Twenty Is Building an Open Source Alternative To Salesforce (techcrunch.com) 1
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: 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 [comparison], 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. [...] 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," [said Twenty co-founder and CEO Felix Malfait]. "People often don't understand why Salesforce is so big, so powerful," Malfait said. Salesforce's platform utilizes 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."
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," [said Twenty co-founder and CEO Felix Malfait]. "People often don't understand why Salesforce is so big, so powerful," Malfait said. Salesforce's platform utilizes 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."
I wish them luck... (Score:2)
Taking on one of the companies that practically invented the modern day "software as a subscription" business model (and one that's making billions from that model) is not going to be easy and it would not surprise me if the lawyers at Salesforce are looking for potential patents to throw at them...