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

That's a very good point. In the early stage, we were thinking about a single tenant architecture which would make this questions way easier. However, I am a strong believer in multi-tenant architectures as they allow to scale while mutualizing the resources (I personally think it's single tenant at scale is non-sense in term of ecology) and we will invest into maintaining a multi-tenant architecture.

So, as we go through the multi-tenant path, what you say is very relevant and will be challenging.

Regarding custom entities and custom fields, we plan to introduce a flexible data table backed by a meta-data, quite close to what salesforce is doing ; this article is gold about how they built it: https://architect.salesforce.com/fundamentals/platform-multi.... In short, you have a data table (uuid, objectid, tenantid, field1, ..., fiel500) where fields are VARCHARs and you build your own engine on top of that. This comes with a lot of challenges such as performances (indexation), typing (we lose Typescript/GraphQL power obviously as we deal with flexible data modeling)

Regarding plugins that we want users to be able to create and to activate on the marketplace without vetting, here is the way we see it right now:

1) Front-end: serve a dedicated JS depending on what workspace you are on. Rebuild this JS when you activate / update a plugin

2) Back-end: we will need to execute the code in a separate environment. We were thinking about serverless lambdas for the cloud version and keep it local on the main server for self-hosting ; kind of allowing two drivers (lambdas + local) to execute plugin code in the codebase but using lambdas only on the the cloud).

Would love to chat a bit more about it. We will likely open a Github discussion thread in the upcoming weeks about this specific topic) so we can get the feedback from anyone interested into it

It seems like a good solution would have clean interfaces between various pieces so they can be easily replaced. Sales, purchasing, payroll, HR, and IT stand out to me, but there may well be others.

Hi Ifelix, I have been working as Siebel Consultant implementing it in many companies and then later moved to Salesforce which I also work implementing/changing it for companies needs.

As a fullstack developer I already thought multiple times to "create my own Siebel" or "create my own Salesforce".

But I faced that, the CRM part of it is very easy to implement. That is why there are so many players on commercial CRM area (Pipedrive, Insighlty, etc) and even on open-source (vTiger, SugarCRM, etc).

But what makes Siebel and mostly Salesforce different is their power of customization.

Imagine that there are entire careers (including mine) built on top of customizing such applications.

I know current state of Twenty is just the start, but I'm wondering how different from vTiger, SugarCRM and other opensources solution is Twenty? Besides the UI design that is really clean but, from my experience, is not so much what final users thinking when choosing a CRM, if you want to compete agains the big players as you stated in your CTA: "Building a modern alternative to Salesforce"

Curious why did you think about building you own? For us the frustration came primarily from the design, the developer experience to extend/customize, and the way data is pulled and fetched. I think that if we nail those 3 points, we would have a solution that is well enough differentiated from what currently exists in the market

good to know what these "Company OS" stands for

> Salesforce comes in at the sales side of things,

> SAP invades as a finance app, and

> ServiceNow begins their encroachment as an IT ticketing system,

but they all wanna be THE only cloud platform your company needs.