[HN Gopher] Twenty, a modern CRM alternative to Salesforce
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Twenty, a modern CRM alternative to Salesforce
Author : client4
Score : 154 points
Date : 2024-06-11 16:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twenty.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twenty.com)
| wilsonfiifi wrote:
| 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/
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/tTrBn9Wvko0?si=IoqQ7o7Y8czfxB31
| sseagull wrote:
| 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.
| darraghmckay wrote:
| 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
| Uniquenl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| sseagull wrote:
| Oh that looks interesting! Thanks for the recommendation,
| I will give it a look.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| civicrm https://civicrm.org/ is more non-profit oriented,
| so that may be worth a look.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| You seem in a unique position with respect to needs and
| opportunity. So many organisations go looking for a tool
| mainly to quench a vague desire to systematise. The
| temptation is to think, "we can't be so different, surely
| there's a solution out there that already solves this
| problem". Reuse, not reinventing wheels, all fine and
| good... but in fact the "problem" is ill-formed and before
| you know it you end up fitting what you do, and your
| horizons, to a tool not of your making, adapting what you
| do to someone else's paradigm.
|
| So why not build it? Sounds like you have the academic and
| research resources. It's just entities, relations and
| timelines. There's a thousand ideas out there in games,
| logistics and asset tracking that are so nearly what you
| want and can be adapted. Many now well known tools only
| evolved as a side effect of another niche business need, to
| scratch a singular itch.
| bombcar wrote:
| Sounds like you need Association Management Software (AMS).
|
| There are a few built on salesforce but there are others
| that are standalone, and they all implement CRM in some
| way.
| sseagull wrote:
| That was a class of software I have never even heard of,
| but could be it. Thanks!
| ralphc wrote:
| Do you think something like this would work for a non-
| profit?
|
| Do you host it yourself, what database is used?
|
| I've done some work for a homeless advocacy group that uses
| Salesforce, it keeps track of donors as well as information
| on clients.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Consider Attio. Unaffiliated but a very happy user, also with a
| fairly unique business to keep track of.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| 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.
| listenallyall wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sorta like Oracle, I'd add.
| samanator wrote:
| Salesforce is slow (the lwc frontend I mean), and has legacy
| (aka governer) limits. E.g. you can't have synchronous code run
| for more than 10 seconds, you can't update more than 200
| records in a standard transaction, the query language has only
| very basic joins, and much more.
|
| If you can build a crm without these limitations, why not get
| your 80% without the limits?
| pbreit wrote:
| I wonder if they could get the setup and updates to be as easy as
| once.com?
| altairprime wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Two services talking to each other doesn't mean that they
| have to use the same licence or that AGPL "infects" the
| other.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| It's a risk most companies don't want to chance.
| azemetre wrote:
| I mean GitHub was literally built off of Git (GPL) and
| they had zero issues being acquired for $7.5billion.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Massive difference exist between GPLv2 (Git) vs AGPLv3
| (Twenty).
|
| You're comparing apples and oranges.
|
| Google documents well why they forbid AGPL https://openso
| urce.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
| altairprime wrote:
| Incorrect. For example, the relevant paragraph from the
| Google doc linked elsethread:
|
| > _any product or service that depends on AGPL-licensed
| code, or includes anything copied or derived from AGPL-
| licensed code, may be subject to the virality of the AGPL
| license. This viral effect requires that the complete
| corresponding source code of the product or service be
| released to the world under the AGPL license. This is
| triggered if the product or service can be accessed over
| a remote network interface, so it does not even require
| that the product or service is actually distributed._
| kube-system wrote:
| At larger organizations, a significant amount of the custom
| code in CRM systems are proprietary business rules... e.g.
| pricing calculations, business rules regarding the fine
| details of internal and personnel operations, etc. It's not
| uncommon for them to contain information that is covered
| under NDA, which would be a non-starter for redistribution.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Dear everyone, please remember, the restrictions are on AGPL is
| about making changes and _not upstreaming_ the changes. You can
| absolutely run it as a service, or as a networked part of your
| application.
|
| For example, if you wanted to remove their branding or some
| message in an email or a link on a webpage from the source
| code, you could absolutely do that -- as long as you release
| the forked code under a similar license in the public sphere.
|
| Businesses still won't touch AGPL (for now) and that's what
| they're going for to encourage enterprise signups (I find
| calling it "GPL-licensed" is a little misleading on the front
| page, but I get why they did it) -- but I think at some point
| that will probably end. I'm glad it's still going though, more
| chances for people to make money doing F/OSS (AGPL is free
| software).
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You could suggest they implement moddable.app so that you can
| write custom React components
| arach wrote:
| there are now systems of engagement that help author / manage
| salesforce
|
| - https://www.swantide.com/
|
| - 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/blog/introducing-attio-objects
| samanator wrote:
| 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
| dataminded wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I agree... with the exception of PersonAccounts... those
| need to go die in a dumpster fire
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Yeah IMO its a red flag to compare yourself to Salesforce
| unless you:
|
| * Offer a managed database system that can support common ETL
| workloads, custom fields, event hooks like post-save, etc
|
| * A embeded-DSL for scripting custom actions, no an API does
| not replace this functionality
|
| * Consultants/Support-engineering/and other escape valves when
| a really important business process needs to get fixed or built
| NOW
|
| * A lot more
|
| And frankly many startups don't have the muscle for this. Its
| not easy to do database work and its not easy to create
| functional (not necessarily good, just functional) DSLs and
| programming languages. These are harder computer science
| problems that take real talent to solve well. There are valid
| reasons Salesforce has the market cap it does.
| arach wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the OP is not part of Twenty's team so the
| startup itself is not positioning vs Salesforce
|
| Language on their homepage: The #1 Open-Source CRM Modern,
| powerful, affordable platform to manage your customer
| relationships
| CSDude wrote:
| Same for all Jira "alternatives". It's so easy to make a kanban
| & sprint board. But that's not what's important.
| m1117 wrote:
| I think you want Salesforce because of how reliable and secure it
| is, also because of the cute mascots.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| How difficult is it to roll your own CRM these days? On the
| surface it doesn't seem that difficult.
| pnut wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's fortune cookie wisdom.
| pphysch wrote:
| > 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!
| kube-system wrote:
| Doesn't matter if you use pen and paper, you'll still need
| those people:
|
| https://c8.alamy.com/comp/B083YP/female-secretary-or-
| assista...
| swatcoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| iceburgcrm wrote:
| Extremely easy.
|
| I built IceburgCRM (available in Django or Laravel). You can
| create a specialized crm with only a few words. For example:
| "create a stamp collecting crm". Modules, Fields,
| Relationships, Subpanels, default data and even a image for
| your homepage is created.
|
| Data can be imported/exported into 6 different formats.
| Supports unlimited many to many relationships, 26 different
| themes, etc.
|
| This is what the default crm looks like:
| https://demo.iceburg.ca/
|
| Here are some samples I generated:
|
| Gourmet Coffee Enthusiasts CRM
|
| https://coffee.iceburg.ca
|
| Bee Keeping CRM https://beekeeping.iceburg.ca
|
| You can also manage an existing database as a CRM.
|
| Here is a default wordpress database crm.
|
| https://wordpress.iceburg.ca
|
| Live wordpress site: https://wordpresssite.iceburg.ca/
|
| Open Source. Check it out. https://github.com/iceburgcrm
| kube-system wrote:
| People have been using tools like Excel or Access to do it for
| decades
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Sure, but I mean something that can actually fit in with the
| rest of the systems running a decent sized org. On the
| surface a CRM seems trivial to make, a pretty simple db
| schema with a pretty simple UI. But, I haven't done it.
| pembrook wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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(r)
| Trusted Partners(r) 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-
| start...
| buzzwords wrote:
| I see alternative to Salesforce I up vote
| tcbawo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I have had decent success using <https://www.monicahq.com> for
| journaling and birthday reminders.
| bmulholland wrote:
| I use https://clay.earth/ which might be what you're looking
| for
| proee wrote:
| Consider https://legendapp.com/ or 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).
| wkat4242 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ironically Salesforce is filled with Siebel alumni.
| o_m wrote:
| Does the email integration only support gmail?
| airstrike wrote:
| title should really be changed to "Twenty: an open-source CRM
| alternative"
| rtpg wrote:
| 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 :)
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