A solution to engage customers with smarter conversations on any channel, designed so support, marketing, sales, and even bots to have conversations at scale with customers.
$0
per month free for up to 10 agents
Grasshopper
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Grasshopper is an IP telephony business communication solution that provides companies with a toll-free or local phone number. It has both desktop and mobile applications and includes features such as custom greeting recording, call forwarding, call transfer, call reporting, and voicemail.
$18
per month for a single user
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
Freshchat
Grasshopper
Twilio
Editions & Modules
Growth
$19
per month (billed annually) per agent
Pro
$49
per month (billed annually) per agent
Enterprise
$79
per month (billed annually) per agent
True Solo
$18
per month for a single user
Solo Plus
$32
per month
Small Business
$70
per month
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
Freshchat
Grasshopper
Twilio
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
20% discount available for annual pricing.
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.
It is best suited for having 24-hour support, where customers can interact easily, even using their phones, to raise concerns or inquire about information. This makes it easier than going through the documents portal as a source of knowledge or sending emails for worries. However, it can be less appropriate for scenarios when you need more formal communication, like emails, and when proper documentation is necessary.
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.
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.
Real time customer support. During busy times all our available agents can jump on and handle large volume of customer interactions.
Automations and canned response features. With automation we can greet our customers the moment a chat gets assigned to an agent letting customers know they are being attended to similarly canned response helps us use templates for generic and commonly asked questions.
Dashboards and analytics. Freshchat's ability to build customized dashboards and analyze performance in a granular level helps us monitor workload and manage performance effectively.
Freshchat is one of the best platforms, but still there are certain areas that require further improvement in order for the platform to become flawless.
I feel that the automated system in Freshchat is comparatively slow and due to this, it does not respond well according to all the requirements.
There are certain features in Freshchat which are not available for everyone and they can only be accessed by those who are paying the highest pricing tier.
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.
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
Freshchat has met all our expectations and more. It has allowed our team to be more efficient with their time, field questions quickly, and escalate issues up the chain. We highly recommend freshchat as the perfect addition to anyone already using freshdesk or simply looking for a good solution for in app messaging.
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.
I give it an 8 due to its usability. Yes, I had a few issues to begin with and needed some assistance from Freshchat agents, but considering this is something that is completely new to me, to set up what feels like a professional chat handling system complete with autobot within a day is really saying something I feel.
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.
The experience we had in past for lets say 4-5 months with the support team and our TAM was really helpful. The changes in the bot flow has helped our bot to ensure we connect with customer easily.
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.
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.
Messaging across mediums - Freshchat integrates with majority of mainstream instant messaging apps. Like Facebook messenger, Telegram and WhatsApp . This makes it convenient for us to have a presence on the above-mentioned platforms and respond to messages from these platforms from a single Freshchat dashboard.its good app Freshdesk Messaging help me to contact the customer and contact the customer to inform my problem to solve it and is a good app and help full app and its easy to use uncomplicated and Freshdesk Helps me provide good quality to the customer and make customer feedback good for a company
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.
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.