Bandwidth, headquartered in Raleigh, provides business class communications platform as a service (CPaaS), supporting many use cases such as lead alerts for sales, automated customer surveys, conference calls and messaging, and virtual call center, among other cases.
$0.01
per message
Twilio
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Twilio offers a CPaaS and CCaaS solution, with the combination of its programmable Voice, Video, and Messaging APIs, as well as the Twilio Flex cloud contact center. Additional capabilities include Twilio's Elastic SIP Trunking, as well as API for WhatsApp.
$0
per min per participant
Pricing
Bandwidth
Twilio
Editions & Modules
Outbound Messaging
$0.01
per message
Inbound Calling
$0.01
per minute
Outbound Calling
$0.01
per minute
Phone Number
$0.35
per line/per month
Inbound Messaging
Free
per message
Programmable Video
$0.0015
per min per participant
WhatsApp Business API
$0.0042
Per WhatsApp Template message sent
WhatsApp Business API
$0.005
Per WhatsApp session message
Elastic SIP Trunking
$0.007
Per min for termination
Programmable Messaging
$0.0075
per message sent or received
Programmable Voice
$0.0085
per minute to receive a call
Programmable Voice
$0.013
per min to make a call
Elastic SIP Trunking
$0.045
Per min for origination
Twilio Conversations
$0.05
per active user per month
Twilio Authy
$0.09
per authentication
Programmable Wireless
$0.1
per MB
Twilio Flex (Contact Center)
$1
per active user hour (5000 hours free)
Programmable Wireless
$2.00
per SIM card
Twilio SendGrid Email API
$14.95
per month up to 100k emails. (Up to 40k emails free for 30 days)
Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns
$15
per month for 5,000 contacts and 15,000 emails. Your first 2,000 contacts are free
Twilio Flex (Contact Center)
$150
per named user per month (5000 hours free)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bandwidth
Twilio
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
1. Pay-as-you-go pricing: Simple usage-based pricing means you don’t get locked into big contracts.
2. Volume discounts: Discounts trigger as your usage grows, so you always get a fair price.
3. Start building today with free trial credit and full API access.
Bandwidth covers the majority of areas where we had customers. However, there are still some areas we would have like to see them cover for calls. They cover more areas than our other carriers, but they did surprise us from time to time by an inability to be able to deliver call transport.
I recommend Twilio to many small non-profits, especially those with unmanned outposts in the world. While it takes some effort to get started, it nearly runs itself from there and is by far the most affordable option I have seen to-date. Like if you want to try text solutions, might as well start with the pay-per-message options rather than the multi-thousand dollar solutions, see how your audience responds.
Authy does not support the "push button" multi-factor authentication from your application's native apps. This means if you want to use Authy, you still need to use TOTP based codes.
Not really a shortcoming of Authy, but it does nothing to help with multi-factor authentication using text messages - those are still sent to your platform's messaging app.
Authy doesn't always display how much time is left before your current token expires, making it difficult to know how much time you have left to enter the current code.
We have standardized our processes surrounding Twilio. The entire process just works! There is no significant gap that we need to fill. Instead of thinking about Twilio's replacement, we'd rather focus on our customers with Twilio. It meets all our uses-cases currently. We haven't even explored the entire suite of applications to determine what other use cases we may potentially use.
Twilios large peer community on the internet , easy to access Twitter tutorials provided by Twilio itself and available API references makes using Twilio an easy experience. Sincerely, I do not think anyone can get lost in the course of using Twilio, at least from my own personal experience and that of junior engineers and developers on my team.
The problem tends to be us, the user, rather than Twilio. We don't reach out to support fast enough (spend time struggling), but when we have, they've solved our issue immediately. We are rural, so there are signal issues to accommodate, however, we find that a few staff on a few cellular networks can triangulate where we all have signal to put up a sign.
I have not had to communicate with Twilio support in the last 3 years but my past experience with them has been very positive. They replied to my previous requests promptly and kept me well informed to resolve my inquiries. With their documentation that's available, I hardly imagine why anyone would need to contact support since it's all there in a concise and easy to understand format. It would probably take you longer to type out a support ticket than to just open their doc websites.
Their pricing is tough to beat, the reliability is great. And then add a few more positive things, like the tools and customer support, and that makes it a no-brainer.
Twilio was referred to me by a business colleague, and I can't be more thankful! Twilio has helped my Facebook page by leaps and bounds, and I haven't even considered trying another chat option for my page. It is easy to set up, and customer service is quick to answer any and all questions you may have. I highly recommend it!
We found Bandwidth to be very easy to work with and they grew as we grew. Their pricing was very competitive and they were always willing to take another look at their pricing for us.
Adding in phone numbers onto our onboarding sequence has increased our user activity by about 30%. We believe due to the users being more invested in the application now.
On top of that, our first SMS has increased our week 1 retention by about 15%. Pushing users to go on the app more than 2-3 times has been a struggle and SMS seems to be a solid driver in retention.
