Twenty Is What Happens When Someone Finally Gets Mad Enough
An open-source CRM that looks like it was designed by people who've actually used software before.
twenty kept growing. the open-source CRM movement continued. salesforce still costs too much and still looks like 2003. the observation that someone finally getting mad enough to build the replacement is usually how these things start remains true.
Salesforce costs somewhere between "a lot" and "what do you mean that's per seat" and looks like it was designed in 2003 by a committee that hated the people who would eventually have to use it. This is not a controversial position. Everyone knows this. Nobody does anything about it.
Twenty is doing something about it.
It's an open-source CRM — self-hostable, React frontend, NestJS backend, Postgres underneath — and the thing that gets me is it looks good. Not good for an open source project. Just good. The kind of Linear/Notion-aesthetic good where you open it and don't immediately feel punished for choosing the free option.
The GitHub stars are climbing fast. The kind of fast that means developers are forwarding it to each other going "have you seen this yet."
What they've figured out — or what the traction suggests they've figured out — is that the CRM problem isn't really a features problem. It's a dignity problem. People use Salesforce because they have to, and they hate every minute of it, and they'd switch to literally anything that didn't make them feel like a data entry temp from 2009.
Twenty is that anything.
Whether it stays good as it grows is the whole question. These things have a tendency to start clean and accumulate cruft as enterprise customers show up with their enterprise requirements and their enterprise budgets and their deeply held belief that software should have seventeen nested dropdown menus.
For now it's clean. Watch it.
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