CRM · cost comparison
Salesforce Sales Cloud vs self-hosted Twenty: what each actually costs
Salesforce Sales Cloud on the Pro Suite tier against Twenty running on the smallest server that fits it. Every figure below is computed from the sizing model and the dated prices at the foot of this page, and includes the part most comparisons leave out: your own time.
At 10 people, self-hosting Twenty costs $272 a month against $1,000 for Salesforce Sales Cloud. You are ahead after about a month and $25,015 better off over 36 months, with your own time already priced in.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- $1,000per month, Pro Suite
- Self-hosted
- $272server, backups and your time
- Server and backups
- $46.80Starter 8 GB, 8 GB RAM
- 36-month difference
- $25,015 saved by self-hosting
- Break-even
- about a monthafter $1,200 of setup time
The same comparison at every team size
Self-hosting has a floor and almost no slope, while per-seat software has no floor and a steep slope. That is the whole story, and it is why the answer flips somewhere in this table rather than being the same for everyone.
| Team size | Salesforce Sales Cloud | Self-hosted | Without valuing your time | Server needed | 36-month difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| solo | $100 | $272 | $46.80 | Starter 8 GB (8 GB) | -$7,385 |
| 5 people | $500 | $272 | $46.80 | Starter 8 GB (8 GB) | +$7,015 |
| 10 people | $1,000 | $272 | $46.80 | Starter 8 GB (8 GB) | +$25,015 |
| 25 people | $2,500 | $272 | $46.80 | Starter 8 GB (8 GB) | +$79,015 |
| 50 people | $5,000 | $272 | $46.80 | Starter 8 GB (8 GB) | +$169,015 |
| 100 people | $10,000 | $272 | $46.80 | Starter 8 GB (8 GB) | +$349,015 |
| 250 people | $25,000 | $326 | $101 | Starter 16 GB (16 GB) | +$887,071 |
The balance tips in favour of self-hosting at around 5 people.
Where the self-hosted money actually goes at 10 people
| Line item | Per month | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Server | $39.00 | Starter 8 GB at VPSServer: 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 150 GB disk |
| Backups | $7.80 | Provider snapshots at 20% of the server price. Skipping this is not a saving, it is a bet. |
| Your time | $225 | 3 hours a month of updates, upgrades and the occasional broken thing, at $75 an hour |
| Total | $272 | Plus $1,200 once, for roughly 16 hours of first-time setup |
Salesforce Sales Cloud at this size costs $1,000 a month. 10 seats at $100 each. This is the annually-billed rate, which is what the vendor's page displayed; paying monthly costs more.
What Twenty needs to run at 10 people
Server, worker, PostgreSQL and Redis. The most credible modern-feeling open CRM, and still moving fast enough that you should pin versions.
| Resource | Required | How it is derived |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 5.2 GB | 4 GB for the stack at rest, plus 20 MB per active user, plus 25% headroom |
| Disk | 21 GB | 20 GB base, plus 0.1 GB per user |
| vCPU | 2 | The project's own baseline. For this workload memory runs out before the processor does. |
These base figures are an estimate. Twenty does not publish a minimum specification we could cite, so the base memory and disk are derived from the services in its own reference Docker Compose file. Treat them as a starting point and watch the first week of metrics.
What you give up, stated plainly
- Uptime is now yours. Salesforce Sales Cloud has an operations team on call. Self-hosted, a failed upgrade at 18:00 on a Friday is your evening.
- Backups only exist if you test restoring them. The $7.80 line above buys snapshots, not a rehearsed recovery.
- Twenty is operationally heavy: several stateful services and an upgrade path that can lose data if you rush it. That is why the maintenance line is 3 hours a month rather than zero.
- Feature parity is never exact. Twenty covers the core of what teams use Salesforce Sales Cloud for; the long tail of integrations and enterprise controls is where the gap shows.
Where to put Twenty
5.2 GB of memory and 21 GB of disk is what this needs at 10 people. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the Starter 8 GB at VPSServer for $39.00 a month.
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Hetzner Cloud, Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and Hetzner in particular is usually cheaper per gigabyte of memory than anything quoted above. Price them yourself before you commit.
The VPSServer link above is an affiliate link, run through the same programme as our Kamatera link; VPSServer and Kamatera belong to the same group. If you sign up through it we may earn a commission, but the programme does not state an amount for VPSServer. That never changes the computed costs, which server is chosen, or the conclusion of this page. The sizing model and every price source are published in full.
Twenty at a glance
| Licence | Other not a standard open-source licence |
|---|---|
| Written in | TypeScript |
| GitHub stars | 56,624, checked 2026-09-12 |
| Latest release | sdk/v2.39.0 |
| Last commit | 2026-09-12 |
| Ships Docker images | Yes |
| Project | twenty.com · twentyhq/twenty |
Get the migration checklist for this tool
A one-page pre-flight list: data export path, sizing, backup plan, and the rollback step most people skip.
Every figure on this page, and where it came from
| Input | Value used | Source | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce Sales Cloud Pro Suite | USD 100.00 per seat per month | vendor pricing page | 2026-10-09 |
| VPSServer Starter 8 GB | $39.00 per month | provider pricing page | 2026-09-21 |
| Engineer time | $75 per hour | our published assumption | — |
| Twenty sizing | 4 GB base, 20 MB per user | derived from its reference Compose stack | — |
Prices move. If the vendor has changed theirs since 2026-10-09, the figures above are stale and the source links are the authority, not us. How we handle that.