Twenty CRM: Open-Source Salesforce Alternative

What is Twenty?

Twenty is an open-source CRM platform for modeling contacts, companies, and deals as code instead of working inside a vendor's fixed schema, built on a React frontend and a NestJS/GraphQL backend over PostgreSQL. You can sign up for a hosted cloud workspace at twenty.com in minutes, or self-host it yourself with Docker Compose if you want the data on your own infrastructure.

Core features of Twenty

• ✓Code-first schema - twenty-sdk/define lets you declare objects like a 'deal' with TEXT, CURRENCY, and DATE_TIME fields instead of clicking through a schema builder.
• ✓CLI scaffolding and publishing - `npx create-twenty-app my-app` bootstraps a new app, and `npx twenty app:publish --private` ships it to your workspace.
• ✓Composable primitives - objects, views, workflows, and agents are the building blocks the docs walk through, each extendable as code.
• ✓GraphQL API - the backend exposes GraphQL, per the repo's topics, for querying and mutating CRM data programmatically.
• ✓Background job processing - the NestJS backend runs on BullMQ with Redis, so long-running work doesn't block requests.
• ✓Nx monorepo stack - React frontend (Jotai, Linaria, Lingui) and NestJS backend live in one Nx-managed repo alongside PostgreSQL and Redis.

What you can build with Twenty

• •Sales pipeline tracking - model deals with custom fields like close date and amount, and move them through stages you define yourself.
• •Contact and company records - a central database of customers that other internal tools can query through Twenty's GraphQL API.
• •Custom line-of-business objects - define something Salesforce doesn't ship out of the box, using the same defineObject API used for deals.
• •Internal apps on CRM data - the docs point to workflows and agents as ways to automate actions on records, built and published with the same CLI used to scaffold apps.

Running Twenty locally or on your server

Twenty CRM gives you three paths to running it, per the project's README. The fastest is the hosted cloud: sign up at twenty.com and a workspace is ready in under a minute, with no infrastructure to manage. To build a custom app on top of Twenty, scaffold one with `npx create-twenty-app my-app`, define objects and fields with the `twenty-sdk/define` package (a `defineObject` call with fields like TEXT, CURRENCY, or DATE_TIME), then ship it to your workspace with `npx twenty app:publish --private` - the README points to a separate app development guide for views, agents, and logic functions. To self-host on your own infrastructure, the README links out to a Docker Compose guide; the exact compose file and environment variables aren't included in the material reviewed here, so check that guide directly before deploying.

Alternatives to consider

Frequently asked questions about Twenty

The problem it solves

Off-the-shelf CRMs like Salesforce lock the data model behind an admin UI and a proprietary customization language, so extending them for a niche business process means fighting the platform or paying for consultants. Twenty CRM's own README frames its goal as giving technical teams a CRM defined in code - objects, fields, and workflows as version-controlled artifacts - so the CRM evolves at the same pace as the rest of the product instead of lagging behind as a separate system.

Who should try it — and who should skip

Twenty CRM fits engineering-led teams that already run a TypeScript/PostgreSQL stack and want their CRM schema living in the same repo and review pipeline as the rest of their code. It also works for teams happy to start on the hosted cloud workspace and move to self-hosting later if requirements change. Skip it if you need a large marketplace of pre-built integrations out of the box, or if nobody on the team wants to own a NestJS/React/Postgres/Redis deployment long-term.

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