The article sounds like there is just Salesforce and now Twenty (and SugarCRM). But there are a lot of other open source alternatives that have been around for quite a while: Odoo, ERPNext, SuiteCRM, CiviCRM, … just to name a few.
Good. Hope it gets some traction.
I’ll be honest, I doubt it will. At least, not in the mainstream.
Alternatives to Salesforce already exist, and there’s a reason why they’re not more commonplace: most companies that use Salesforce or similar CRM platforms do so because somebody else maintains it (which is why Salesforce/Zendesk/etc are more expensive than a lot of their counterparts that don’t offer such services). If they have a problem with the tools, they’re paying for somebody at Salesforce to fix it for them. They don’t have to pay somebody in their own company to manage the servers or learn the software, they just let Salesforce manage that.
That level of support very likely wouldn’t be the case with Twenty, and companies would be expected to pay somebody internally to learn and maintain their instance of the software. There’s also liability issues; if your company’s customer data gets breached somehow, it’s Salesforce’s responsibility and not yours, so you have to take on those sorts of burdens, as well. All of this starts to get very pricey (and very risky) if a company isn’t already structured in a way to handle those sorts of tasks, which is why I doubt there’ll be any big shift.
I’d love to be wrong, though.
There is a huge gap in there that you don’t see though, and Salesforce profits greatly from it. Small and medium-sized businesses who hate using Salesforce, but premade alternatives aren’t customizable for what they need. Throw some customization at it, and you get exactly what you want.
This is essentially how SF became big to begin with. It sucked so bad, people hired engineers to build their extensions on top of it because it had the option. A capable FOSS solution opens the door to people being dedicated hosts for it, as well as offering pluggable solutions.
I understand the converse on its success, just see an opportunity to do better with it.
Redhat were very successful with the open source, but paid support model, so it could happen.
Inertia would be hard to overcome, anyone using sales force right now is probably not gonna want to risk a newcomer.
Many Open source alternatives exist already such as vTiger and CiviCRM.
For my two cents worth I think they could do well by integrating with Nextcloud and Drupal or WordPress (Or whatever comes out of its current shambles).
From the article it seems like they are creating a extendible object model which in some ways is similar to what SharePoint has with its lists. Nextcloud has an add-on (Tables) that is a proto version of this. CiviCRM has worked to integrate website data collection from Drupal / Wordpress well.
Thinking from front of house (website) to back of house (CRM) then Nextcloud the missing link is to Nextcloud ( So documents and images can flow forward into the website Media Library ) and the extensible object model for data.amd being able to link unstructured data (documents etc. to structured data. (Not an expert on CiviCRM so not sure how flexible it is. )
But good on them for having a go. Let many flowers bloom. Even if it doesn’t take off some of their ideas might get adopted by someone else in some other way.
