Three questions and answers: How Twenty wants to replace proprietary sales CRMs

The CRM Twenty starts with high expectations – and its own goal of becoming an open-source alternative to Salesforce is sometimes met with disbelief. We spoke to Félix Malfait, CEO and one of the founders of Twenty, about the development, current status, and goals of the project.

CRMs aren't hot new tech. Why did you decide to build a new one anyway?

The idea goes back to 2015, when I was running a property management company. At the time, we looked at Salesforce, thinking we could just build on top of it rather than reinvent the wheel. But after talking with them, I left disappointed. It was clear it wouldn't work the way we wanted and I didn't like the idea of being hostage of a closed-source project, so we built our own software instead.

After we sold that company to Airbnb, I kept coming back to this problem. People think of CRM as “sales software,” but to me, the interesting part is that it’s about the customer—which is the core of any business. The real opportunity is to build abstraction layers around that, so people can solve their own unique problems, not just follow a playbook we hand them. We’re not trying to be prescriptive or say "we know best", we want to give people a toolkit.

If Twenty is about customers, but companies see CRM as sales software: Can you actually replace existing CRMs in use, or would companies use Twenty in addition to those?

The goal is definitely to replace existing sales software—and, over time, marketing and support tools as well. We want to be "low barrier, high ceiling." Out of the box, you get familiar objects like Companies and Opportunities, or a kanban view for managing deals. So if all you want is a sales CRM, it takes zero effort to get started.

But our goal is to allow people to go further. You can treat it as a kind of backoffice builder—to model whatever matters most to your business beyond just sales pipelines. I think that’s what many companies want today: something that starts very simple, but doesn’t limit them as they get more ambitious.

What kind of businesses should be interested in Twenty? And which ones would miss features?

Right now, we’re a good fit for tech-savvy companies who value flexibility or tech-savvy agencies working with small to midsize companies. I'm most proud of our data modeling system. For example, the way we generate both GraphQL and REST APIs is very elegant and more powerful than what I’ve seen in any other CRM. The workflow feature is newer, but already quite powerful too.

That said, there are still gaps. If you need total control over layout, advanced AI-driven automation, or sophisticated dashboards and charts, those are areas we’re actively working on. We expect to have all three by the end of the year.

Mr. Malfait, thank you very much for your answers. We conducted the interview in English – interested readers can find the translated version in German here. All information about Twenty can be found on the project website.

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