Act vs Twenty
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Act! pivots from CRM-only to payment processor while modernizing its Cloud UX.
Act! is in the middle of a methodical Cloud modernization, rebuilding list views, navigation, and notifications to match the consistency users expect from modern CRMs. Alongside that polish work, Act! has just shipped Act! Payments via Propelr — turning the CRM into a place where credit card transactions close, not just leads. The product is still recognizably a small-business CRM, but its surface area is widening.
The release cadence shows two parallel tracks: weekly UX rationalization (notification center, list parity, faster task editing) and category expansion through embedded financial services. Act! is following the same playbook HubSpot and Pipedrive have run — keep the legacy users happy with quality-of-life work while quietly bolting on revenue-bearing features that compete with Stripe-adjacent SMB tools. Payments is the most directional move in years.
Expect deeper payments integration next — recurring billing tied to opportunities, dunning workflows from the contact record, and likely a payments-driven pricing tier that monetizes transaction volume rather than seats.
Twenty's open-source CRM hits v2.5 while wiring AI agents and credit-metered billing into the workflow core.
Twenty is shipping fast on its v2.x line, with five releases across April and May pushing AI agents as first-class workflow nodes and rolling out a billing v2 that meters AI credit usage. The release cadence shows the cost of that ambition: a string of cross-version upgrade hotfixes, agent-node execution bugs, and modal-loading regressions has accompanied the new surface area. The team is leaning into incremental hotfixes (v2.5.0 to v2.5.3 within four days) rather than batching.
AI agents and credit-based metering are becoming structural to the product, not optional add-ons — the architecture is being reshaped to gate billing at AI entry points rather than per workflow step. Meanwhile the workspace migration runner keeps surfacing cascade-dependency bugs as the schema evolves, suggesting an underlying brittleness that will need a structural fix. The pattern is: new capability ships, upgrade paths break, hotfix lands.
Expect a consolidation release that hardens the workspace migration runner against cascading column dependencies — the recurring pattern of fixing this case-by-case (v2.5.0, then the band-aids in #20581/#20583) signals a refactor is overdue. AI agent capabilities will continue expanding as the credit-cap architecture matures.
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