Freshdesk Contact Center ( Formerly Freshcaller) is a call center software for startups and small teams. Fresh Contact Center aims to enable businesses / teams set-up and run a call center without spending a lot of time and money. It is suited for phone teams of size 1- 30. Users can create custom greeting texts based on specific call scenarios. The nested Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system allows the user to provide a detailed set of options to callers. The call queues…
$0
per agent/per month
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
Freshdesk Contact Center
Twilio
Editions & Modules
FREE
$0
per agent/per month
Growth
$15
per agent/per ,billed annually
Pro
$39
per agent/per month, billed annually
Enterprise
$69
per agent/per month, billed annually
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
Freshdesk Contact Center
Twilio
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
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.
One scenario where Freshdesk Contact Center is well suited is when we have a lot of parents calling in with requests about student transcripts, and or grades, we can better interact with each caller and not have a lot of people on hold waiting for a long time. One scenario where Freshdesk might not be well suited is when callers get the chatbot more often than talking to an actual person.
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.
Cost - the system was felt to be way overpriced for the feature-set it provided. For the cost of 10 support agents, I could engage with a full-blown VoIP UCaaS provider to support 20-30 users.
The system was dependent on the Amazon Web Services system, which was prone to outages, and as it was outsourced by Freshworks to Amazon, resolution time did not have clear SLAs.
Non-US support - any issues encountered with the system would go through international channels which decreased resolution time depending on when the development team was available.
Call reliability was questionable - sometimes agents would have ringing devices that would have no one on the other end - other times calls would be dropped without explanation.
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
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.
It's a really simple and affordable software solution if you're looking to upgrade your system or processes to a softphone. The service has been fantastic for both our outbound sales team and our inbound customer service team. As a manager, I'm really grateful I found FreshCaller early on in the process of evaluating companies to go to for a softphone.
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.
Freshcaller support is great. They will respond very quickly once I submit a ticket. On occasion, they are unable to answer a question and require a deep dive on some research for random questions but that's completely understandable. Overall, great service, great quality, and very accommodating. This is one of the better support groups, in my opinion.
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.
After multiple checks and constant research we found Freshdesk is one of the leading product service providers and the best at it too. We used to have PSTIN hard phones which caused a lot of drops and customer discontent. After Freshdesk, it has been a cakewalk. Really happy with it.
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.
