competencies and buy everything else off the shelf. Don't forget to hire/contract experts to admin those """off the shelf""" solutions!
pembrook 2y ago
Among the modern CRM players like Attio, Folk, Clay, etc. how does this compare? Anybody tried all of them? It’s impossible to get impartial info on software these days due to all the scummy affiliate marketing/paid-influencer/“Top 10 Best” crap that has taken over Saas.
- georgespencer 2y ago
  Have spent extended periods in the last 12 months with Pipedrive, Attio, Salesforce, and Hubspot, if this helps: Pipedrive - simultaneously lightweight and no-frills whilst impossibly slow and antiquated. The simple act of navigating through records and performing actions is laborious. The price is extraordinarily high relative to the UX and functionality (same ballpark as Attio, the clear leader IMO). Same category as Gem (ATS) to me – I'm sure lots of people are working on it, but with a slightly resigned air as they see Ashby building a way more performant and capable product. Salesforce – not as slow as I recalled it being in ~2015, but still pretty "heavy" feeling. Commercial terms are as unpleasant as ever,[^1] and the professional services + 'does anything you need' angle is IMO designed to bamboozle non-technical stakeholders into outsourcing significant portions of sales and operations engineering to Salesforce Ecosystem® Trusted Partners® or whatever they're called. Unlike Attio (which embraces the fact that yes, this is just a fucking database with useful workflows on top), Salesforce seems to do what it can to prevent you from feeling like you're interacting with a database (right up to and including making it less convenient to use than, say, psql). Hubspot – It's not a huge N, but of the half-a-dozen occasions I've spent time with companies using HubSpot, at least half the time people hated it because it had been misconfigured or inexpertly set up. The CRM side is, I think, relatively benign, but attribution modeling and campaign tracking is a poor UX in my opinion, and I found myself exporting giant .CSVs to analyze with Excel and Python. (Saving grace: Dan Lyons didn't enjoy working there, which suggests that they might be doing something right culturally[^2]) Attio – It isn't perfect, but it's the first CRM product I've used to be just good software, without the "for CRM" qualifier. Model is that it ingests all email traffic and calendar appointments from registered seats, offers rich support for creating data models and relationships (e.g. we have objects representing Deals, Contracts, and Invoices and the associated attributes in Attio – making it a general purpose "Customer OS" for us), has the right mix of powerful but not overwhelming tools for reporting, batch emailing, etc. Has its quirks (floats are limited to four decimal places, you have to create new lists before you select the objects you want to store in it, etc.) but it's outstanding software, trivial to integrate without writing too much code, and by leaning into the idea that yes, this is a database, so yes, feel free to define models and relationships and attributes, it is rapidly integrated into the workflows of technical users. HTH! [^1]: In 2015 or so, I had a "friend" who found that his colleague forgot to set a reminder for the renewal/break period in a 24 month Salesforce contract, belatedly tried to activate it, and was told that the contract had automatically extended for a further 24 months. Said "friend" created a fake General Counsel on LinkedIn with a real company email address, created a reasonably convincing email thread between themselves and the fake GC (FW: Salesforce Renewal "Is this legal?" RE: FW: Salesforce Renewal [Hastily googled legal perspectives ending in an admonishment that GC was bored and would love to sink their teeth into this dispute) which they "accidentally" forwarded back to Salesforce (even going so far as to do one of those silly honor system Outlook email recalls). The renewal was rescinded pretty quickly! [^2]: https://fortune.com/longform/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ https://fortune.com/longform/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-start...
buzzwords 2y ago
I see alternative to Salesforce I up vote
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
tcbawo 2y ago
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?
- sn0wf1re 2y ago
  I have had decent success using <https://www.monicahq.com https://www.monicahq.com> for journaling and birthday reminders.
- bmulholland 2y ago
  I use https://clay.earth/ https://clay.earth/ which might be what you’re looking for
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- proee 2y ago
  Consider https://legendapp.com/ https://legendapp.com/ or https://noteplan.co/ https://noteplan.co/ for nice note integration with your calendar. You could easily create a list of contacts in these systems and trigger various events (singular and recurring).
- voltaireodactyl 2y ago
  If you’re on Mac/iOS, contact journal may be exactly what you’re looking for — it adds tasks/reminder/attachments/etc to contacts.
wkat4242 2y ago
Hmm it's kinda hard competing with the big dinosaurs because enterprises are so incredibly locked into them. And salesforce at least innovates with modern interfaces. It's not legacy trash like Siebel. Salesforce is pretty good all things considered. When we had siebel, we'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's just as bad as SAP (these guys are also soooo bad at UX). Salesforce by comparison works a lot like facebook. People grok that naturally.
- dexwiz 2y ago
  Ironically Salesforce is filled with Siebel alumni.
- RHSman2 2y ago
  Ex Siebel here. Got out into ‘real’ engineering at the time of Salesforce’s rise with that as a backup plan. Now fighting to keep Salesforce out of company. Shiny RFP’s of a horizontal service that doesn’t do much that well but appeals to execs.
  - RHSman2 2y ago
    AND trying to get out of SAP shark lock in!!! The future is bright elsewhere
  - altdataseller 2y ago
    Why do you think Salesforce doesnt do much?
    - RHSman2 2y ago
      The do wide. And lock you in.
o_m 2y ago
Does the email integration only support gmail?
airstrike 2y ago
title should really be changed to "Twenty: an open-source CRM alternative"
rtpg 2y ago
My glib take to every CRM like this: If you don't ship with a programming layer you'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's programs so they don't have operational questions. 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/textbox, and get new functionality. So... Twenty, hire one person whose job it is to layer AWS Lambda over your system :)
- ssahoo 2y ago
  What is the difference between Salesforce and low code platforms then?
- debarshri 2y ago
  I think it is easier said that done. The GTM completely changes of a product like this. Now you have to build API, DSL and eco-system to support it. I absolutely agree that your take. But building an eco-system is hard.
  - rtpg 2y ago
    You don't need a DSL if you, for example, "just" use Javascript. You need an API anyways. You do need to do some operational fudging around of course. I'm going to also counter with something super important: you build out stuff like this, and suddenly you can handle your own feature requests faster. User wants X to happen after Y? Write a tiny event script that they install into their env. They need some bespoke field? You have custom models, and now your events reply to that. In the fractal of requirement differences that is sales pipelines, not doing this just feels like causing yourself a bunch of dev pain.
    - moneywoes 2y ago
      So just re-use your own internal apis with better access control? What else?
awinter-py 2y ago
no comment on this product specifically, but large takeaway from hitting a point where my side thing had actual users + communication -- CRM is critical if you asked me 24 months ago I'd tell you CRM was a BS category, now I think of it as a backend component on par with the DB
- aantix 2y ago
  What crm did you settle on and why?
  - abpavel 2y ago
    CRM selection heavily depends on stage of the company and GTM motion complexity. I would never recommend to anyone to ever start with SFDC, but I can't not recommend ending there.
  - awinter-py 2y ago
    csv file with emails + python thing to send them using postmark it took an hour every time I had to do anything, and I ended up with a collection of python scripts that solved random problems that were already solved somewhere else, which grew and grew I tried a few programmable shared inbox tools and they were all clunky and meh. tried lighter things like supabase + some golang list manager, also meh. postmark has a CRM they acquired, iirc it was too expensive zoho seems reasonable on price, but did not try it but to be clear, even if I paid up for something dumb like hubspot, my life would have been simpler and better zapier is a good place to shop for these
- jruthers 2y ago
  Sounds like hard won experience there. I've long thought CRM was BS but been wondering lately - this helps, thanks.
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    The only thing more bullshit than 99% of CRM implementations is not having one when you start to outgrow Excel.
aetherspawn 2y ago
Excellent, I wish we saw this a few months ago, we just bought Freshsales. In terms of Wishlist we’d love to see: quotes/invoicing (support for product SKUs etc), document generation on deals (NDAs, proposals etc) I think that’s the extent of the gap between Freshsales and this that we actually use. 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? Disclaimer didn’t actually take it for a spin yet. 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.
aphroz 2y ago
"Frequent updates" is something that I would like to avoid in a CRM. Unless you have a team dedicated to update, test, migrate and fix.
tbrooks 2y ago
I'm shocked no one has mentioned Close.com I've been using it for close to ten years and can't imagine using another CRM. I believe they were an early YC company as well.
ec109685 2y ago
If only Salesforce was better software, billions of capital funding “a better Salesforce” could be deployed in more productive ways.
- matsz 2y ago
  The world runs on subpar software, and will continue to do so... Windows being the best example of that.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  That's why the money's going into making a better Salesforce.
alrs 2y ago
I'm no fan of Salesforce. Any HN submission with the word "modern" in the title should be shit-canned.
sneak 2y ago
Is there some other “arbitrary entities with arbitrary fields” builder webapp like this that isn’t Drupal? I have a number of simple database apps/sites I want to build that don’t warrant dedicated CRUD apps.
lclc 2y ago
Does it have HubSpot (etc.) import functionality? Otherwise the switchting-costs are probably too high for most companies.
vusjandus23857 2y ago
To beat salesforce you need to win over the admin/rev-ops or trailblazer as SFDC celebrates them. They throw monthly events in their skyscraper in every major city globally and an annual retreat/festival called Dreamforce to keep them loyal. It's not a better tech problem, it's a network effect. Good luck ripping them from the church of benioff.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
akkrumel 2y ago
Your core rest api page link is broken: https://twenty.com/developers/section/rest-apis/rest-api/core https://twenty.com/developers/section/rest-apis/rest-api/cor...
Closi 2y ago
Would love a product like this that offered pricing on a concurrent user basis or similar. 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/month so we stick to a spreadsheet. 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.
- PaulWaldman 2y ago
  I find this take interesting. Some software venders, like Autodesk, offer a token based system to charge for actual usage instead of a flat subscription fee. On a team of 15 people, $150/month is enough to maintain an internal tool? What is your average loaded cost per employee?
gorkish 2y ago
How does this compare to all of the other "#1 open source CRMs"
- 98codes 2y ago
  This one grants a right for the service to use your content however they wish. An absolute showstopper for me, honestly. From their Privacy Policy: "You retain any and all of your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Service and you are responsible for protecting those rights. We take no responsibility and assume no liability for Content you or any third party posts on or through Service. However, by posting Content using Service you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of Service, who may also use your Content subject to these Terms." https://twenty.com/legal/privacy https://twenty.com/legal/privacy
  - itsafarqueue 2y ago
    Anyone from Twenty care to comment on this?
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    A day later, I can't find that text on that webpage.
pavl 2y ago
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
cco 2y ago
I love the logged out experience in your app; super creative to display your app, just slightly dimmed. Super smooth and neat flow.
yencabulator 2y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37805520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37805520

378 points by client4 2y ago

Nice! It's great to have more open source platforms in the CRM space. 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]. [0] https://directus.io/ https://directus.io/ [1] https://youtu.be/tTrBn9Wvko0?si=IoqQ7o7Y8czfxB31 https://youtu.be/tTrBn9Wvko0?si=IoqQ7o7Y8czfxB31

sseagull 2y ago

A few months ago I was looking for some software that was CRM-like. We are a bit non-traditional, and don't fit neatly into the typical CRM use cases. Twenty was almost what we needed. It was extremely easy to set up, the customization is very promising, and the REST API worked ok. 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'm keeping an eye on it, and will re-evaluate again at some point. Hopefully it keeps its customizability. Never found anything more suitable, though.

bossyTeacher 2y ago
> We are a bit non-traditional That's what your standard business says and it is often business with bad practices that say that
- Propelloni 2y ago
  LOL, that struck a chord. And the way things are is for historical reasons. Man, I wish I had a dime for every time I hear this.
darraghmckay 2y ago
My startup [0] works with a lot of companies that are non-traditional, as you put it, and gives you the tools to design a CRM (and other business tools) that actually suit your business, if you want to check it out [0] https://noloco.io https://noloco.io
Uniquenl 2y ago
What features were you missing? Currently Im part of a team making a CRM based on more niche kind of customer and were trying to retrieve more information about what other CRMs lack
tiffanyh 2y ago
> We are a bit non-traditional I'm curious to understand more. Do you mean you're non-traditional in how you track Pipeline and working a customer through your sales funnel to Close? (which I am struggling to understand what could be non-traditional about that) Or are you referring to something else? Genuinely curious, which is why I ask.
- sseagull 2y ago
  Because we aren't a business :) We are academic group who is looking to increase collaboration both in industry and academia. While we have "products" (which we don't sell), we also have other initiatives like an education program. We also may want to set up a consortium with industry, which may include them giving us money, but not in a "buy a product or service" sense (but still needs to be thoroughly tracked). So I'd really like a platform that holistically tracks people and our engagement with them. Some of this is done by traditional CRM, but the focus on selling products & services is too narrow. Some desired features: * Tracking our contacts, so we don't forget to follow through on something (CRM generally does this) * Tracking people through time. If/Where they did their PhD, postdoc, are they in industry now. CRM I've looked at tend to be very fixed-point in time. * What their research interests are and have been. Are they in an area we are looking to expand into? What conferences do they typically go to? * How they have engaged with us before. Was it through an educational workshop? Did we mentor them in a mentorship program? Just someone we met sometime and seemed interested? People can be part of multiple groups. * If they are using our projects, how are they using them? We are looking for good stories to give to our own funding agencies (and for general marketing). * If they are interested in giving us money, what is the status of those talks? If there's a better term for software that does this kind of thing, I'm very open to ideas. This isn't a strength in academia, as is pretty obvious, and I'm very new at this :)
  - tiffanyh 2y ago
    Super interesting. Thanks for sharing the detail. The trouble that you’ve probably felt is CRM are sold to sales exec and as such, focus on sales exec needs. You’d be better served not with CRM, but a personal contact management system. Something like https://www.monicahq.com/ https://www.monicahq.com/
llamaimperative 2y ago
Consider Attio. Unaffiliated but a very happy user, also with a fairly unique business to keep track of.
iFelix 2y ago
That's my main frustration every day too. The vision for what we're building is very clear but it takes time to build it right. We'll get there :).
rushabh 2y ago
Checkout Frappe CRM (https://github.com/frappe/crm https://github.com/frappe/crm). It is built on a customizable web framework and there is a reasonable community as well.

tiffanyh 2y ago

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

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listenallyall 2y ago
> You’re competing on... Purchase decisions for products like these are almost always at the C-level. Very rarely do they actually understand the details of each product's feature set, especially the deepest 20%. You're competing on your ability to convince that decision maker to commit to a new product, as opposed to "nobody ever get fired for buying IBM (Salesforce in this case)" syndrome.
- kube-system 2y ago
  It's the same thing, by proxy. They may not know the details of that 20%, but they can be comfortable knowing it is capable of accomplishing it because of its use at other orgs.
codegeek 2y ago
You are also competing against a beast that locks in multi year contracts and is embedded so much within a company's ecosystem that it is almost impossible to replace them. Sorta like JIRA/Confluence.
- pantulis 2y ago
  Sorta like Oracle, I'd add.

pbreit 2y ago

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

altairprime 2y ago

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. Does the $9/user/month plan exempt paying self-hosted users from those requirements?

g15jv2dp 2y ago
I don't get what you're saying. Why would a self-hoster care about the code publication requirements of the AGPL? It's an OSS project, the end user doesn't care if the code has to be redistributed, they're not profiting from it remaining closed.
- tiffanyh 2y ago
  It's not uncommon for people to link their core product into their CRM (for billing and usage). Which could in turn "infect" your core offering to now become AGPL (and now you're having to release your core product IP to the public).
  - g15jv2dp 2y ago
    Two services talking to each other doesn't mean that they have to use the same licence or that AGPL "infects" the other.
    - tiffanyh 2y ago
      It’s a risk most companies don’t want to chance.
      - azemetre 2y ago
        I mean GitHub was literally built off of Git (GPL) and they had zero issues being acquired for $7.5billion.
        tiffanyh 2y ago

WinstonSmith84 2y ago

I wonder whether it's possible to write custom code on the platform (to automate processes)? In Salesforce, it'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? Salesforce has barely evolved in the last 15 years. Apex (as mentioned previously) has not changed the slightest. In 2010, there was Visualforce, it'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?..

bluelightning2k 2y ago
You could suggest they implement moddable.app so that you can write custom React components
arach 2y ago
there are now systems of engagement that help author / manage salesforce - https://www.swantide.com/ https://www.swantide.com/ - https://www.sweep.io/ https://www.sweep.io/ pretty cool but obviously an automation native platform would be cooler and I think Attio is the contender for this - https://attio.com/templates https://attio.com/templates - https://attio.com/blog/introducing-attio-objects https://attio.com/blog/introducing-attio-objects

redwoolf 2y ago

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

samanator 2y ago

Very cool and promising. Currently the biggest blocker, even for simple use cases that don'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! User permissions: https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/discussions/209 https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/discussions/209

trollied 2y ago
Any user being able to alter the data model is just a fundamental design flaw. Other than that, I'd expect segment-based permissions (sales team/territory etc) as a minimum.

dataminded 2y ago

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

leeter 2y ago
I wish them the best, but I think they would have been best not drawing the comparison to Salesforce. IME people buy Salesforce not for the CRM but for the force.com platform. The ability to seamlessly build business logic over the entire flow of a business is Salesforce's bread and butter. CRM is a small part that definitely gets heavy use, but it's only a small part of the larger picture. If they had a way to quickly spin of LOB apps like Salesforce does, and had implemented a CRM on top of that... I'd say they would be much more apt drawing the comparison. Particularly if that doesn't require code to do. I know a LOT of companies that would pay dearly for such a hosted platform, GPL or not.
- pantulis 2y ago
  > The ability to seamlessly build business logic over the entire flow of a business is Salesforce's bread and butter. While being able to update the platform seamlessly without breaking that logic.
- arach 2y ago
  It's probably wise as a startup to not go for Salesforce parity while building out the core roadmap. You can build a decent business catching new companies and paying attention to their needs unencumbered by the expectations of "switchers". I agree with your points about what people want / expect from Salesforce. Would kind of be cool to see a CRM have AppExchange + SF data model interoperability.
  - leeter 2y ago
    I agree... with the exception of PersonAccounts... those need to go die in a dumpster fire
- rahimnathwani 2y ago

m1117 2y ago

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

danielmarkbruce 2y ago

How difficult is it to roll your own CRM these days? On the surface it doesn't seem that difficult.

swatcoder 2y ago
If you're modeling one workflow for one team at one organization, it's always been trivial. Same as making an issue tracker. The complexity arrives when you need to support complex and branching workflows, teams that model things subtly differently, organizations that model things radically differently, strongly opinionated stakeholders at key teams/clients, endless demands to integrate with external systems, etc
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  Right - for most companies, they are one org. The complexity of "product CRMs" as opposed to "roll your own CRM" seems to come from trying to satisfy mulitple orgs. A CRM that can satisfy two orgs seems about 10x more complex than a CRM that can satisfy one. LLMs might tip the calculation of buy v build enough that "roll your own" becomes the standard for most business apps.
pnut 2y ago
Major mistake, unless your company is building and selling CRM software. Focus engineering resources on core competencies and buy everything else off the shelf.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  That's fortune cookie wisdom.
- pphysch 2y ago
  > Focus engineering resources on core competencies and buy everything else off the shelf. Don't forget to hire/contract experts to admin those """off the shelf""" solutions!

pembrook 2y ago

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

georgespencer 2y ago
Have spent extended periods in the last 12 months with Pipedrive, Attio, Salesforce, and Hubspot, if this helps: Pipedrive - simultaneously lightweight and no-frills whilst impossibly slow and antiquated. The simple act of navigating through records and performing actions is laborious. The price is extraordinarily high relative to the UX and functionality (same ballpark as Attio, the clear leader IMO). Same category as Gem (ATS) to me – I'm sure lots of people are working on it, but with a slightly resigned air as they see Ashby building a way more performant and capable product. Salesforce – not as slow as I recalled it being in ~2015, but still pretty "heavy" feeling. Commercial terms are as unpleasant as ever,[^1] and the professional services + 'does anything you need' angle is IMO designed to bamboozle non-technical stakeholders into outsourcing significant portions of sales and operations engineering to Salesforce Ecosystem® Trusted Partners® or whatever they're called. Unlike Attio (which embraces the fact that yes, this is just a fucking database with useful workflows on top), Salesforce seems to do what it can to prevent you from feeling like you're interacting with a database (right up to and including making it less convenient to use than, say, psql). Hubspot – It's not a huge N, but of the half-a-dozen occasions I've spent time with companies using HubSpot, at least half the time people hated it because it had been misconfigured or inexpertly set up. The CRM side is, I think, relatively benign, but attribution modeling and campaign tracking is a poor UX in my opinion, and I found myself exporting giant .CSVs to analyze with Excel and Python. (Saving grace: Dan Lyons didn't enjoy working there, which suggests that they might be doing something right culturally[^2]) Attio – It isn't perfect, but it's the first CRM product I've used to be just good software, without the "for CRM" qualifier. Model is that it ingests all email traffic and calendar appointments from registered seats, offers rich support for creating data models and relationships (e.g. we have objects representing Deals, Contracts, and Invoices and the associated attributes in Attio – making it a general purpose "Customer OS" for us), has the right mix of powerful but not overwhelming tools for reporting, batch emailing, etc. Has its quirks (floats are limited to four decimal places, you have to create new lists before you select the objects you want to store in it, etc.) but it's outstanding software, trivial to integrate without writing too much code, and by leaning into the idea that yes, this is a database, so yes, feel free to define models and relationships and attributes, it is rapidly integrated into the workflows of technical users. HTH! [^1]: In 2015 or so, I had a "friend" who found that his colleague forgot to set a reminder for the renewal/break period in a 24 month Salesforce contract, belatedly tried to activate it, and was told that the contract had automatically extended for a further 24 months. Said "friend" created a fake General Counsel on LinkedIn with a real company email address, created a reasonably convincing email thread between themselves and the fake GC (FW: Salesforce Renewal "Is this legal?" RE: FW: Salesforce Renewal [Hastily googled legal perspectives ending in an admonishment that GC was bored and would love to sink their teeth into this dispute) which they "accidentally" forwarded back to Salesforce (even going so far as to do one of those silly honor system Outlook email recalls). The renewal was rescinded pretty quickly! [^2]: https://fortune.com/longform/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ https://fortune.com/longform/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-start...

buzzwords 2y ago

I see alternative to Salesforce I up vote

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tcbawo 2y ago

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?

sn0wf1re 2y ago
I have had decent success using <https://www.monicahq.com https://www.monicahq.com> for journaling and birthday reminders.
bmulholland 2y ago
I use https://clay.earth/ https://clay.earth/ which might be what you’re looking for
- deleted 2y ago
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proee 2y ago
Consider https://legendapp.com/ https://legendapp.com/ or https://noteplan.co/ https://noteplan.co/ for nice note integration with your calendar. You could easily create a list of contacts in these systems and trigger various events (singular and recurring).
voltaireodactyl 2y ago
If you’re on Mac/iOS, contact journal may be exactly what you’re looking for — it adds tasks/reminder/attachments/etc to contacts.

wkat4242 2y ago

Hmm it's kinda hard competing with the big dinosaurs because enterprises are so incredibly locked into them. And salesforce at least innovates with modern interfaces. It's not legacy trash like Siebel. Salesforce is pretty good all things considered. When we had siebel, we'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's just as bad as SAP (these guys are also soooo bad at UX). Salesforce by comparison works a lot like facebook. People grok that naturally.

dexwiz 2y ago
Ironically Salesforce is filled with Siebel alumni.
RHSman2 2y ago
Ex Siebel here. Got out into ‘real’ engineering at the time of Salesforce’s rise with that as a backup plan. Now fighting to keep Salesforce out of company. Shiny RFP’s of a horizontal service that doesn’t do much that well but appeals to execs.
- RHSman2 2y ago
  AND trying to get out of SAP shark lock in!!! The future is bright elsewhere
- altdataseller 2y ago
  Why do you think Salesforce doesnt do much?
  - RHSman2 2y ago
    The do wide. And lock you in.

o_m 2y ago

Does the email integration only support gmail?

airstrike 2y ago

title should really be changed to "Twenty: an open-source CRM alternative"

rtpg 2y ago

My glib take to every CRM like this: If you don't ship with a programming layer you'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's programs so they don't have operational questions. 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/textbox, and get new functionality. So... Twenty, hire one person whose job it is to layer AWS Lambda over your system :)

ssahoo 2y ago
What is the difference between Salesforce and low code platforms then?
debarshri 2y ago
I think it is easier said that done. The GTM completely changes of a product like this. Now you have to build API, DSL and eco-system to support it. I absolutely agree that your take. But building an eco-system is hard.
- rtpg 2y ago
  You don't need a DSL if you, for example, "just" use Javascript. You need an API anyways. You do need to do some operational fudging around of course. I'm going to also counter with something super important: you build out stuff like this, and suddenly you can handle your own feature requests faster. User wants X to happen after Y? Write a tiny event script that they install into their env. They need some bespoke field? You have custom models, and now your events reply to that. In the fractal of requirement differences that is sales pipelines, not doing this just feels like causing yourself a bunch of dev pain.
  - moneywoes 2y ago
    So just re-use your own internal apis with better access control? What else?

awinter-py 2y ago

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

aantix 2y ago
What crm did you settle on and why?
- abpavel 2y ago
  CRM selection heavily depends on stage of the company and GTM motion complexity. I would never recommend to anyone to ever start with SFDC, but I can't not recommend ending there.
- awinter-py 2y ago
  csv file with emails + python thing to send them using postmark it took an hour every time I had to do anything, and I ended up with a collection of python scripts that solved random problems that were already solved somewhere else, which grew and grew I tried a few programmable shared inbox tools and they were all clunky and meh. tried lighter things like supabase + some golang list manager, also meh. postmark has a CRM they acquired, iirc it was too expensive zoho seems reasonable on price, but did not try it but to be clear, even if I paid up for something dumb like hubspot, my life would have been simpler and better zapier is a good place to shop for these
jruthers 2y ago
Sounds like hard won experience there. I've long thought CRM was BS but been wondering lately - this helps, thanks.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  The only thing more bullshit than 99% of CRM implementations is not having one when you start to outgrow Excel.

aetherspawn 2y ago

Excellent, I wish we saw this a few months ago, we just bought Freshsales. In terms of Wishlist we’d love to see: quotes/invoicing (support for product SKUs etc), document generation on deals (NDAs, proposals etc) I think that’s the extent of the gap between Freshsales and this that we actually use. 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? Disclaimer didn’t actually take it for a spin yet. 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.

aphroz 2y ago

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

tbrooks 2y ago

I'm shocked no one has mentioned Close.com I've been using it for close to ten years and can't imagine using another CRM. I believe they were an early YC company as well.

ec109685 2y ago

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

matsz 2y ago
The world runs on subpar software, and will continue to do so... Windows being the best example of that.
robertlagrant 2y ago
That's why the money's going into making a better Salesforce.

alrs 2y ago

I'm no fan of Salesforce. Any HN submission with the word "modern" in the title should be shit-canned.

sneak 2y ago

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

lclc 2y ago

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

vusjandus23857 2y ago

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

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[deleted]

akkrumel 2y ago

Your core rest api page link is broken: https://twenty.com/developers/section/rest-apis/rest-api/core https://twenty.com/developers/section/rest-apis/rest-api/cor...

Closi 2y ago

Would love a product like this that offered pricing on a concurrent user basis or similar. 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/month so we stick to a spreadsheet. 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.

PaulWaldman 2y ago
I find this take interesting. Some software venders, like Autodesk, offer a token based system to charge for actual usage instead of a flat subscription fee. On a team of 15 people, $150/month is enough to maintain an internal tool? What is your average loaded cost per employee?

gorkish 2y ago

How does this compare to all of the other "#1 open source CRMs"

98codes 2y ago
This one grants a right for the service to use your content however they wish. An absolute showstopper for me, honestly. From their Privacy Policy: "You retain any and all of your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Service and you are responsible for protecting those rights. We take no responsibility and assume no liability for Content you or any third party posts on or through Service. However, by posting Content using Service you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of Service, who may also use your Content subject to these Terms." https://twenty.com/legal/privacy https://twenty.com/legal/privacy
- itsafarqueue 2y ago
  Anyone from Twenty care to comment on this?
- yencabulator 2y ago
  A day later, I can't find that text on that webpage.

pavl 2y ago

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

cco 2y ago

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

yencabulator 2y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37805520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37805520