Erxes vs Twenty CRM in 2026: All-in-One vs Focused CRM

Q: What About Other CRM Options?

The open source CRM space also includes SuiteCRM (the most feature-complete, but legacy PHP), EspoCRM (modern, lightweight, and easier than SuiteCRM), and Monica (personal CRM for relationship management). For B2B sales teams specifically, Twenty and Erxes are the two most actively developed modern options in 2026. ---

TL;DR

Both Erxes and Twenty CRM are open source HubSpot/Salesforce alternatives. Erxes is the all-in-one business platform — CRM, marketing automation, customer support, and email campaigns under one roof. Twenty is the focused modern CRM — contact management, deal pipelines, and a beautiful GraphQL-powered interface with no marketing or support bloat. Choose based on whether you need a full business suite or just excellent CRM.

Key Takeaways

Erxes (AGPL-3.0, 3K+ stars) covers CRM + marketing automation + customer support + email campaigns — the open source HubSpot equivalent
Twenty (AGPL-3.0, 24K+ stars) is a laser-focused CRM with a modern React/NestJS stack and an exceptional developer API
HubSpot's Sales Hub starts at $20/user/month — a 5-person sales team pays $1,200/year at the entry tier, $4,800/year at Professional
Erxes requires more infrastructure (multiple microservices) but covers more use cases
Twenty's GraphQL API is production-grade and already used as a CRM layer for custom internal tooling
Both run on AGPL-3.0 — self-hosted use is free

The HubSpot Problem

HubSpot is the dominant CRM for growth-stage companies, and it earns that position — the product is genuinely excellent. But the pricing creates a trap. The free CRM is actually useful, which gets companies hooked. Then growth unlocks limits that require upgrading: email sequences, more reporting, automation workflows, calling features. By the time a 10-person sales team needs HubSpot's Marketing + Sales + Service Hub at the Professional tier, they're paying $3,600+/month — $43,200/year.

Self-hosted CRM eliminates the per-seat licensing. You pay for a server (one VPS, $20–40/month) instead of per user.

Twenty — The Modern Focused CRM

Twenty was built by ex-engineers from Qonto and Lemlist with a clear thesis: most CRMs try to be everything and end up being mediocre at everything. Twenty focuses exclusively on being the best CRM — contacts, companies, deals, activities, and a powerful developer API.

The UI is genuinely impressive — it looks and feels like a well-funded startup's product, not an open source project. The interface is fast (optimistic updates), supports keyboard shortcuts throughout, and has a command palette for navigating the entire CRM without touching the mouse.

# Twenty CRM Docker Compose
services:
  twenty-front:
    image: twentycrm/twenty-front:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3001:3000"
    environment:
      - REACT_APP_SERVER_BASE_URL=https://crm.yourdomain.com
  twenty-server:
    image: twentycrm/twenty-server:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      - PG_DATABASE_URL=postgresql://twenty:password@db:5432/twenty
      - FRONT_BASE_URL=https://crm.yourdomain.com
      - SIGN_IN_PREFILLED_EMAIL=admin@yourdomain.com
      - APP_SECRET=your-app-secret
      - STORAGE_TYPE=local
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis
  db:
    image: postgres:15
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: twenty
      POSTGRES_USER: twenty
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: password
    volumes:
      - twenty_db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
  redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
  twenty_db:

Custom objects are a standout feature. Twenty isn't limited to contacts, companies, and deals — you can create your own data objects (e.g., "Investors", "Partners", "Vendors") with custom fields and relationships, then access them through the same UI and API. This turns Twenty into a flexible data platform rather than a rigid CRM.

// Twenty's GraphQL API — query contacts
const query = `
  query GetContacts {
    people(filter: {
      company: { name: { like: "%Stripe%" } }
    }) {
      edges {
        node {
          id
          name { firstName lastName }
          emails { primaryEmail }
          company { name domainName }
          opportunities {
            edges {
              node {
                name
                amount { amountMicros currencyCode }
                stage
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
`;

const response = await fetch('https://crm.yourdomain.com/api', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'Authorization': `Bearer ${apiToken}`,
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({ query }),
});

Key features:

Contacts, companies, deals, and activities
Custom objects with custom fields
Kanban deal pipeline view
Notes and tasks on any record
Email integration (IMAP/SMTP threading)
Calendar sync (Google Calendar)
GraphQL API (full CRUD on all objects)
Webhooks for external integrations
Import from CSV, HubSpot, Salesforce
OIDC single sign-on
24K+ GitHub stars (one of the fastest-growing CRM projects)

Limitations:

No built-in marketing automation
No email campaign/sequence sending
No customer support inbox
No phone/calling features

Erxes — The Open Source HubSpot

Erxes takes the opposite approach: be the entire customer-facing software stack. The platform covers CRM, marketing automation, customer support inbox, live chat, email campaigns, forms, and sales pipelines — all in one deployment.

The architecture reflects this ambition. Erxes runs as a set of microservices: API gateway, core backend, separate worker processes for emails and jobs, and integrations with external messaging platforms. This complexity is the price of feature breadth.

# Erxes simplified Docker Compose (abbreviated)
services:
  erxes:
    image: erxes/erxes:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      - REACT_APP_API_URL=https://api.erxes.yourdomain.com
      - REACT_APP_SUBSCRIPTION_URL=wss://api.erxes.yourdomain.com/graphql
  erxes-api:
    image: erxes/erxes-api:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      - MONGO_URL=mongodb://mongo:27017/erxes
      - REDIS_HOST=redis
      - ELASTICSEARCH_URL=http://elasticsearch:9200
      - JWT_TOKEN_SECRET=your-jwt-secret
    depends_on:
      - mongo
      - redis
      - elasticsearch
  mongo:
    image: mongo:4
    volumes:
      - erxes_mongo:/data/db
  redis:
    image: redis:7-alpine
  elasticsearch:
    image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:8.6.2
    environment:
      - discovery.type=single-node
      - xpack.security.enabled=false
    volumes:
      - erxes_es:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
volumes:
  erxes_mongo:
  erxes_es:

The inbox is Erxes' most distinct feature. All customer conversations — live chat messages, email replies, form submissions, social media comments — flow into a unified inbox with assignment, tagging, and resolution workflows. This eliminates the need for a separate Intercom or Zendesk deployment.

Marketing automation builds behavioral workflows: "when a lead visits pricing page 3 times, assign to sales rep and send follow-up email." The visual workflow builder handles multi-step campaigns with conditional branching.

Email campaigns run through your SMTP provider (SendGrid, SES, Postmark) with open tracking, click tracking, and list management. Unsubscribes are handled automatically.

Key features:

CRM with contact, company, and deal management
Unified customer inbox (chat, email, social)
Live chat widget for websites
Marketing automation workflows
Email campaigns with tracking
Forms and landing pages
Customer segmentation
Sales pipeline management
GraphQL API
Plugin/module system for extending features

Limitations:

Complex multi-service deployment (MongoDB + Redis + Elasticsearch)
Higher resource requirements (4+ GB RAM)
Less polished UX than Twenty
Smaller GitHub star count (3K vs Twenty's 24K)
More configuration required to get started

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	Erxes	Twenty
License	AGPL-3.0	AGPL-3.0
Stars	3K+	24K+
Stack	TypeScript + MongoDB + Elasticsearch	TypeScript + React + NestJS + PostgreSQL
CRM (contacts/deals)	✅	✅
Marketing automation	✅	❌
Customer support inbox	✅	❌
Live chat	✅	❌
Email campaigns	✅	❌
Custom objects	Plugin-based	✅ Native
UX quality	Functional	Excellent
API	GraphQL	GraphQL
Min RAM	4 GB	1 GB
Setup complexity	High	Low

Decision Framework

Choose Twenty if:

You need a CRM and only a CRM — contacts, companies, deals, activities
Developer API usage is important (Twenty's GraphQL API is production-grade)
You want to extend CRM with custom objects for your specific business model
UX matters — Twenty looks and feels like a well-funded product
You have limited DevOps capacity (simpler Docker Compose, less infrastructure)

Choose Erxes if:

You want to replace HubSpot or Intercom — not just the CRM but the full customer-facing stack
Customer support inbox is required (unified chat + email conversations)
Marketing automation workflows are a core requirement
Email campaigns and lead nurturing are part of the use case
You have the infrastructure capacity for the larger deployment

What About Other CRM Options?

The open source CRM space also includes SuiteCRM (the most feature-complete, but legacy PHP), EspoCRM (modern, lightweight, and easier than SuiteCRM), and Monica (personal CRM for relationship management). For B2B sales teams specifically, Twenty and Erxes are the two most actively developed modern options in 2026.

Cost Comparison

Solution	Annual Cost (5 users)
HubSpot Sales Professional	$4,800/year
HubSpot Sales Starter	$1,200/year
Salesforce Essentials	$1,800/year
Twenty self-hosted	$60–120/year (VPS)
Erxes self-hosted	$120–240/year (larger server)

Migrating From HubSpot or Salesforce: What the Transition Looks Like

The migration question is as important as the tool comparison itself. Both Twenty and Erxes are capable of replacing HubSpot Starter or Salesforce Essentials — but the migration path has common failure modes that are worth anticipating.

Data export and cleaning. HubSpot exports contacts, companies, deals, and activities as CSV files. Salesforce exports via Data Export or Apex data loader. The exported data almost always contains years of accumulated noise: duplicate contacts with slight name variations, contacts associated with wrong companies, deals in inconsistent stages, and custom field values that made sense in 2019 but no longer reflect how your team works. Migrating dirty data into a new CRM embeds the same problems you had before. Budget 40-60% of the migration timeline for data cleaning — deduplication, normalization, and validation — before import.

Custom field mapping. Both HubSpot and Salesforce have accumulated dozens of custom fields that your team added over the years. Twenty's data model is flexible (the custom objects feature lets you create entirely new entity types), but custom fields in the source CRM need to be manually mapped to fields in the target system. Fields that were workarounds for CRM limitations (storing data in text fields because there was no proper relationship field) often need to be rethought rather than directly copied.

Historical activity and email timeline. The contact timeline — all the email exchanges, calls logged, meetings, and notes accumulated over a relationship — is often the most valuable data in a CRM. It's also the hardest to migrate. HubSpot email data is not fully exportable via CSV; you get summary data but not complete email content. Salesforce's email-to-case data requires custom export scripts. Plan for the reality that some historical activity data may not survive migration, and decide in advance what "good enough" looks like — typically, the structured data (contacts, companies, deals, deal amounts) migrates cleanly, while unstructured historical notes require manual effort.

User adoption and workflow transition. CRM migrations fail more often from adoption problems than technical problems. Your sales team has years of muscle memory in the current tool. The new CRM needs to be demonstrably faster or more pleasant for daily tasks, not just equivalent. Identify 2-3 power users who participate in the evaluation and configuration of the new system — they become internal advocates who train and support the rest of the team. Run the new system in parallel with the old one for 30-60 days, with the new system as the system of record for new deals, to validate workflows before fully decommissioning the old CRM.

Integration rebuilds. Every CRM integration your team relies on — email sync, calendar sync, marketing automation trigger, Slack notifications, reporting — needs to be rebuilt in the new system. Both Twenty and Erxes have webhook APIs that enable custom integrations. Inventory all active integrations before migration and budget engineering time for the rebuilds. Erxes's plugin architecture means some integrations exist as first-party plugins; Twenty's REST/GraphQL API requires custom integration code for most third-party connections.

Rollback plan and parallel running period. Define your rollback plan before starting the migration: what constitutes a migration failure, and what steps would you take to revert if critical functionality doesn't work in the new system within 30 days? The cost of a clear rollback plan is low; the cost of not having one when you need it is high. Run both systems in parallel for at least 30 days — new deals enter the new CRM, existing deals remain in the old one until close. This limits the blast radius of any migration issue to new deals only, rather than contaminating active pipeline.

For the broader open source CRM landscape, see Best Open Source CRM Tools 2026. For the specific Twenty vs SuiteCRM comparison covering legacy CRM migration, see Twenty vs SuiteCRM 2026. Teams evaluating replacing HubSpot's marketing automation alongside CRM should see Best Open Source HubSpot Alternatives 2026.

See open source alternatives to Erxes on OSSAlt.

Erxes vs Twenty CRM in 2026: Which Open Source CRM?