Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) vs. Grasshopper

The Amazon SNS service is well suited to support event notifications, monitoring applications, workflow systems, time-sensitive information updates, and mobile applications that generates or consumes notifications. It can be used to relay time-critical events to mobile applications and devices. It provides significant advantages to developers who build mobile applications that rely on real-time events. It is not well suited for hybrid cross platform mobile application frameworks at this juncture. An optimal version to meet the needs of a cross platform mobile developer is needed as generally the frameworks are not meant to manage real-time events. It is also not suited for cases where the queue management needs improvement or requires special workflows/tooling.

Incentivized

Grasshopper is well suited for basic needs of texting in and out as well as calling out if you would like to avoid using your personal line. It also eliminates the need to have a dedicated land land in your office or business. You can obtain a vanity number and forward calls through grasshopper.

Incentivized

• Built in for quicker setup within AWS ecosystem.
• Trusted as you control the users and configuration via IAM and easy access controls.
• Can be sent to S3 simple storage or for long term storage if required.
• Can be used in many regions, same configs.

Incentivized

• I like that there are differing voicemails for each extension, to keep up with the image of calling a separate line.
• I love the voicemail text emails. I believe we pay a little extra, but worth every penny for those urgent calls while I am in a meeting.
• The cost is very reasonable for the value added to our company.

Incentivized

• At times you receive access denied errors which are annoying.
• Rarely do you receive internal failure errors where you can't access the information. It is rare but it does happen.
• You are required to add an MWS Authentication Token every so often. I wish it would pull that information automatically for you so you don't have to go searching for it.

Incentivized

• It would be nice to have the ability to transfer some calls to another Grasshopper IVR, for those customers who mistakenly dial the wrong number (we have two incoming numbers, one for corporate and one for sales).
• Likewise, it would be nice to have the ability to forward to a toll-free number, which would have allowed us to work around the inability to transfer between IVRs (see above).
• Lastly, it would be great to have an 'emergency' switch setting (default off but could be toggled on) that would let us override all IVR settings and transfer all incoming calls elsewhere (either to a direct dial or toll free number) for those rare times when we cannot take any calls (such as a weather emergency OR the one time each year we take all of our staff on a retreat) - that would allow us to send all calls to a backup answering service rather than just voicemail.

Incentivized

It is useful for applications developed using event driven architecture. It helps in tracking and logging the events in a very timely and efficient manner. The dashboards are a little difficult to implement. But overall it is very easy to integrate with other AWS services like Lambda, API GW, S3 and DynamoDB. The permissions to access should be resolved before using it.

Incentivized

The admin functions are kind of confusing in the old interface which was my most recent experience on the admin side.

Incentivized

Amazon Simple Notification Sevices (SNS) support depends on your usage pattern and definitely on your support plan as an enterprise with AWS. Before reaching out to support you should read their documentation, as they have mentioned almost all the common issues and their solutions there. However, for specific issues, they generally respond in 1-2 business days.

Incentivized

When I was setting up my account I contacted support a couple of times. They were also very professional, personable, and helpful. Their response is prompt and thorough. I'm confident I can get any question answered as well as help with any issue I might have. That's pretty important to me.

Incentivized

Amazon’s SNS is incredibly easy to set up compared to the
more powerful, but complex, Kafka flavours.

SNS’s core advantages are –

· no setup/no maintenance

· either a queue (SQS) or a topic (SNS)

· various limitations (on size, how long a message lives, etc)

· limited throughput: you can do batch and concurrent requests, but still
achieving high throughputs would be expensive

· SNS has notifications for email, SMS, SQS, HTTP built-in.

· no "message stream" concept Overall, it would be the best choice to get into the concepts of Pub/Sub concepts as although it has limitations it can provide significant capabilities and solutions

Incentivized

I have not used any other phone services like Grasshopper. I know that there is another option out there called Ruby, which is more like a virtual receptionist but since I did not try it out I cannot compare the two. When I started my company I found the services that Grasshopper offers to be perfect. It still works for us and we have no need to change to anything else right now.

Incentivized

• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) saved us a lot of extra coding time by providing straightforward functionality we needed in our ad campaign automation tool.
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) allows us to maintain a consistent, serverless model within our applications.

Incentivized

• It's allowed us to keep cost down. Other phone systems can seriously get outrageous in implementation and monthly fees!
• It's allowed our team the confidence to work in locations outside of the office and still be seen as professionals.
• It's decreased the amount of time spent on unwanted sales calls via the call screening application.

Incentivized