Twenty

https://twenty.com

Overview

Twenty is a new, fresh take on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. It is sleek, but is not a stable, mature project yet (v0.31 as of Oct 2024).

Three great things

  1. Sleek UI: The creators of Twenty have borrowed from Notion’s design language to create a sleek, modern UI.
  1. Flexible data model: Twenty includes our favourite ‘data model’ function. It is flexible yet still intuitive. Views are limited to table, kanban, and detailed views for all data models, but this approach works neatly.
  1. Keyboard shortcuts: This one is for the power users. Twenty has borrowed again from Notion (and maybe inspired by Superhuman) to create keyboard shortcuts. It’s not perfect and MacOS-centric for now, but it is appreciated.

Three annoying things

  1. Frequent updates: It is a promising sign that the Twenty project is being updated every few hours on GitHub. There is a strong community backing Twenty, and the Twenty.com company is pushing many updates and keeping a consistent design vision. However, the future product and business model of Twenty is not written in stone.

  2. No in-built automation/workflows: Twenty does not currently include any workflow tools (e.g. email campaigns). However, it does have an API and webhooks that can be used with automation platforms (e.g. n8n).

  3. No ‘real-time’ updates: If other users are updating data in Twenty, you will not be able to see it until you refresh your page. This is a minor issue for most use cases, but frustrating for managers that share accounts.

Scoring

Functionality ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

UI/UX ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Of all the CRMs we have tested, Twenty is the only one that feels like it was designed for a post-Covid world.

Project maturity ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

As mentioned, there is a strong community behind Twenty. Over 300 people have contributed to the project, and the Twenty.com team is well-funded for a growing, open-source project.

Performance ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

On the server, the performance of Twenty is reasonable. With a few users, the app uses about 600-800MB of memory. Hopefully these requirements do not grow dramatically as more features are added to the Twenty platform.

In the browser, Twenty requires about 200MB of memory. It appears the Twenty team have made the same design/performance trade-off that Notion has made - the application is not snappy (unless running on a powerful machine and/or has little data), but it looks great.

Business model ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Twenty is backed by a Paris-based team, Twenty.com PBC. Twenty.com generates revenue by providing hosting Twenty for $9/user/month (early adopter pricing). There are no features or limits that are locked behind paywalls.

We like the current business model, but we are not confident it will remain so community-friendly. Twenty.com PBC itself is backed by Y Combinator, and will likely have a target to reach $100m+ in equity. If they can’t achieve this target with the current business model, we hope that they don’t prioritise investors over users and the open-source community that has supported them.

Overall ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Twenty looks and feels like a CRM should in 2024. We recommend it for small teams that are prepared for the product to update and evolve in the next few years.

CRM Open Source Free