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Title: Twenty Is Building an Open Source Alternative To Salesforce

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/19/0025...

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, 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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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