Twenty

What it is

Twenty is an open-source CRM that you can either self-host or rent as a managed cloud workspace. It was founded in 2023 by Charles Bochet and Félix Malfait, went through Y Combinator’s S23 batch, and sits at 57,700+ GitHub stars as of 29 September 2026, and the vendor bills it as the #1 open-source CRM on GitHub. The data model works the way Attio’s does: you define custom objects, fields, views (table, kanban, calendar, list) and dashboards from Settings, with no per-object or per-record limits on any plan.

The core is AGPLv3, with the app-building toolkit (twenty-sdk, create-twenty-app) under MIT and a small set of files marked @license Enterprise under a commercial license. That split is the thing to understand before you buy: the AGPL code gives you a full CRM for free, and the commercial files are where SSO and row-level permissions live.

Why it shows up in RevOps stacks

• It resolves the “why are we paying per seat for a database?” question. A self-hosted instance costs you the server and the ops time, with no seat fee, no record cap and no object cap.
• The release cadence is fast and visible. Twenty ships in public at twenty.com/releases: v2.35 (26 August 2026) added call recordings with synced, navigable transcripts; v2.39 (9 September) added audio-only recordings and a pause switch for the recording bot; v2.40 (15 September) added a single slider for picking an AI model by tier, with each model’s provider, price, context window and data residency shown in AI settings.
• Agents get first-party access. Every Cloud workspace ships a native MCP server over OAuth, so Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can read and write CRM records without middleware. REST and GraphQL APIs plus webhooks are on every plan, and workflows, AI chat and AI agents with custom skills are included from Pro.
• Developers can extend it in TypeScript. npx create-twenty-app scaffolds an app that ships custom objects, server-side logic functions, React components rendered inside Twenty, and AI skills — the Salesforce AppExchange idea without the Apex.

Pricing reality

Checked on twenty.com/pricing on 29 September 2026. All plans have unlimited seats, records and custom objects; the 30-day trial needs no credit card.

• Self-hosted Free — $0. All Pro features, community support, and you run Docker or Kubernetes yourself. AI calls go to your own provider keys (OPENAI_API_KEY and equivalents for Anthropic, Google, Mistral and xAI).
• Pro (Cloud) — $9/user/month on yearly billing, about $12 month-to-month. API capped at 50 calls/minute. No SSO, no row-level permissions.
• Organization — $19/user/month yearly, about $25 monthly. Adds row-level permissions, SAML/OIDC SSO, audit logs, encryption-key rotation, custom domain, priority support, 100 API calls/minute. Also sold as a license key for self-hosted instances.
• Enterprise — from $50,000/year. Single-tenant isolation, IP allow-listing, SCIM, security review and DPA, SLA.

Workflows and AI run on credits, where 1 credit = $1 of usage. A workspace gets 5 credits/month on monthly billing or 50/year on yearly — per workspace, not per user — and unused credits roll over up to one period’s allocation. A standard workflow step costs about $0.0001, so plain automation is effectively free; a large multi-step agent task can cost a dollar or more. A 20-seat team on Organization, billed yearly, pays $4,560/year before credit packs — against $42,000/year for 20 Salesforce Enterprise seats at $175 list.

Best for

RevOps and ops engineers at 10–200 person companies who have an engineer on hand, want the CRM on their own infrastructure or in their own EU region, and would rather write a TypeScript app than buy a marketplace add-on.

Not for

Sales teams without technical support: migrations off complex Salesforce or HubSpot orgs need scripting or a partner, and there is no AppExchange-sized ecosystem to fill gaps. Teams whose buying requirement is SSO on the cheap tier. And teams buying for outbound — Twenty has no built-in sequencing, dialer or contact database, so you still pay for Apollo, Outreach or a Clay workflow.

Versus the alternatives

• Salesforce — pick it when finance, support and partners already share the data model, or when year-three governance at 200+ users is the evaluation. Twenty wins on cost (Organization is roughly a ninth of Enterprise list) and on owning the code.
• HubSpot — pick it when marketing automation, sequences and CRM need to sit on one bill and nobody on the team writes code. Twenty is a CRM, not a marketing suite.
• Attio — the fastest-growing entrant in the flexible-data-model segment, and the closest in feel. Pick Attio when you want built-in enrichment, Sequences and call intelligence without running anything yourself; pick Twenty when self-hosting, the open-source license, or $9 against Attio’s $35 Plus seat is the deciding line.

Watch-outs

• Self-hosted is only free until you need SSO. SSO, row-level permissions and audit logs are in the commercially licensed files, so a security questionnaire turns a $0 install into an Organization license. Guard: list your access-control requirements before choosing the free path, and price the Organization key on day one if SSO is on the list.
• The AGPL has teeth if you resell. Internal use is unrestricted, but a modified Twenty offered to customers over a network triggers AGPL source obligations. Guard: build customer-facing extensions as separate apps through the MIT-licensed SDK and the published APIs, which the license’s application exception covers, rather than forking the core.
• Pro’s API ceiling is low for sync-heavy stacks. 50 calls/minute throttles a bulk enrichment backfill or a two-way warehouse sync. Guard: batch writes through the GraphQL API and schedule backfills off-hours, or budget Organization’s 100/minute if the CRM sits in the middle of the data flow.
• Credits are small and pooled. 5 credits/month per workspace covers plain automation but not a team running AI agents daily. Guard: run one month on monthly billing, read the per-workflow and per-model credit breakdown in Settings → Billing, then buy packs or move to annual.
• Call recording is new. Transcripts shipped in late August 2026 and are weeks old, not a replacement for a conversation-intelligence tool. Guard: keep Fathom or Granola on calls — both have Twenty apps — until the native recorder has a quarter of production use behind it.