
Why choose Tropo over Twilio - blitzo
http://www.diggz.org/index.php/2010/12/01/why-choose-tropo-over-twili/
======
garply
I have a gripe against Twilio. Aside from their China service sucking, they
keep sending me newsletters or emails that are tailored to look like they're
personally written to me. The subject looks like "RE: Twilio's Developer
Community" and then the text preview in gmail looks something like "Hi Joe, I
wanted to drop..."

Effective at getting me to open the email, but I always feel deceived when I
open it up to see the cookie-cutter mail that they've sent me.

~~~
asanwal
So is the alternative/your expectation that they send each developer a custom
email? If Twilio was to do that, that doesn't sound practical, scalable or
smart.

~~~
mgkimsal
The alternative would be to not include "RE:" in the subject, which makes it
looks like a reply to an earlier thread. The subject is subject enough
already. Don't manipulate it with a "RE:" to imply something more.

That said, I've been working with Twilio on and off for 2 years and have never
received an email like this from them.

~~~
danielle17
Looks like this is a bit of email usability fail on our part. When you first
sign up for Twilio, you receive an email with the subject line "Welcome to
Twilio... Learn to Build Your First Phone App in Less than 5 Minutes" and then
7 days later we send you an email introducing our CEO that says "RE: Welcome
to Twilio..." in the subject line. The goal was that these would get threaded
together, but they don't since the from is "Twilio" in the first and we use
real names in the other emails (the one from Jeff says his name, the one from
me says my name, etc.)

Sorry about that, it's an easy fix to remove the RE:

~~~
mgkimsal
Thanks for addressing that.

------
hopeless
My more pragmatic reasons for choosing Tropi over Twilio:

1\. having the voice scripts written in Ruby and hosted by Tropo was easier
than building a web service to control every mundane aspect

2\. Tropo would supply non-U.S. numbers if I needed them

3\. Tropo made it easy to do the voice recording and POST it as an MP3

4\. Tropo worked out cheaper for my little test service

Some or all of these may now have changed but i'd still give Tropo first
choice in any future projects

~~~
visionik
Thank you for a great summary of Tropo advantages!

-Jonathan (CEO, Voxeo)

~~~
SriniK
Do you guys consider giving sms bulk discount? Like a tiered pricing?

~~~
akalsey
We're already priced below the bulk price of most other vendors. What sort of
volume do you have? Feel free to drop me an email at akalsey@tropo.com

------
rriepe
Every time I ask, "Why don't you use Tropo?" I invariably hear "What's Tropo?"

It's a shame, because it is pretty great. I think the word is finally getting
out now, though.

~~~
ra
We use Twilio, and I hadn't heard of Tropo.

FWIW we're not totally over the moon with Twilio, and I've since discovered
freeswitch, which is much more developer friendly and scalable than asterisk.

It's all but persuaded me to roll our own telco connectivity.

~~~
danielle17
If there's anything we can do to make your Twilio experience better, I hope
you'll email me, I'm danielle@twilio.com

~~~
HectorRamos
We've been experimenting with Twilio for the past few months, have some proofs
of concepts up and running, but in the end it seems like we will launch with
Tropo instead. We're based in Puerto Rico, which even though is technically in
the US, we can't get local numbers through Twilio. It also helps that Tropo
has TTS in spanish and other languages.

Would really love to see Twilio match Tropo in these regards eventually!

~~~
danielle17
Hey Hector, thanks for this feedback I'll check with the team on the status of
Puerto Rico phone numbers. Regarding TTS, you might want to take a closer look
at the Twilio <Say> verb, we actually support Spanish TTS... you just have to
specify the language and you'll get the right accent, like this:

<Response> <Say language="es">Es un robot que hablan español!</Say>
</Response>

Also have French and Germain. Details here:
<http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/2010-04-01/twiml/say>

~~~
HectorRamos
Thanks for the followup - I'll check this out. I'm not sure how Tropo got the
PR numbers, as Google Voice and Skype have the same issue - something about
the local telecoms.

If anyone at Twilio needs help when dealing with the PR numbers/needs telecom
contact info/whatever, send me an email to anything @ my username dot com

------
AlexMuir
Absolutely agree that Tropo is better than Twilio. Here are my reasons:

1\. Cheaper

2\. Multiple voices and accents (UK British Male & Female)

3\. Use any number as caller ID.

4\. Calls during development are free.

5\. Recordings are a breeze

6\. Voice recognition from a set of options instead of pressing digits (eg.
"Say yes, no or repeat").

On the downside, I've found their system wasn't quite as easy to get going
with as Twilio, but it is much more powerful.

Twilio have been more visible and active - Tropo seem slightly behind in
evangelism and generally pimping their product.

~~~
adityakothadiya
I'm not sure why you're saying it's cheaper. As Danielle mentioned, the prices
are actually very less. And as a developer, every penny difference counts.
Also they give $30 credit, which is more than enough to "try and play" and
release your app to production.

I agree with point "3" though. I use Twilio for an app which sends voice call
reminders to other people. But when automatic reminder call goes to these
people, it goes from a 1-877 number and many people don't pick up the phone
thinking that it's a spam number. Instead if I could call from the number of
an original user who sets the reminder, that would be really great.

Point "6" also seem to be great, and I'm sure Twilio will add that.

But somehow, the article coming from Tropo's evangelist is not strong enough
or convincing to make a switch from Twilio to Tropo. In fact you did a good
job in highlighting some of the technical differences. I think the post lacks
these kinds of specifics.

~~~
visionik
Hi - Tropo should cost about the same as Twilio depending on your use case,
but Tropo does _alot_ more than Twilio for a roughly equivalent price. For
example. Twilio just does SMS, Tropo does SMS and IM. Tropo adds speech
recognition and higher quality speech synthesis, etc.

Also, I wanted to make sure I understand, what kind of specifics did you feel
are lacking in Diggz post? We love to learn how to improve our product and our
communication about it. If you are up for discussing it we will give you $100
on Amazon or Paypal for your time. Just email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.

-Jonathan (CEO Voxeo)

~~~
biot
[Edit: my info here was incorrect as it was based on a completely different
platform. Removing this to prevent confusion.]

~~~
visionik
Woah there, your post is misleading and I want to make sure no one is confused
as a result.

You said you inquired about Voxeo/Tropo but the pricing you mention above has
_absolutely nothing_ to do with Tropo.

Tropo is 100% free for development use - always.

Production Tropo pricing starts at 3 cents per minute with free second-leg
(connected) calls, free voice recognition, free high-quality speech synthesis,
free 24x7 support, no minimum, and no port limitations.

<http://tropo.com>

Prophecy IVR is a completely different service. It's intended for a different
customer set, and those customers _love_ the product.

~~~
biot
Thanks for the info. Looks like I should re-evaluate things as at the time
Tropo seemed to be a coming-soon/developer-only service that didn't have
details around production pricing nailed down. The Prophecy IVR info scared me
into thinking that Tropo might have similar limitations.

------
blitzo
"Twilio would never be able to keep up with Tropo on features" -Danielle
Morrill, Twilio head marketing

edit: to downvoter, i just wanna hear from danielle himself about this qoute,
no harm mean

~~~
danielle17
This quote is completely fabricated.

~~~
blitzo
that why i put the quote here, to hear a response from you

~~~
danielle17
:) thanks

------
runT1ME
Twilio uses _Asterisk_? Is this true? If so my respect for both their
technical chops and pain tolerance went up...

~~~
stanleydrew
This is absolutely true. I think Tropo does as well.

~~~
akalsey
No, Tropo uses Prism, Voxeo's enterprise grade SIP application server:
<http://www.voxeo.com/prism/>. Tropo's application layer is also open source
and will run on any SIP servelet server.

~~~
runT1ME
Is 'enterprise grade' referring to a specific technical claim made by Voxeo or
more of just a substitute for 'often used in the enterprise'?

~~~
visionik
Thank you for asking. "Enterprise grade" can be a vague marketing term. This
is what Voxeo means when we say PRISM is "enterprise grade":

1\. Fault tolerant: Including the ability to do state-full failover of
applications from one PRISM server instance to another.

2\. Scalable: Proven ability to scale to over 25,000 calls per server.

3\. High performance: Proven ability to scale to over 800 call setups (new
calls) per second per server.

4\. Standards-based: PRISM implements the Java SIP servlet standards (JSR-289)
and Java Media Control standard (JSR-309). PRISM applications can run
unmodified on similar platforms from Oracle, IBM, and Redhat - and vice versa.

5\. Support: PRISM is backed by a company with guaranteed 24x7 support, under
20 minute response times, over 150 employees, world-wide offices, financial
stability, and 10 years of experience.

On top of that, yes, PRISM is often used in the enterprise and by service
providers. :)

PRISM is also used for everything we do at Voxeo. All of our products and
services, including Tropo, are built on top of PRISM.

------
nivertech
Twilio always seems like a hack to me. Once VoiceXML/CCML was hot market with
many startups competing, with biggest exit being Tellme acquired by Microsoft
for $800M (same people who founded Zappos).

So what's new Twilio can offer here? I have no idea why USV invested in
them...

~~~
patio11
_So what's new Twilio can offer here?_

Twilio lets a modestly competent web developer program a telecommunications
company from their kitchen table in about, oh, six weeks or so. Alternatively,
Twlio lets a modestly competent web developer take an existing app and add
voice/SMS features to it in about a day. (Have a social site? Want to do SMS
notifications when something important happens? You can implement that in four
hours.)

~~~
visionik
I'm Voxeo's CEO.

Thanks for the summary of what Twilio makes possible.

What nivertech (who you responded to) knows and was trying to say is this:

With Voxeo (and others) a competent web developer has been able to create a
telecom company in six weeks - or add voice features in less than a day - for
ten years now. Voxeo delivered and has grown a completely free web-based
telephony developer program since 2000.

And since 2000 over 200,000 developers have used Voxeo to do just that.

This is the Voxeo developer site in the wayback machine archive from August
19, 2000:

<http://bit.ly/voxeo-dev-2000>

Quoting that site:

"our mission at voxeo community is to make it as easy as possible for web
developers, service providers, and enterprises to create and deploy
applications for an existing market of 1.5 billion telephone users.

existing web developers & services use technologies like Perl, PHP, Cold
Fusion, Microsoft ASP and Java Servlets to create web applications for
traditional web browsers via HTML. we make it just as easy to use those
technologies to create web applications for telephones, using phone markup
languages such as VoiceXML, Microsoft WTE, and CallXML."

Here's the juicy part:

"if you have experience creating web applications, this site will help you
create and test your first phone application in less than an hour -- without
any new hardware or software."

Sound familiar? :)

What Twilio has done that's new is use marketing and hype to convince
developers they invented something that was invented by others and available
for a decade now. The power of hype never ceases to amaze me.

To be fair, Twilio also did a great job creating more modern developer
documentation and refocusing on simplicity. These are things Voxeo had drifted
away from as we grew into "the man". In short, we got distracted by million
dollar deals with enterprises and carriers. We've continued to invest in our
developer community but things got increasingly complex as we added more and
more features and options over time.

Our new Voxeo Labs group - and it's Tropo.com service - was created to fix
that. We're behind on the evangelism but way ahead on the technology. And I
dare say we're getting better at evangelism every week. ;)

-Jonathan

~~~
mgkimsal
If it was really that easy a decade ago why was there no marketing done to
reach people like me?

Show me pricing lists and contracts from 10 years ago indicating it was cheap
as Twilio was 2 years ago. I can't see anything at
<http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://voxeo.com> :(

I _suspect_ the infrastructure was there for the 'big boys' and that indie
devs and 2-3 man shops who wanted this sort of functionality were ignored in
favor of 'enterprise' development shops and projects.

OK - rereading your post here - yes, you got 'distracted' by big deals. But
it's the focus on getting the basic fundamentals as easy for people to use as
possible which has created the Twilio loyalty and fandom they have relative to
voxeo/tropo.

Twilio has (imo) about a year to add some more features that people are asking
for before people jump ship. They should not waste that goodwill and rest on
their laurels. But it's going to be easier for them to grow their success with
smaller shops and indies in to something larger as those smaller shops and
projects grow to larger needs than it is for 'enterprise'-focused groups to
prove to the smaller players that they 'get' the independent developer market.

You can suggest that this is 'just' marketing/evangelism. I suspect it's a bit
more - a focused simplicity on getting a few core things down first rather
than trying to offer multiple services on day one. That doesn't appeal to
everyone, but I think it's helped more than hurt in Twilio's case. Simply by
having more options up front you're forcing people to have to learn a lot more
about stuff on _your_ terms when making an evaluation. For example, Tropo's
APIs - 'webapi' vs 'scripting'. Huh? What are the differences? I don't find an
adequate explanation of the strengths/weaknesses of each model.

Both services have their place, but developing a rabid fanbase will serve
Twilio better longer term as opposed to pure technical superiority.

~~~
diggz
>> If it was really that easy a decade ago why was there no marketing done to
reach people like me?

I can speak fairly knowledgeably as I headed up all of Voxeo's developer
community and support in the early part of this decade (and as employee #1 and
co-founder Voxeo). In a pre-social media world, marketing involved a lot of
face-to-face contact, primarily at conferences for developers: Cold Fusion,
PHP, ASP etc. We held app contests, live coding demos making people's phones
ring, sponsored meetups and conference after parties. (sound familiar?) We
were out there...just apparently not at the same ones you were at (sorry).

>> Show me pricing lists and contracts from 10 years ago indicating it was
cheap as Twilio was 2 years ago.

I honestly don't think any exist...not because they were lost, but because we
never charged anything back then..nor have we ever charged developers. For
production apps, there's no doubt that the cost of transporting data has
dropped dramatically in the past 10 years. What we can do for pennies now,
cost dimes 10 years ago. Of course, we also had to walk 10 miles to school, in
the snow, uphill, both ways ;-)

>> But it's the focus on getting the basic fundamentals as easy for people to
use as possible which has created the Twilio loyalty and fandom they have
relative to voxeo/tropo.

You are absolutely correct. There are some things about Tropo that are _still_
overly complex. We're working on that. Fortunately it's easier to simplify
features than to add new ones.

>> Twilio has (imo) about a year to add some more features that people are
asking for before people jump ship.

I'd tend to agree. By my estimation (based on how long it took them to burn
through their first round of financing) That _should_ be right about the same
time their latest round of funding runs out. No time for resting on laurels.
:-)

~~~
mgkimsal
Thanks for the reply :)

Whether you charged developers or not, at some point you charged _someone_ for
_something_.

While free dev accounts are great, I'm still not going to learn a tool and
recommend it to clients without knowing if it's something that they can
actually afford. Twilio has made it known from day 1 what the pricing is -
whether people liked it or not is a different matter! :)

<i>Fortunately it's easier to simplify features than to add new ones.</i>

Possibly in tropo's case it may be. That's not always the case - I would say
not even usually the case with software. Witness MSOffice - much easier to add
new features than to simplify the interface. The 'ribbon' effort pissed off as
many people as it helped. :) Don't give us a tropo 'ribbon' equivalent please!

~~~
visionik
As Voxeo's CEO, I guarantee there will be no Tropo Ribbons ;)

------
nutanc
I think the comments are becoming a little personal in this post. Thats in one
way good as that shows there is a developer attachment(fanboyism :)) to both
the platforms.But the fact of the matter is that both Twilio and Tropo are
trying to solve the same problem along with many other web to telephone
companies.Also,I think Teleku, acquired by Voxeo takes a Twilio kind of
approach.

Just to summarize the facts, and in general there is a consensus here:

1.Twilio is easier to get started

2.Tropo has more features

3.Both end up costing around the same.

So I would say, as a developer, just try both the platforms or atleast read
through the features and make an informed decision about which platform to go
with for your customers as ultimately they are the ones we are trying to
service.

------
ericb
I was looking at creating an IVR monitoring tool. I would like to 1-make a
call every hour, 2-record the response, and ideally 3-verify the response
matches the expected. Thoughts? It looks like twilio and tropi might be able
to do this (although I wasn't sure they weren't more focused on inbound), but
the 1 cent price is prohibitive for what people might pay per-month especially
at higher monitoring frequencies. Anyone have other solutions that are
reasonably simple?

edit: If I did run adhearsion/asterisk, what do I just have to connect it to a
phone line? Vague on the setup needed to do this...

~~~
akalsey
NuGram makes a product designed for just that. You could certainly build
something yourself using either a hosted service like Tropo or using Asterisk,
but using something purpose built may work better. We use NuGram to test
things.

If you run an asterisk server the easiest way to get it hooked up to the phone
network is by setting up a SIP account for it.

~~~
ericb
Thanks for the recommendations!

How is the pricing on NuGram? Is this it?
<http://www.grammarserver.com/welcome>

I'm finding their descriptions a bit opaque. Do you remember the product name
off hand? Do they host it, or do I need to look into learning what an SIP is?
:-)

~~~
schemeway
NuGram (www.grammarserver.com) is a hosted platform used to host and share
speech recognition grammars (both static and dynamic, i.e. grammar templates)
for use by hosted IVR platforms (Tropo, Voxeo Prophecy, etc.) It's totally
free, although it's not really meant for production use as of now. If you need
it in production, please contact me at dominique DOT boucher AT nuecho DOT
com.

From it's companion site, nugram.nuecho.com, you can also download a complete
Eclipse-based grammar development environment (NuGram IDE) from which you can
upload your grammars to NuGram Server.

Regarding the opacity of the site, maybe we could work on that... We are very
open to constructive comments!

\--Dominique (Nu Echo's CTO)

~~~
schemeway
Here is a blog post on Tropo's blog that explains how to use NuGram Server
from Tropo.

[http://blog.tropo.com/2009/12/17/advanced-grammar-topics-
for...](http://blog.tropo.com/2009/12/17/advanced-grammar-topics-for-tropo/)

~~~
jsgoecke
Yes, this is a great example of how we focus Tropo on making things easy. But
then also let you do the complex things like advanced grammars for speech
recognition when you need to. Simplicity mixed with depth of features.

------
johns
I work at Twilio and I wanted to clear up a couple misconceptions here for the
record.

I didn't know who the author was prior to this post but from his about page
he's the co-founder of Voxeo so this post is hardly impartial. He can write
whatever he wants on his blog obviously, but keep that in mind. Comments on
the site were also moderated preventing responses from some people.

It is not true that we only work with one carrier. We work with a variety of
carriers to maximize our capabilities, geographic reach and redundancy. Twilio
works with most of the same carriers as Google Voice.

In regards to prank calling, _every_ phone service is used for pranks, Tropo
included. In our case, it's a byproduct of making it easy for any web
developer to get started in minutes. However, we've put in place safeguards
(most notably validating outgoing caller IDs before they can be used) to
minimize these types of activities.

We pride ourselves on support. We monitor Twitter constantly, we have people
in IRC all the time (set office hours is just a focused discussion topic), and
we try to respond to emails and forum posts as fast as possible. We have a
team of people scouring Stack Overflow, Hacker News and events all over the
country helping developers with their questions, related to Twilio OR NOT. Go
find any blog post written about Twilio and see how quickly we responded. We
answer the phones when you call, though we have some area to improve in that
regard. We're actively working on it.

We support developers like nobody else. We feature them on our site in our
Gallery <http://www.twilio.com/gallery>, we tweet about them, we blog
regularly about what our customers build, we have a weekly developer contest
to reward cool new apps and we generally go to great lengths to help promote
what developers and startups are building using Twilio. We exist to empower
you. We'd much rather talk about the cool problems real working developers
solving then toot our own horn.

Everyone here knows how good EC2 is, I don't think I need to defend that
issue. It's working wonderfully for us. We don't have any capacity or other
issues related to our infrastructure. On a more general capacity note, we have
yet to hit a limit of what we can handle, and we've worked on some huge
projects. Go look at our customer list. These companies would not work with us
if we couldn't handle their demands: <http://www.twilio.com/gallery/customers>
These are just scratching the surface. There's another class of customer
that's even bigger but doesn't like being talked about publicly.

We're hyper-focused on web developers. We (I'm a web dev myself) don't care
about complicated telephony issues. We're too busy solving problems. Twilio
works the way we work. Before I worked at Twilio I struggled trying to
implement features that took me minutes once I discovered the Twilio API. It
already spoke what I knew already and that's just simply HTTP.

We are not the right solution for every single developer; nothing is. But we
have a rock solid solution that's working for over 20,000 developers and
growing rapidly. If you're conflicted, try both services out for yourself.
Don't listen to either company, just see for yourself which you like better.
And if we can help in any way, we're listening.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me directly at
jsheehan@twilio.com

------
prakster
Has anyone compared Tropo and Twilio in these 3 areas:

(a) Speed of SMS deliverability (# of SMS that can be delivered per minute)

(b) Confirmation of SMS (i.e. can we be sure that the SMS was indeed
delivered)

(c) Availability of phone numbers in different area codes

~~~
akalsey
SMS delivery from regular phone numbers is rate limited by the carriers. Tropo
throttles you to 10 messages per minute to keep inside carrier guidelines.

From a shortcode, there's no limit. And Tropo's connected directly to the SMS
carriers, so you can deliver at a significant rate.

We don't provide delivery confirmation of SMS today. That's coming soon
however. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that delivery can only be
confirmed to the carrier. Handset delivery receipts are flaky at best. Not all
handsets support sending delivery receipts, those that do often allow the user
to disable it, and some carriers will block the receipt.

We have phone numbers in about 280 area codes and 41 countries. Not all of the
area codes are available in the UI yet, so if you need one and don't see it,
send an email to support and we'll hook you up.

