Bird CRM, replacing the former MessageBird, is a CRM for Marketing, Sales, and Payments, powering messages to customers across Email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
$45
per month 3000 monthly contacts
Twilio
Score 7.7 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
Bird
Twilio
Editions & Modules
API Pricing - WhatsApp
$0.01
per message
API Pricing - Voice
$0.01
per minute
API Pricing - SMS
$0.01
per message
API Pricing - Numbers
$1
per month
Pro
$50
per month
Pro Plus
$150
per month
Start Up
Free
Custom Plan
Contact sales team
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
Bird
Twilio
Free Trial
No
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.
Twilio prices were much higher for our initial volume (30k SMS/month). But they have more APIs and more services if you need to integrate email, SMS, and other channels. We didn't need those features, only basic SMS and email, so we kept each feature from one provider. Email …
MessageBird seems to me a very useful tool for the times we are living [in] and the paradigm shift in corporate communications in all industries. It is very good at exchanging information and plain text. It works with some difficulty for sending images and other functionalities that the real WhatsApp application has, but the client on the other side does not know about this and sometimes sends information such as location that it is not possible to obtain.
Twilio is highly suited for marketing and engagement campaigns as it supports multiple channels, which makes it easier for us to reach more audiences through their preferred channels. It is also essential for customer support and contact centers for handling live chats and calls through automation, hence reducing tasks for agents.
Unless we can get this handled quickly -- less than 1 week -- we will likely switch to another provider who, in my opinion, we'll have to spend close to $3,000 in development time to build a new integration for texting. Our clients need texting and I feel Twilio has failed us miserably.
Twilio has well documented APIs and examples. There are several tutorials, videos and Q&As regarding their services. So, usability is very good. I must say that advanced knowledge of telephony, API/Programming and error-handling is essential to make good use of Twilio. It's not just plug-and-play unless you are integrated with a system that has all of the programming built for it.
Twilio executes what it is designed to do: send SMS messages at scale while providing very good deliverability. I believe that Twilio is very good at what we use for adding SMS messages to our comms strategy. We can see those messages get opened and replied to, which is exactly what we are looking to achieve.
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.
Regarding WhatsApp Business, it is a very useful tool because templates can be programmed for the entire organization and clients can also be referred to other users in order to decongest an agent who can become quite busy. Otherwise there would be no way to serve you through two agents and you could have a bad end user or customer experience.
We evaluated many fundraising-based text-to-give programs and found the subscriptions prohibitively expensive for our small scale and uncertain first few years of development. While we may be willing to invest that kind of money after discovering how things work, we're happy with Twilio now and have no desire to start over.
We found that associates who had the opportunity to respond to a survey about their assigned job were 37% more likely to return to a job site
We were able to reduce the number of resources required to manually respond to associates using Twilio Studio, so those resources could have more time to complete other tasks
We were able to scale the number of associates who received survey messages at least by a factor of 8 without increasing our resource demand