CallRail vs. Grasshopper vs. Twilio

This is great software for differentiating where phone traffic is coming from. Whether it's paid/organic search, you can see exactly where the calls are coming in from. I'd love to see them add text/SMS features in the future, but it does what it claims. I'd also like to see more CRM integrations, but not sure that other users share the same sentiment

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

I found Twilio to be excellent and very easy to use for a programmer in all aspects related to voice, SMS, and other features utilizing their API. I found the node client to be excellent and helpful. We previously used the Apex client for Salesforce before it was discontinued. Although we try not to use Twilio from Apex anymore, using that client was easier than implementing our own.

Incentivized

• Tracking phone calls first & foremost! Being able to have a running tally of the phone calls made and listening to the recorded calls throughout the month and providing that information back to our clients is vital!
• Their UI is exceptionally easy to use & navigate. This is important when we have many clients running at the same time and we are able to always determine what report is for which client.
• The ease of setting up a brand new client & their tracking phone number is fantastic! Saves a lot of time when it walks you through everything you need to know & do step by step.

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

• Easy to see my team in one place, when they log in and out and what call status they are in.
• Twilio is a simple, user friendly way to log in and out of work activities.
• Excellent services and support.
• The omnichannel feature which allows agents to get request from all channels.

Incentivized

• The integration with Hubspot is not as seemless as I would have liked. We had an issue where a person who was already in Hubspot called in, and their contact information was not matched to the caller ID correctly which created some duplicate entries. A little bit of a bummer, but from what I understand they may have fixed this. We had to stop using them for a little while because our outsourced sales team was more confused by adding CallRail, so we'll be re-implementing this once our new sales team is fully trained. Hopefully the record miss-match issue gets fixed.

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

• Segment’s email identifier is case-sensitive, which is ridiculous because emails themselves are not case-sensitive. This means that if I send a capitalized email address in an identify call, it will create a duplicate user rather than matching it with the lowercase email. I think this is a technical oversight that should be corrected.
• I’d like to see more information about the eventual transition of existing Frontline customers to Twilio Flex
• I’d like to see some integrations between Twilio Studio and OpenAI or another open source LLM to provide automated responses, if this hasn’t been done already
• I would like to be able to drag and move the actual lines connecting the steps in Twilio Studio, sometimes mine can get pretty messy
• I think a Bug Report form would be beneficial for developers

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The platform is easy to use and we really don't have any complaints with using it so far. The information is invaluable for clients that rely on phone calls to drive more business. Not much negative to say about it at this point. We're actually really happy with it so far and the cost is manageable.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

CallRail support normally gets back to us pretty quickly when we submit a ticket and they have a good knowledge base for common questions. I've heard mixed reviews from other local marketing agencies that use this tool, but overall in my experience, support has been knowledgeable and quick working through our problems.

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

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.

Incentivized

The developer APIs and SDKs are super easy to follow.

Incentivized

Callrail has a very seamless and easy to use Dynamic Number Swap function. In other call tracking that we looked into the integration was either not as easy to use or required much more work to implement. Setting up CallRail has been so easy even our entry-level employees need very little training to master the platform.

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

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.

Incentivized

Being in South Africa, direct local currency support would be nice

Incentivized

• It is useful to monitor our calls weekly. We can give our employees feedback on the quality of the calls which helps our overall sales and conversions.
• By knowing which campaigns perform best, we can shift our budget to target those campaigns specifically which saves us revenue and increases sales.

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

• It helps drive the adoption of multi-factor authentication by making second-factor authentication quick and easy.
• Decreases the number of times a user spends migrating to a new device from an old one.
• Enables easy access to second-factors of authentication by offering multi-device support, making multi-factor authentication painless.

Incentivized