Twenty is free the moment you can run Docker, and not one moment before

76 out of 100 puts Twenty in our Strong band, and it ranks first in the CRM category while two tools score above it. EspoCRM and SuiteCRM both land on 77. That is effectively a tie, and we are leaving it visible rather than tuning it, because Twenty's rank rests on being the nicest of the open source CRMs to use day to day and none of our four pillars measures how a tool feels to work in.

The number itself comes from the split between the two builds. Generosity and freedom both sit at 84 on the strength of a self-hosted instance with no meter, and both take a deduction for the same fact: there is no free tier on the cloud at all. Sentiment sits at exactly 50 because we hold no G2, Trustpilot or Capterra figure for Twenty whatsoever. That is unremarkable for a project founded in 2023, and it means the pillar reports an absence rather than a judgement.

Nothing in the free build counts anything, so the honest limitations here are about running it rather than about ceilings.

• You provide the infrastructure. Docker and a PostgreSQL database, then updates, backups and security patching for the system your sales team opens every morning. The project ships a Docker Compose setup and a developer can have it running in an evening, but nobody else is carrying that pager afterwards.
• The free build is not byte for byte the paid one. Files marked with an Enterprise licence header sit under a separate Twenty.com commercial licence rather than the AGPL-3.0 core (as of July 2026). Do not assume everything you saw in the cloud trial is yours to run.
• The cloud is not a fallback. There is no free tier on twenty.com, only 30 days, so an instance you can no longer maintain converts to $9 per user per month rather than to a smaller free plan.
• The integration catalogue is thin. Twenty is young, and the list of native connectors is short next to HubSpot's or Zoho's. Wiring up your stack can mean writing against the API yourself, which costs developer hours instead of dollars.

None of that will ever show you an upgrade prompt. It will show you a 2am alert instead, and for a CRM holding every customer conversation your business has had, that trade deserves a decision rather than a shrug.

The plan cards below show a $0 column, and the useful thing to know about it is that it is not a plan Twenty operates for you. It is permission to run the software yourself. The ladder proper starts at Pro, $9 per user per month, after a 30-day trial.

Pro does not unlock features you were missing. It removes the server: hosting, upgrades and backups become somebody else's problem, with full customisation, custom apps, AI agents and workflow credits included. Organization at $19 per user per month is the compliance rung, adding row-level permissions, SAML and OIDC single sign-on, a custom domain and higher API rate limits. For most small teams the second rung is irrelevant until an enterprise customer asks about SSO.

As a paid ladder this is fair, and $9 a seat undercuts most hosted CRMs with a comparable feature set. As an answer to whether Twenty is free, it is the wrong axis, because the thing people upgrade for here is operational relief rather than a locked feature. The real sum is $9 per user per month against your own time: five seats is $540 a year, which buys a small VPS and leaves change for the evenings you spend patching it.

Free with limits, and the limit is a requirement rather than a quota. Self-host it and nothing meters you, which on its own would be a yes. Two things hold our answer one step back: some Enterprise-marked files in the codebase sit under a separate commercial licence rather than the AGPL, and the only other door is a trial with nothing free underneath it.

Concretely, a startup with a developer on staff can run its whole pipeline on Twenty indefinitely and pay nothing but hosting, which is the best deal in this category for a team that owns its own stack. A two-person consultancy with no server skills cannot, and should read $9 per user per month as Twenty's actual price for them. The uncomfortable middle case is the team that can install it and then stops maintaining it, because a CRM that quietly stopped taking backups is worse than the spreadsheet it replaced.

If that middle case sounds like you, Zoho CRM's free plan is the hosted answer for up to three people, free Twenty alternatives lists the rest, and the best free CRM software ranks the whole category.