Twenty

What Twenty does

Twenty is a CRM for tracking companies, people and opportunities, built so that the data model can be reshaped to fit the business. You can add custom objects and fields, link any object to any other, and show records as tables, kanban pipelines or calendars with saved filters. Emails and meetings from connected Google or Microsoft accounts appear on the matching records, and contacts can be created automatically from those interactions; other providers connect over IMAP/SMTP and CalDAV.

Automation is handled by a visual workflow builder. A workflow can start when a record is created or changed, on a schedule, from a manual button or from an incoming webhook, and it can call outside services over HTTP. Dashboards turn pipeline and activity data into charts.

Extending it as code

What sets Twenty apart is that the project treats the CRM as something you develop. Every workspace gets GraphQL and REST APIs that follow its own custom objects, with generated documentation. On top of that, the “apps” framework lets developers define objects, views, server-side logic functions, interface components and AI agents in TypeScript, keep them in version control and publish them to a workspace with the Twenty CLI. The license includes a specific exception so that such apps do not have to be released under the AGPL.

Self-hosting Twenty

Twenty is self-hosted with Docker Compose, either through a one-line install script or by hand. The Compose file runs a server and a background worker alongside PostgreSQL 16 and Redis. The documentation asks for at least 2 GB of RAM and warns that losing the generated ENCRYPTION_KEY makes stored secrets such as OAuth tokens unreadable. Uploaded files go to the local disk by default, and S3-compatible storage is recommended for production. Email sending, Google and Microsoft sign-in and other integrations are configured from an admin panel or environment variables.

The free self-hosted plan includes everything in the cloud Pro plan, with community support on Discord. Single sign-on, row-level permissions, audit logs and AI usage data require the paid Organization plan even on your own server, because that code is under Twenty’s commercial license. The same plan removes the obligation to publish your changes to the code.

Hosted version

Twenty Cloud offers Pro and Organization plans and a trial. The documentation describes moving a self-hosted instance to the cloud with CSV exports, which also shows the main route out: your data can be exported at any time, but views, workflows and permissions do not travel with it.

Limitations

The license is open core: most of the code is AGPL, but the premium features sit in files under a proprietary license. Moving from Salesforce, HubSpot or Pipedrive is a CSV or API job, and the guide says views, workflows and permissions must be rebuilt by hand. Twenty focuses on contact and pipeline management; it has no quoting, invoicing or marketing email tools, and email campaigns are listed as “available soon” for the Organization plan.

Who it suits

Twenty fits startups and technical sales teams that want a clean, modern CRM and are willing to shape it themselves, whether through settings or through code. It is less suited to teams that need marketing automation or quotes in the same tool, or to organizations that need SSO without a paid plan. For a broader view of the options, see the guide to open source CRM software.