Twenty is building an open source alternative to Salesforce

If a software product is successful enough, you’ll probably be able to find a company building an open source alternative. And yet, nobody has created a modern open source CRM product that can be considered as a serious competitor to Salesforce.

That’s exactly what Twenty is trying to achieve. For the past couple of years, the startup has been iterating on a brand-new CRM platform and making everything available on GitHub under a permissive AGPLv3 license.

While Twenty doesn’t have all the features that you can find in Salesforce, the company is slowly building a community of CRM and open source enthusiasts around it with more than 300 contributors in the last year and 20,000 stars on GitHub.

The startup’s three co-founders worked together on a previous startup called Luckey that was acquired by Airbnb. It was a sort of mini CRM for Airbnb guests and hosts, specifically designed for vacation rentals.

When it was time to leave and start a new startup, they looked at the tech industry and noticed a trend. For the past few years, there has been a wave of open source startups replicating popular software-as-a-service products with a community-oriented approach. Baserow is trying to replicate Airtable. Documenso is working on a DocuSign alternative. Formbricks has released a Qualtrics competitor. And the list goes on.

“And I realized that CRM is the biggest software market overall, because it covers marketing, customer support, operations — a CRM does everything,” Twenty co-founder and CEO Félix Malfait told TechCrunch.

Arguably, some companies have already tried to build an open source CRM and take on Salesforce, such as SugarCRM. While SugarCRM has been quite successful, SugarCRM never reached the success of Salesforce or HubSpot. The company also stopped releasing its Community Edition in 2018.

“They didn’t see the point of open source at the time, it was more of a constraint. I think that’s because there was no GitHub, there was no community,” Malfait said.

The world of open source has changed, and CRMs, too. These platforms are no longer designed for sales teams exclusively. Many companies use their CRM as the main repository for customer data and build products on top of that data.

“I think that in every category, there will be an open source leader, and the more a category depends on network effects, ecosystems, and extensibility, the more effective open source will be,” Malfait said. “We’re not there yet, but that’s what I believe. It’s my long-term thesis,” he added.

Flexible framework

That’s why Twenty is trying to build a flexible platform that can be tweaked to every company’s needs and that can serve as a basis for other tools and use cases. Each entry in a CRM is an object. It can be a standard, pre-defined object like a person or a company. But customers can also create their own custom objects.

If you’re a conference organizer, you can create a conference object. If you’re a restaurant chain manager, you can create a restaurant object. As you may have guessed, Twenty also lets you create custom fields for each object. This way, it’s easier to capture and compare data across multiple entries.

This customer data can be viewed in Twenty directly in list or Kanban views. People can sort and filter entries, add tasks and notes, all the usual CRM stuff.

But data in Twenty can also be reused with GraphQL and REST APIs. And that’s how you can extend Twenty beyond its CRM roots. Eventually, Twenty hopes there will be an active ecosystem of developers working on extensions and plugins to build a proper alternative to the Salesforce product suite. But we’re not there yet.

“Building a CRM is a daunting task, especially for us because of the way we’ve chosen to do it. We’re building a platform, and we’re not taking any shortcut. In fact, we still need to work on workflows, on automation and more,” Malfait said.

Twenty has raised two small funding rounds representing $5 million in total with around 50 different investors, including Mathilde Collin (Front founder); Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot founder); Pierre Burgy and Aurélien Georget (Strapi founders); and Sergei Anikin (former CEO/CTO at Pipedrive). The company is also backed by Y Combinator and Automattic.

“People often don’t understand why Salesforce is so big, so powerful,” Malfait said. Salesforce, as a platform, is a flexible data model, a programming language called Apex to execute code on Salesforce’s servers and a front-end customization framework.

“So when you have these three bricks you can store data, do logic on the back end, and display the result as you like,” Malfait said. “It means that you can do everything. And that’s what we want to enable in the long term.”