Desk.com (discontinued) vs. Twilio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Desk.com (discontinued)
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Desk.com was a helpdesk, ticketing, and customer support product offered by Salesforce, and oriented towards the needs of small businesses. It is no longer sold and support has been discontinued. Salesforce recommends its modern Service Cloud as a replacement.N/A
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
Desk.com (discontinued)Twilio
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
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
Desk.com (discontinued)Twilio
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details1. 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.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Desk.com (discontinued)Twilio
Best Alternatives
Desk.com (discontinued)Twilio
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Dialpad Support
Dialpad Support
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
SysAid
SysAid
Score 8.9 out of 10
Verint Community
Verint Community
Score 9.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Desk.com (discontinued)Twilio
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(38 ratings)
8.0
(90 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.4
(14 ratings)
7.5
(5 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(19 ratings)
9.5
(10 ratings)
Availability
1.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.5
(34 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(21 ratings)
5.7
(16 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.5
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Desk.com (discontinued)Twilio
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
Once I had to search the logs to find cases and data on a particular keyword, but I was not able to do so as there was no search tool available, nor was there a sort or filter tool. I was totally frustrated as I had to skim through the data to complete my task manually.
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Twilio
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.
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Pros
Discontinued Products
  • Desk.com automatically tracks analytics on all cases coming in and going out.
  • Desk.com helps prevent multiple people from working on the same case. However, it does allow us to assign the case to someone else if we feel that person is more qualified to address the case.
  • Desk.com has very few bugs or server issues that we've seen. This helps prevent any delays in communicating with our customers.
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Twilio
  • 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.
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Cons
Discontinued Products
  • Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
  • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
  • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
  • Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
  • Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless
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Twilio
  • 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
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Likelihood to Renew
Discontinued Products
We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products
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Twilio
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.
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Usability
Discontinued Products
Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud's usability is seamless to get up and running, administer, and scale across the organization. It allows us to get up and running in days rather than weeks and has transformed our customer support teams globally into efficient, world-class teams. The best practices that the Salesforce and Desk.com teams provide are also very valuable, as we have the right case studies and tips to implement right away in our organization.
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Twilio
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.
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Reliability and Availability
Discontinued Products
We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.
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Twilio
No answers on this topic
Performance
Discontinued Products
Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.
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Twilio
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.
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Support Rating
Discontinued Products
Their support leaves much to be desired. They do not respond quickly and do not follow up with feature requests. There is also a lack of on-demand or live training available for the teams to use as they learn a new tool. Because there is so much customization, a lot of questions do come up regularly.
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Twilio
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.
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Implementation Rating
Discontinued Products
As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.
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Twilio
The developer APIs and SDKs are super easy to follow.
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Alternatives Considered
Discontinued Products
Overall, it performs a lot better than all three combined, with a lot fewer glitches and a lot more user-friendly and user experience efficiency. Any new link that needs to be done, takes a lot less time to execute on desk compared to the three others. Simply advanced when it comes to execution this platform is.
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Twilio
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.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Twilio
Being in South Africa, direct local currency support would be nice
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Return on Investment
Discontinued Products
  • Better customer service and employee efficiency when dealing with cases
  • It's so universal, meaning that everyone can use it and it's easy to understand.
  • The only negative impact is that our IT department who is assigned tickets has responded to customers instead of to the local reps and we have to ensure they know to change the email if it's assigned to them.
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Twilio
  • 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.
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ScreenShots

Desk.com (discontinued) Screenshots

Screenshot of Desk.com ConsoleScreenshot of Desk.com Issue ScreenScreenshot of Desk.com Reporting and Analytics

Twilio Screenshots

Screenshot of To access any of the products in Console, head over to the “Explore Products” section and start building.Screenshot of Whether you prefer to build with a drag-and-drop visual editor or with code, Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns helps you engage your customers through email.Screenshot of Flex is a programmable Contact Center that puts you in control.