If your software product is successful enough, you'll probably find companies building open source alternatives. However, no one has developed a modern open source CRM product that would be considered a serious competitor to Salesforce.
That's exactly what Twenty is trying to accomplish. Over the past few years, the startup has iterated on its modern CRM platform and made it all available on GitHub under the permissive AGPLv3 license.
Although Twenty doesn't have all the features found in Salesforce, the company has gradually built a community of CRM and open source enthusiasts around it, with more than 300 contributors last year. GitHub has 20,000 stars.
The startup's three co-founders have worked together on a previous startup called Luckey, which was acquired by Airbnb. It's like a mini-CRM for Airbnb guests and hosts, designed specifically for vacation rentals.
When it was time to leave their jobs and start a new startup, they looked at the tech industry and noticed a trend. The past few years have seen 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 replacement for Docusign. Formbricks has released a competing product to Qualtrics. And the list goes on.
“And we realized that CRM is the biggest software market overall, because it covers marketing, customer support, and operations. CRM does it all for us,” said Twenty. Co-founder and CEO Felix Malfay told TechCrunch.
There is no doubt that some companies, such as SugarCRM, are already building open source CRMs to compete with Salesforce. Although SugarCRM has had considerable success, SugarCRM has not reached the success of Salesforce or HubSpot. The company also stopped releasing Community Edition in 2018.
“At the time, they didn't understand what open source meant, and it was more of a constraint, and I think that's because there was no GitHub, there was no community,” Malfait said.
The open source world has changed, and so has CRM. These platforms are no longer designed specifically for sales teams. Many companies use CRM as their main repository for customer data and build products based on that data.
“I think there are open source leaders in every category. The more a category relies on network effects, ecosystems, and scalability, the more effective open source will be,” Malfay said. “We're not there yet, but that's what I believe. That's my long-term theme,” he added.
Image credits:20
flexible framework
That's why Twenty seeks to build a flexible platform that can be tailored to any company's needs and serve as a foundation for other tools and use cases. Each entry in CRM is an object. This can be a standard predefined object, such as a person or a company. However, customers can also create their own custom objects.
Meeting organizers can create meeting objects. If you are a manager of a restaurant chain, you can create a restaurant object. As you might expect, Twenty also allows you to create custom fields for each object. This makes it easier to retrieve and compare data across multiple entries.
You can view this customer data directly in Twenty's list view or kanban view. Users can perform all the usual CRM functions, such as sorting and filtering entries, adding tasks and notes, and more.
However, Twenty data can also be reused with GraphQL and REST APIs. By doing so, you can extend Twenty beyond its CRM roots. Ultimately, Twenty hopes to see a thriving ecosystem of developers working on extensions and plugins to build suitable alternatives to the Salesforce product suite. But we are not there yet.
“Building a CRM is a difficult task, especially because of the method we have chosen. We are building a platform and we are not going to take shortcuts. In fact, we are still working on workflows, automation, etc. We need to work on it,” Malfay said.
Twenty are Mathilde Collin (founder of Front), Dharmesh Shah (founder of HubSpot), Pierre Burgy and Aurélien Georget (founders of Strapi), and Sergei Anikin (former CEO/CTO of Pipedrive). The company is also backed by Runa Capital, Y Combinator, and Automattic.
“People often don't understand why Salesforce is so big and so powerful,” Malfait says. Salesforce as a platform is a flexible data model, a programming language called Apex for running code on Salesforce's servers, and a front-end customization framework.
“So with those three bricks, you can store your data, run your logic on the backend, and display the results however you want,” Malfait says. “It means we can do anything, and that's what we want to achieve in the long term.”