
Ask HN: Your preferred cloud API for voice/SMS and why? - varunkho
I stumbled upon this HN discussion of about 2 years old http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996970<p>Want to know fresh thoughts from people using different services recently?<p>Metrics are Price (including international calls), reliability, support/docs, and anything else you like about a service.
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pla3rhat3r
twilio is the entire package. If you use OpenVBX along with twilio you can
replace your phone system. And if you still want to hold onto your phone
system you can use SIP out with twilio. Pretty soon they'll have SIP in as
well.

Overall, twilio is more robust, more reliable, priced better, and more
flexible. No one in the market even comes close. I've been doing telecom for
over a decade and there's nothing better than twilio for telecommunications.

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johntdyer
Definitely biased here, since I work for Voxeo Labs, but Tropo is free for
development, supports SIP, SMS, Shortcodes, TFN's ITFN's, ect. We also have
great support ( 24/7 ) and fantastic documentation. Our product is also
available on premise, should you want to go that route. It is also being
deployed into many large carrier clouds, such as AT&T, Deutsch Telekom, ect.

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laurencei
Twilio. In my personal experience nothing comes close. Their API is awesome
and I was up and running in literally minutes.

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varunkho
I agree! But are they also better than others in terms of price and other
features? I think price is the most crucial for telephony apps, provided
reliability is not compromised.

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taf2
Yes, you really also need to consider reliability - building an app for the
phone and imagine the phones go out - your customers will not be happy, so for
me twilio is definitely worth it. Also at scale twilio price is definitly more
price competive then the smaller guys can offer... Additionally, queue is a
huge feature that twilio offers - not sure the others offer that...

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saarons
Plivo. I use it to provide voice/text services for my personal line and I
couldn't be happier with them. I think the price is slightly cheaper than
Twilio and you get a similar set of features. I've run into the occasional
quirks here and there, but I've always been able to get great support right
away.

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mayel
At Babelverse, we first used Tropo's APIs to hack together a crisis-response
tool - literally overnight - post-Japan earthquake & tsunami. We've been quite
happy with it since then.

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rdl
Plivo. SIP.

