Twilio Alternatives in 2018

Introduction

There is no doubt that Twilio has done a great job marketing CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service)APIs and SDKs to the developer community and has went from a startup all the way to IPO with their model.

Many apps and services that we relay on today such as ride-sharing apps like Uber and features like two-step verification when accessing our emails and web pages are mostly powered by CPaaS APIs like Twilio, Nexmo, Plivo.

The problem

Almost every CPaaS Provider out there (Nexmo, Plivo, Twilio) are competing in the market by either slightly less pricing, faster support etc.. and trying to win the developers attention in order to win the API stickiness into their apps and win the traffic (Voice, SMS, Lookup…).

I have seen so many blog posts trying to compare CPaaS providers or the CPaaS providers them selves spending energy to win the ranking on Google search for Twilio cheaper alternatives. for example:

However, after many years of monitoring and trying different CPaaS providers we realized that none of these popular CPaaS providers or Communications APIs and SDKs providers is perfect enough and switching from one to another as an alternative is not a solution, in fact its a full waste of time. Why ? because each CPaaS provider have their strength and weaknesses specially on the carrier connectivity side of things and pricing.

For example while Twilio is strong in North America, Nexmo is stronger in EU and Unifonice is strong in KSA and so on, so what now, who wants to integrate with many different APIs, SDKs in one application “YUCK!”.

The Solution

After couple of years of research we have realized that what we need is one API, SDK for Voice, Video, Messaging, WebRTC that allows us to use any SMS, Voice, Messaging channel/connection that we want including Nexmo, Twilio, Plivo and others. So okay to solve the problem we need to build Voice, Video, Messaging, WebRTC APIs and SDKs from scratch that will interact with our backend infrastructure to complete the transaction, while its totally possible to build it we realized that to do it right and scale it properly we need a couple of years and a couple Millions dollars to get the job done correctly until we found RESTCOMM  and realized that it empowers most of the successful CPaaS retailers out there like Twilio, Plivo, Nexmo, you can easily figure this out by simply looking at the API documentation of Restcomm Cloud and compare it to Twilio, Nexmo, Plivo it will become obvious the the core technology used is the popular open-source Restcomm which is backed by TeleStax .

TeleStax took out the complexity of Restcomm setup and configuration by offering an easy way to start and scale your CPaaS Platform in the Cloud which solves the API Layer of the problem, next what you need is to use Restcomm Cloud BYOC (Bring your own Carrier) feature to connect to Voice, SMS Carriers.

Once that is done you’re ready to add as many SMS & Voice carriers as you need including Twilio, Nexmo … and let your application interact with one single API and you can manipulate connectivity and routing on the application level, you can also use TelecomsXChange platform to instantly connect your restcomm cloud account to 300+ carriers around the world at wholesale pricing