Twenty Is Building an Open Source Alternative To Salesforce (techcrunch.com) 22
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:3)
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...
Re: (Score:3)
Never mind you about Salesforce, just taking on all the flavor-of-the-month open source ERP/CRM service providers is going to be a mess. If you're already looking for Salesforce then you are not listening for anything else, anyhow. Typical open source ERP/CRM service providers are not sustainable models of business... it is more akin to multi-level marketing schemes.
ADempiere
SugarCRM
Odoo
Check out this lovely throwback how it was (and largely still is almost 20 years later): https://opensource.org/blog/wi... [opensource.org]
MLM (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
This is exactly what happens with Windows. It's not about what the company needs but what some clueless higher up decides.You ask them why and at best they will throw out something like "it's what everyone uses".
Re: (Score:2)
Agree 100%... I worked for a company years ago and the CEO went to Vegas to one of their "Dreamforce" events. Came back and announced to the whole company that he had signed on for a 3-year contract and we'd be moving everything from an on-premise MRP solution to a Salesforce "solution" that ended up being a bunch of 3rd party add-on modules each with their own billing account, etc. Plus it was ~$250 per hour for any "customization" work.
They ended up spending months trying to make it all work before ab
Re: (Score:2)
This is especially as ERP/CRM systems are not packaged software you can buy off a shelf. They are heavily customized applications.
If you're a s
Re:I wish them luck... (Score:5, Interesting)
Many years ago, I migrated my small (12-person) company from Salesforce to SugarCRM. I paid about $1000 for a contractor to migrate all our data.
SugarCRM was awful code, but it was Good Enough, and we saved tons of money after leaving Salesforce. I don't regret the move at all.
I wish Twenty good luck also.
Re: (Score:2)
So according to you Android developed the smartphone market?
Challenge? You are right Linux can't challenge Windows in lock-in because Linux is not about limiting users choices. If the car industry was like the computer industry we would all be driving a Ford Escort. You see the world as volume and not quality.
There is nothing special about Salesforce.
AGPL, eh? (Score:2)
Overall seems interesting, but how does AGPL work with what's basically an app building framework?
Like for internal app use only, i guess it would be ok. But if you want to make anything external (to a company) it seems like a no-go. no? Like how infectious is this to extensions / plugins integrations etc ?
Salesforce exists because deciders ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... don't understand software or IT all that much, not because there's a lack of alternatives.
Most people with half-decent knowledge of how the web works could probably click together a viable alternative to their Salesforce setup with a WordPress installation and a handful of plugins.
What is SalesForce other than just yet another set of forms and masks in front of a database? Focusing on the CRM aspect of such software is more of a marketing shtick than anything else.
Re: (Score:2)
Probably. Also this gem: "It means that you can do everything."
That is properly called an "API" or a "mod interface" (in the gaming-space). It is not special.
Re: (Score:3)
Most enterprise software gets sold on the number of ticks on the feature list rather than whether the system is a steaming heap of shit or not. Once it is purchased for millions (with support contract on top) it is NEVER coming out no matter how terrible it is. And it because will be terrible there will a secondary market for consultants, dedicated IT staff and hardware vendors charging exorbitant rates to make this hot garbage semi fit for purpose.
AGPLv3 for thee, not for me (Score:2)
Some of their "enterprise" code is under a commercial license. And use of AGPLv3 basically shuts out the competition (and prospective customers) from using the code without risking infecting their own code.
I'm sure from their perspective it makes sense to not have some cloud provider or vendor repackage their code and sell it, but the flipside is as a customer, the fact that is open source is irrelevant if the only way of using it safely is to pay money for a commercial license, or engaging in shenanigans t
whoopee (Score:2)
You can do 90% of what Salesfarce does with Drupal and a couple dozen modules.
It also does a lot of things a lot better than Salesforce does. For example, every user on every instance of Salesforce has to have a unique login ID. Your users are mixed in with all other users. Salesforce users have to beg to be allowed to do performance tests even though the platform allegedly handles scaling, and they tell you outright it's because your tests could cause problems for someone else. This is how we know that the
Re: (Score:2)
You can do 90% of what Salesfarce does with Drupal and a couple dozen modules.
True, by a factor of a thousand if you combine Drupal with CiviCRM [civicrm.org], both of which have been developed cooperatively for well over a decade already.
Sure, CiviCRM runs all by itself without Drupal or even with another CMS', but why would you want to limit yourself that way?!
Re: whoopee (Score:2)
CivicRM used to just be some Drupal modules. It still does nothing you can't do with just some Drupal modules. I guess that's not an argument against it, but I'd rather have all my content in Drupal as first class nodes.
Salesforce is Salesforce NOT because of technology (Score:2)
Their technology is fine, but not technically amazing or even "great". It's Salesforce because they know how to sell their product.
Open source projects rarely know how to sell themselves.