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Twenty: A Modern open-source CRM
- yieldcrv 3y agoI think salesforce is pretty dumb, but I think salesforce users are dumber and the artificial limitations help them removing those limits in an open source alternative doesnt help that crowd but yeah there’s definitely a sliver of an audience that can do system design and wont just roll out their own microservices and database
- RagnarD 3y agoOpen source or not, apparently the no cost version is limited to 100 contacts, making that version a toy at best. At $29/seat/mo, it's not far away from far more mature all-employee Zoho One at $37/seat/mo (paid annually).
- paulmendoza 3y agoThat’s a tiny number of contacts.
- zdragnar 3y agoI'm guessing they don't expect that many customers would actually convert if they had a higher cap on the free tier. It's more like a trial than anything.
- iFelix 3y agoTbh we haven't been focused on monetization at all. We've just put a high number to avoid disappointing people afterwards by raising pricing (I hate when company advertise something as cheap, then lock you in and raise prices). But we don't enforce any pricing as of today, you can use the cloud version for free without any limitation. The actual pricing will likely be significantly lower. Initially we thought of introducing a pricing system that's more aligned with the value created (with a generous credit system, based on number of actions taken), because we found that Salesforce charges by seat but in large orgs most of the seat companies pay for are unused, so the incentives aren't aligned. I'm not sure we'll go this way because people also want a simple and predictable pricing they can understand.
- mirzap 3y agoContacts are a core feature. You can not expect to succeed as an open-source company by limiting the number of contacts at any point of maturity. Provide a decent number of features, and then charge for SSO and stuff like that. Or put everything free and have your own dedicated service, with your infra and support. Look at Sentry. Everything is open source. They are making a lot of money. Not everybody wants to run Sentry on their own infra. Same with CRM.
- antaviana 3y agoBe careful, that’s going to confuse a lot your buyers, especially at large corporations. Unless you are focusing in very tiny shops where who decides is the main or only user, your customers will be more concerned with cost predictability than with fairness. They just want to know what the cost will be with no surprises as to earmark the budget without having to revisit it later.
- iFelix 3y agoYes I agree, we might have to pick our battles and follow the industry norm on this one.
- monkey_monkey 3y agoThe no-cost Saas version is limited. The self-hosted version is not.
- iFelix 3y agoThanks for clarifying for others! I didn't expect this to show on HN today but we're definitely taking the feedback and going to change that page soon
- daft_pink 3y agoHaving implemented a few different CRM systems, I think that CRM systems should be opinionated and enforce business rule best practices for most users. When I meet a CRM salesperson, and they're like our software will do whatever you want and we will create it, you have to read between the lines and translate it. What they really mean is "Our software isn't designged to work for most general use cases, implementation will require a team of really expensive developers to create and maintain, we will tell you we are making custom fitting "cuture" software and you will be sending us a boat load of money for the rest of your company's life if it works or you will burn a giant pile of money until it doesn't work. This isn't my first rodeo. If you have to extensively customize the software then the cost of the software will end up being moot and the cost of the people to run it will end up costing a fortune forever.
- mavelikara 3y agoCan it be built as layers - a flexible platform, with an opinionated product built on top of it? That way, simple use cases are easy and complicated use cases are possible.
- civilitty 3y agoThat would be the promise of companies like SAP and Salesforce. I believe Dante wrote a book on the subject…
- daft_pink 3y agoDevelopment and developers are extremely expensive, especially when you have to train them how to use your custom home built product. You are generally far better off using the off the shelf product that everyone has been trained on than using some custom product when you have to start hiring and training developers. The software costs are generally minimal compared to hiring smart people to design, implement and code projects with complex business logic.
- anonzzzies 3y agoThis used to be the SAP philosophy; build your company processes around SAP, not the other way around.
- jaza 3y agoHow is this different from Odoo?
- iFelix 3y agoOdoo is an open source ERP so they're doing a lot more than CRM. They also want to replace Docusign, Shopify, Workday, Notion, Intercom, Google Sheets, and more. We will focus on a narrower scope and try to do it very well instead of going into that many directions
- 2Gkashmiri 3y agoHey. Github says Agpl license. Then the pricing page says 100 contacts for community support, is that for hosted version? Why not have a "self hosted option" on pricing page that probably doesn't have limits unlike hosted one?
- iFelix 3y agoYes that's only for the hosted version. Self-hosting is indeed 100% free and not limited. We definitely need to work on that page!
- iFelix 3y agoThanks pretext for posting this! We didn't expect to be featured today :) We're currently rewriting the backend and will ship a new version on October 30 that will be much more powerful (with a flexible data model)
- nurettin 3y agowhy did they commit .vscode/ ?
- aiunboxed 3y agoUi using shadcn ?
- iFelix 3y agoNo shadcn is great but we rebuilt every component from scratch. And we use styled components, not tailwind. Storybook here: https://storybook.twenty.com https://storybook.twenty.com When it's mature enough we'll isolate this into a UI lib anyone can use
- hannes0 3y ago> rebuilt every component from scratch. And we use styled components, not tailwind. Honest question: Why?
- charlesTwenty 3y agoHi, I'm Charles and leading the engineering work on Twenty! We've made the bet to invest on a tailored design for our components. Using an existing UI library is a strength to use robust components and move faster, but I've always struggled to customize it. There is always a point where you want something custom that is not supported by the library and you start hacking into it. On previous projects, I've almost always used existing UI libraries. For Twenty, this is a long term project and the initial burden of creating UI components vs customizing existing ones will be marginal on the long run. IMO, if you have strong design requirement (and you have enough resources ofc), don't go with UI librairies ; I take as much inspiration as I can from them, I may fork one but I would not hack their API
- aiunboxed 3y agoAgree, it feels like the right decision as well. The grid felt a little bit like shadcn hence I asked. Using external libraries gives some early velocity, but most of the good looking libraries are incomplete and most of the complete ones are boring (material / bootstrap)
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- CRM_CHILD_IDENT 3y agoSoooo many things missing on first sight. Did the authors ever see a real system in a real company? Also please fill the demo with at least 10.000 to 100.000 items - it makes no sense showing your software with five data items, it looks like a demo for some home work then. We want to see how it behaves with millions of data.
- iFelix 3y agoI like that you signed up just to comment on this. It probably means we're doing something that matters even if you think we don't do it well :) We'll work on a real demo environment with a lot of records, we just haven't prioritized it yet. Right now it's not really a demo environment, but a real account that happens to be provisioned with a few example records. Putting more records wouldn't really make sense (you have to delete those records manually to start using the CRM).
- lucb1e 3y ago> Putting more records wouldn't really make sense (you have to delete those records manually to start using the CRM). I would assume that their point is that this would demonstrate that the system doesn't break down if you fill it with more than a handful of entries. Would be a shame if it grinds to a halt after using it for a few years. And demo data != initial starting state
- garyclarke27 3y agoFor anyone interested a wrote a pretty good Blog post. What is CRM Why use CRM? https://www.onedb.online/blog/what_is_crm_why_use_crm https://www.onedb.online/blog/what_is_crm_why_use_crm
- lucb1e 3y agoYou're linking to your own post, self-judge that it's a good post, it has a call-to-action for a "free of charge consultation" at the bottom (which, ironically, leads to a page with 2 separate loading bars before still showing a flash of unstyled content) where you will presumably (based on the homepage and pricing page) be sold a competing product to TwentyCRM. Is there any redeeming way in which your comment is not just spam / trying to use this thread as free advertising space?
- Linusvq 3y agoEDIT/Update — OP made it clear that this can be self hosted, which wasn’t clear in the pricing sheet. I would recommend updating. — deleting my previous comment -
- iFelix 3y agoSorry if it isn't clear. Self-hosting is 100% free and without any limitation. As for the cloud version, I replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808121 TLDR is that the cloud version hasn't been our primary focus yet and we put a high pricing on purpose that is not the final pricing, while we figure out the good pricing strategy. As of today everything is free without any limitation, we don't enforce any limit. And when we rollout the real pricing, it will be more compelling
- lucb1e 3y agoThanks for that eye-opener. I read the comment and just believed it, would have closed the tab with no further interest if you hadn't been on the ball and replied within minutes, in time for it to be there when I opened this comments page. I've noticed previously in life that if I don't correct an allegation, people will just assume the to-me-obvious-falsehood is true by my silent assent. I didn't know that I, too, fall for this stuff despite being aware of the problem.
- Linusvq 3y agoI stand very much corrected and wasn’t trying to make an allegation… Your pricing page says pretty much the opposite and is quite confusing — it literally just shows “Free” vs. “Grow” and no option for self hosting made clear
- honeybadger1 3y agoThis is the type of solution that brings a business to its knees the moment it outgrows it.
- dizhn 3y agoThe software is at alpha level. What can it already do? Is there a roadmap?
- iFelix 3y agoIt’s already a good CRM for basic tasks like tracking contacts and opportunities. It’s stable and mostly bug-free. Next month we will ship custom objects and the API, then email integration. And next step is to make it truly extensible (right now your best option to do something truly custom is to fork it which obviously isn’t great).
- kaliqt 3y agoDank. I've always disliked most open source CRMs because they are either outdated or hold back too many features as paid.
- iFelix 3y agoYes that’s why we created this. For my previous company I couldn’t find anything I liked. I wanted something built with modern technologies and by people who care about design. There are still a lot of things we need to develop to be at feature parity with big players but we are shipping fast and we will get there!
- sangnoir 3y ago> Dank. I've always disliked most open source CRMs because they are either outdated or hold back too many features as paid. It's the open source circle of life. The same thing will happen to Twenty in a number of years. Things to watch out for: someone launches a competing hosted version of thr CRM.
- pmkelly4444 3y agoit looks like a notion clone on first inspection. your github/website could be more powerful if you highlighted some differentiators! I see there is an "emails" tab. Does it allow you to track emails like HubSpot?
- iFelix 3y agoYes the design is heavily inspired by Notion but the backend and the features are those of a CRM. We’ll have email integration soon!
- victorbjorklund 3y agoLooks good but email integration is a must have for a CRM.
- guluarte 3y agoAs someone who worked implementing different CRMs like Dynamics and Zoho this thing is missing like 99% of the stuff companies need.
- dbarrera_dev 3y agoReminds me of SugarCRM (the Community Edition, that is)
- lamnk 3y agoBased on my experience, one of the most challenging aspects of CRM is having sales agents manually enter customer data and log activities such as calls and emails, especially when dealing with messaging across different platforms. While many SaaS and open-source CRM systems offer basic contact, lead, and opportunity management features, they often lack comprehensive solutions for these issues.