What is vendor lock-in, and how do you choose a CRM without it?
Every CRM has an export button, and that's precisely why that button tells you nothing: you get your contacts but lose your pipeline, your fields and your history. What lock-in really is, and which test exposes it.
Lees dit in het Nederlands →$ export --everything --and-then-what
What is vendor lock-in, and how do you choose a CRM without it?
Vendor lock-in means the cost of leaving is so high that you stay, even if you'd rather not. That cost mainly lies in rebuild work: your pipeline, your automations and your history don't come with you in an export. You choose a CRM without lock-in by testing in advance what you'd take with you if you left tomorrow.
"Vendor lock-in" is jargon for something simple: the cost of leaving is so high that you stay, even if you'd rather not.
That cost mainly lies in work you'd have to do again, not in a penalty clause.
01 / what lock-in really isWhy isn't an export button an answer?
Because it exports the easiest part.
Ask a supplier whether you can take your data with you and the answer is always yes. That's correct, too: you get a file with contacts, and that really is yours.
But think about what you've built up over a year:
| Component | Included in an export? |
|---|---|
| Contacts and companies | Yes. Names, addresses, phone numbers. Those come along, always. |
| Custom fields | Partly. Often as a column in the file, but without the meaning: which values are allowed, what happens when one changes. |
| Your pipeline | No. The stages, the rules for when something moves forward, the reporting on it. |
| Your automations | No. Every "if this, then that" you've set up, rebuilt from scratch. |
| The history | No. Who called when, what was discussed, which email was sent. Usually unusable or incomplete. |
You export your contacts. You leave your way of working behind.
That difference is the lock-in. Not the contract, but the rebuild work.
02 / the testWhat would you take with you if you left tomorrow?
Four questions you can answer today, before you need them.
- Can you download an export without calling your supplier? If someone has to submit a request, the export is a favour, not a right.
- Is the history included (calls, notes, emails)? Test it. Export one contact and see what's in the file.
- Is there a description anywhere of how your automations work, outside the system itself? If not, your way of working is only legible for as long as you keep paying.
- Whose name is the account in? If you work through an agency, you sometimes have access to an environment that's theirs. That's a different story from ownership.
That last one is the sharpest, and it's the reason we're moving ourselves. Our CRM runs in an environment that works fine technically, but the setup is that we manage it and the client sits inside it. That's precisely what a client does not own.
03 / what we choseWhy Twenty?
For three reasons, one of which is technical and two of which aren't.
It's open source. If the supplier disappears, the software still exists. That's a different kind of certainty than a service contract: you're not dependent on whether a company keeps existing.
It talks directly to language models. Twenty is the only open-source CRM we know of with a built-in connection for AI assistants. For us that's not a side detail, but the difference between a CRM an agent can pull something out of and a CRM we'd first have to build an intermediate layer for.
It separates clients at database level. Every workspace gets its own schema in the database. That's a firmer separation than a column stating "which client does this row belong to", which is what many systems give you: one coding error in a filter and client A sees client B.
04 / what it costs youWhat's the price of open source?
More than the website of a project like that tells you. Four things.
And the most honest point: there's no cost argument. Our current CRM doesn't cost us anything extra per additional client environment. So moving delivers nothing on that front. The reason is ownership, not money, and whoever tells you open source is always cheaper hasn't counted the hours.
05 / where things standIs this running already?
No. Decided on 29 July, not yet installed.
The translation table between the old and new system exists: which field lands where, what merges, what disappears. But that's a document, not proof: no connection has been tested live yet.
Why we're writing this down now anyway: because the reasoning is useful before we finish it. You don't need to wait for our migration to run the four questions from section 2 against your own system.
And if the outcome of that is that you're fine where you are, that's fine too. Switching for the sake of switching is more expensive than lock-in.
What exactly is vendor lock-in?+
So is an export button worthless?+
Why did you choose Twenty?+
Is open source cheaper?+
Is this already running for you?+
Want to know how locked in you currently are?
Schedule a call
We'll look at where your time is leaking and tell you honestly whether we can do anything about it. Often the answer is: you can do this yourself. Then we'll say so, and you'll have spent thirty minutes on a clear answer.
This text was produced with AI assistance and checked and approved by a human before publication.