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.
Arguably, some companies have already tried to build an open source CRM and take on Salesforce, such as SugarCRM. While SugarCRM has been quite successful, SugarCRM never reached the success of Salesforce or HubSpot. The company also stopped releasing its Community Edition in 2018.
