Twenty, a modern CRM alternative to Salesforce

I think it is easier said that done. The GTM completely changes of a product like this. Now you have to build API, DSL and eco-system to support it. I absolutely agree that your take. But building an eco-system is hard.

They could somehow whitelabel and embed Windmill.

SFDC for the uninitiated?

Most businesses are not big enterprises that need a programming layer. You can focus on that later on when you actually found some traction and move up-market. I don't think starting with enterprise features is "DOA", it's just smart prioritization.

You don't want to go through enterprise sales cycles when you are just starting your company.

Hey, just seeing this thread now. Agreed! We've started a year ago and have done probably just 10% of what is needed to really get to Salesforce. We need (1) a flexible data model, (2) a flexible layout, (3) code execution. We've done (1) but have yet to do (2) and (3) this year. Next step of the plan is to let people build and share apps that leverage those 3 blocks, that's where open source will really shine!

Yes

Programming And Workflows are keys

What is the difference between Salesforce and low code platforms then?

I run a CRM platform for many years. And while this is true, that if you want to go after a subsection of SalesForce type customers, you do need a programming layer. However, that is only a specific section of the market. There are vast amount of users out there that do not need that and will never will. They need a CRM. Not a Platform-that-is-also-a-CRM.

We offer 100% API access, and customisation from the data layer to the UI (very very flexible), but I'd be reluctant to invest time in adding an actual programming layer like APEX on top of it. I don't think I'd want to even go to that level of "enterprise" customers and everything else that comes with it.

Edit: just because I've seen people plug their products here as well, I'll add mine: https://cogmento.com

We are a bit non-traditional

I'm curious to understand more.

Do you mean you're non-traditional in how you track Pipeline and working a customer through your sales funnel to Close?

(which I am struggling to understand what could be non-traditional about that)

Or are you referring to something else?

Genuinely curious, which is why I ask.

We are a bit non-traditional

That's what your standard business says and it is often business with bad practices that say that

Checkout Frappe CRM (https://github.com/frappe/crm). It is built on a customizable web framework and there is a reasonable community as well.

Consider Attio. Unaffiliated but a very happy user, also with a fairly unique business to keep track of.

That's my main frustration every day too. The vision for what we're building is very clear but it takes time to build it right. We'll get there :).

My startup [0] works with a lot of companies that are non-traditional, as you put it, and gives you the tools to design a CRM (and other business tools) that actually suit your business, if you want to check it out

[0] https://noloco.io

What features were you missing? Currently Im part of a team making a CRM based on more niche kind of customer and were trying to retrieve more information about what other CRMs lack

I wish them the best, but I think they would have been best not drawing the comparison to Salesforce. IME people buy Salesforce not for the CRM but for the force.com platform. The ability to seamlessly build business logic over the entire flow of a business is Salesforce's bread and butter. CRM is a small part that definitely gets heavy use, but it's only a small part of the larger picture.

If they had a way to quickly spin of LOB apps like Salesforce does, and had implemented a CRM on top of that... I'd say they would be much more apt drawing the comparison. Particularly if that doesn't require code to do. I know a LOT of companies that would pay dearly for such a hosted platform, GPL or not.

Yeah IMO its a red flag to compare yourself to Salesforce unless you:

* Offer a managed database system that can support common ETL workloads, custom fields, event hooks like post-save, etc

* A embeded-DSL for scripting custom actions, no an API does not replace this functionality

* Consultants/Support-engineering/and other escape valves when a really important business process needs to get fixed or built NOW

* A lot more

And frankly many startups don't have the muscle for this. Its not easy to do database work and its not easy to create functional (not necessarily good, just functional) DSLs and programming languages. These are harder computer science problems that take real talent to solve well. There are valid reasons Salesforce has the market cap it does.

What's ironic about ecosystems is that (as an integration developer), getting devs to build on your platform is so easy if companies would just help them connect to users to better understand their needs, and then give them the necessary endpoints.

I, and many others, would jump to build on basically any tool that facilitated those relationships.

100%. You also buy Salesforce because your salespeople demand you too. It's something users are familiar with and excel in. Dislodging an incumbent is a lot more than just the technical product itself.

Twenty would be better served not marketing itself as an alternative as it isn't really an alternative. Instead, focus on their strengths and hone it on a niche audience. Useful guide by April Dunford, who's a guru at positioning (and coincidentally had repositioned a CRM tool previously!): https://www.aprildunford.com/post/a-quickstart-guide-to-posi....

You buy Salesforce because your boss told you to. If you believe differently, you’re the boss.

Same for all Jira "alternatives". It's so easy to make a kanban & sprint board. But that's not what's important.

I don't get what you're saying. Why would a self-hoster care about the code publication requirements of the AGPL? It's an OSS project, the end user doesn't care if the code has to be redistributed, they're not profiting from it remaining closed.

Note that if you self-host this, that you are bound by those code publication requirements of the AGPL 3.0 license that apply to your specific circumstance.

Dear everyone, please remember, the restrictions are on AGPL is about making changes and not upstreaming the changes. You can absolutely run it as a service, or as a networked part of your application.

For example, if you wanted to remove their branding or some message in an email or a link on a webpage from the source code, you could absolutely do that -- as long as you release the forked code under a similar license in the public sphere.

Businesses still won't touch AGPL (for now) and that's what they're going for to encourage enterprise signups (I find calling it "GPL-licensed" is a little misleading on the front page, but I get why they did it) -- but I think at some point that will probably end. I'm glad it's still going though, more chances for people to make money doing F/OSS (AGPL is free software).

Major mistake, unless your company is building and selling CRM software. Focus engineering resources on core competencies and buy everything else off the shelf.

People have been using tools like Excel or Access to do it for decades

If you're modeling one workflow for one team at one organization, it's always been trivial. Same as making an issue tracker.

The complexity arrives when you need to support complex and branching workflows, teams that model things subtly differently, organizations that model things radically differently, strongly opinionated stakeholders at key teams/clients, endless demands to integrate with external systems, etc

Extremely easy.

I built IceburgCRM (available in Django or Laravel). You can create a specialized crm with only a few words. For example: "create a stamp collecting crm". Modules, Fields, Relationships, Subpanels, default data and even a image for your homepage is created.

Data can be imported/exported into 6 different formats. Supports unlimited many to many relationships, 26 different themes, etc.

This is what the default crm looks like: https://demo.iceburg.ca/

Here are some samples I generated:

Gourmet Coffee Enthusiasts CRM

https://coffee.iceburg.ca

Bee Keeping CRM https://beekeeping.iceburg.ca

You can also manage an existing database as a CRM.

Here is a default wordpress database crm.

https://wordpress.iceburg.ca

Live wordpress site: https://wordpresssite.iceburg.ca/

Open Source. Check it out. https://github.com/iceburgcrm

Salesforce is slow (the lwc frontend I mean), and has legacy (aka governer) limits. E.g. you can't have synchronous code run for more than 10 seconds, you can't update more than 200 records in a standard transaction, the query language has only very basic joins, and much more.

If you can build a crm without these limitations, why not get your 80% without the limits?

You’re competing on...

Purchase decisions for products like these are almost always at the C-level. Very rarely do they actually understand the details of each product's feature set, especially the deepest 20%. You're competing on your ability to convince that decision maker to commit to a new product, as opposed to "nobody ever get fired for buying IBM (Salesforce in this case)" syndrome.

You are also competing against a beast that locks in multi year contracts and is embedded so much within a company's ecosystem that it is almost impossible to replace them. Sorta like JIRA/Confluence.

Sounds like hard won experience there. I've long thought CRM was BS but been wondering lately - this helps, thanks.

What crm did you settle on and why?

Ex Siebel here. Got out into ‘real’ engineering at the time of Salesforce’s rise with that as a backup plan.

Now fighting to keep Salesforce out of company. Shiny RFP’s of a horizontal service that doesn’t do much that well but appeals to execs.

Ironically Salesforce is filled with Siebel alumni.

I have had decent success using <https://www.monicahq.com> for journaling and birthday reminders.

Consider https://legendapp.com/ or https://noteplan.co/ for nice note integration with your calendar. You could easily create a list of contacts in these systems and trigger various events (singular and recurring).

I use https://clay.earth/ which might be what you’re looking for

Have spent extended periods in the last 12 months with Pipedrive, Attio, Salesforce, and Hubspot, if this helps:

Pipedrive - simultaneously lightweight and no-frills whilst impossibly slow and antiquated. The simple act of navigating through records and performing actions is laborious. The price is extraordinarily high relative to the UX and functionality (same ballpark as Attio, the clear leader IMO). Same category as Gem (ATS) to me – I'm sure lots of people are working on it, but with a slightly resigned air as they see Ashby building a way more performant and capable product.

Salesforce – not as slow as I recalled it being in ~2015, but still pretty "heavy" feeling. Commercial terms are as unpleasant as ever,[^1] and the professional services + 'does anything you need' angle is IMO designed to bamboozle non-technical stakeholders into outsourcing significant portions of sales and operations engineering to Salesforce Ecosystem® Trusted Partners® or whatever they're called. Unlike Attio (which embraces the fact that yes, this is just a fucking database with useful workflows on top), Salesforce seems to do what it can to prevent you from feeling like you're interacting with a database (right up to and including making it less convenient to use than, say, psql).

Hubspot – It's not a huge N, but of the half-a-dozen occasions I've spent time with companies using HubSpot, at least half the time people hated it because it had been misconfigured or inexpertly set up. The CRM side is, I think, relatively benign, but attribution modeling and campaign tracking is a poor UX in my opinion, and I found myself exporting giant .CSVs to analyze with Excel and Python. (Saving grace: Dan Lyons didn't enjoy working there, which suggests that they might be doing something right culturally[^2])

Attio – It isn't perfect, but it's the first CRM product I've used to be just good software, without the "for CRM" qualifier. Model is that it ingests all email traffic and calendar appointments from registered seats, offers rich support for creating data models and relationships (e.g. we have objects representing Deals, Contracts, and Invoices and the associated attributes in Attio – making it a general purpose "Customer OS" for us), has the right mix of powerful but not overwhelming tools for reporting, batch emailing, etc. Has its quirks (floats are limited to four decimal places, you have to create new lists before you select the objects you want to store in it, etc.) but it's outstanding software, trivial to integrate without writing too much code, and by leaning into the idea that yes, this is a database, so yes, feel free to define models and relationships and attributes, it is rapidly integrated into the workflows of technical users.

HTH!

[^1]: In 2015 or so, I had a "friend" who found that his colleague forgot to set a reminder for the renewal/break period in a 24 month Salesforce contract, belatedly tried to activate it, and was told that the contract had automatically extended for a further 24 months. Said "friend" created a fake General Counsel on LinkedIn with a real company email address, created a reasonably convincing email thread between themselves and the fake GC (FW: Salesforce Renewal "Is this legal?" RE: FW: Salesforce Renewal [Hastily googled legal perspectives ending in an admonishment that GC was bored and would love to sink their teeth into this dispute) which they "accidentally" forwarded back to Salesforce (even going so far as to do one of those silly honor system Outlook email recalls). The renewal was rescinded pretty quickly!

[^2]: https://fortune.com/longform/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-start...

That's why the money's going into making a better Salesforce.

The world runs on subpar software, and will continue to do so... Windows being the best example of that.

You could suggest they implement moddable.app so that you can write custom React components

there are now systems of engagement that help author / manage salesforce

- https://www.swantide.com/

- https://www.sweep.io/

pretty cool but obviously an automation native platform would be cooler and I think Attio is the contender for this

- https://attio.com/templates

- https://attio.com/blog/introducing-attio-objects

Any user being able to alter the data model is just a fundamental design flaw.

Other than that, I'd expect segment-based permissions (sales team/territory etc) as a minimum.

This one grants a right for the service to use your content however they wish. An absolute showstopper for me, honestly.

From their Privacy Policy: "You retain any and all of your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Service and you are responsible for protecting those rights. We take no responsibility and assume no liability for Content you or any third party posts on or through Service. However, by posting Content using Service you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of Service, who may also use your Content subject to these Terms."

I find this take interesting. Some software venders, like Autodesk, offer a token based system to charge for actual usage instead of a flat subscription fee.

On a team of 15 people, $150/month is enough to maintain an internal tool? What is your average loaded cost per employee?