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Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

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Re: Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

#32
post #11

ooooh, this is nifty. I was just thinking we needed a good CRM! Are there any other good, self-hosted alternatives I hsould be aware of?

Not trying to hide our competition but honestly, we came to build this because I didn't find any. The leader 15 years ago was SugarCRM but sadly they ended up getting bought by a PE fund and closing the source. There is a project called SuiteCRM[1] that continued with an open source fork but in my opinion they lack the "modern" touch that we were looking for. Besides that, other options I've seen are Yeti [2] or Odoo…

Here's some open source insights regarding the repos mentioned so far.

https://devboard.gitsense.com/twentyhq/twenty

https://devboard.gitsense.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM

https://devboard.gitsense.com/YetiForceCompany/YetiForceCRM

https://devboard.gitsense.com/odoo/odoo

Some notes based on what I'm seeing are SuiteCRM and YetiForceCRM are not fully being developed in the open. The community around odoo is quite large and has close to 10,000 historical contributors. Twenty is new and picking up steam.

Full Disclosure: This is my tool.

Re: Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

#33
post #2

Congrats on the launch! JFYI, app. and docs.twenty.com are both showing cloudflare origin errors at present. The signup from the main site asked me to message on WhatsApp, which I don't use, so I backed out from signing up.

This is disqualifying, for me. I tried to view the CRM and it asked me to log in. There are a lot of dark patterns just at first blush that make this feel spammy.

The auth popup also breaks the back button which also is pretty crappy.

Re: Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

#34
post #16

The biggest mistake a competitor can make is thinking Salesforce is a CRM. They may sell themselves as one, but that is just to get a foothold in a company's sales system. Salesforce actually sells (1) an ecosystem that lets your company connect to any other software out there and (2) a platform on which you can build...basically anything. These two together ensure that every one of their customers is 100% locked in…

Salesforce is basically the OS for your company.

Re: Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

#35

What made you use Blocknote over EditorJS? https://www.blocknotejs.org/ https://editorjs.io/

or TipTap/Prosemirror?

I thought building on TipTap would take too much time but I was wrong. I've looked into TipTap extensions and it seems that in less than a week you can build a very decent Notion-like editor. So we will be rebuilding everything with TipTap soon.

Initially I chose Blocknote over EditorJS because I wanted draggable blocks / something that feels more like Notion. But it wasn't a good call to make the decision based on that.

Re: Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is disqualifying, for me. I tried to view the CRM and it asked me to log in. There are a lot of dark patterns just at first blush that make this feel spammy.

The auth popup also breaks the back button which also is pretty crappy.

Thanks for letting us know, I've logged an issue, we'll fix that this week or next week. https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/763

Re: Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

#37
post #32
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to hide our competition but honestly, we came to build this because I didn't find any. The leader 15 years ago was SugarCRM but sadly they ended up getting bought by a PE fund and closing the source. There is a project called SuiteCRM[1] that continued with an open source fork but in my opinion they lack the "modern" touch that we were looking for. Besides that, other options I've seen are Yeti [2] or Odoo…

Here's some open source insights regarding the repos mentioned so far. https://devboard.gitsense.com/twentyhq/twenty https://devboard.gitsense.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM https://devboard.gitsense.com/YetiForceCompany/YetiForceCRM https://devboard.gitsense.com/odoo/odoo Some notes based on what I'm seeing are SuiteCRM and YetiForceCRM are not fully being developed in the open. The community around odoo is quite large a…

Thanks for sharing! This is so good it could become our internal dashboard

Re: Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accurate. The licensing (and the "kill switch") at a previous job were controlled entirely via Salesforce. Our app would "phone home" regularly to check which features are being paid for and we'd toggle them on and off in our app accordingly. I had, at the same company, been asked to evaluate building Salesforce apps (using the custom programming language they provide) and contrasting that with building new apps on o…

Apex is nightmare fuel

100% - having to submit code server side to just get compilation results is the worst development loop I've ever experienced.

Re: Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

#39
post #31

The first thing that popped out to me when looking at your github repo is this need to be updated: https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/blob/main/server/README.m...

Thanks! Yes :D We are publishing the repo as it is, and we know we have a ton of things to improve, including documentation! I had actually forgotten about this readme, will make sure to remove it https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/764
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