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.
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