Salesforce is the CRM everyone defaults to and quietly resents — powerful, but priced per seat and heavy enough to need a consultant. Even its entry Starter tier runs $25 per user per month, and the bill only grows as you add seats and clouds. Twenty is a modern, open-source CRM built in the Salesforce mold — a clean, keyboard-fast UI on top of data you can self-host and actually own.
What works the same
Twenty covers the core CRM loop: companies and contacts, deals with kanban pipelines, activities and notes, custom objects and fields, filters and saved views, plus a GraphQL/REST API and webhooks for integrations. The interface borrows the best of modern productivity tools — fast navigation, inline editing, and a layout that doesn’t need a training session to use.
What you give up
Salesforce’s depth is unmatched: a vast AppExchange marketplace, mature automation in Flow, deep reporting, and an ecosystem of certified partners. Twenty is younger — some advanced automation, native integrations and reporting are still maturing, and self-hosting means you own updates and backups. For complex enterprise sales orgs, the gap is still real.
The math
Salesforce Starter: $25/user/mo — about $1,500/yr for a five-person team, before add-ons. Twenty: $0 self-hosted with unlimited users on a $12/mo VPS (~$144/yr), plus a free-tier cloud option. A small team saves on the order of $1,300/yr and sheds the per-seat tax as it grows.
Migration — time & effort
Plan a day for a modest pipeline. Export Salesforce accounts, contacts and opportunities to CSV, stand up Twenty with Docker (or use its cloud), and import. Map your custom fields, rebuild pipeline stages, reconnect email, and invite the team. Keep Salesforce read-only during the first sales cycle so nothing in flight gets lost.