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
Talkdesk
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Talkdesk® supports CX with Customer Experience Automation (CXA), using AI agents to replace manual workflows. Powered by the Talkdesk Data Cloud, CXA delivers real-time context and fast deployment—to transform CX without a rip-and-replace.
$85
per month per 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
Grasshopper
Talkdesk
Twilio
Editions & Modules
True Solo
$18
per month for a single user
Solo Plus
$32
per month
Small Business
$70
per month
Digital Essentials
$85
per month per user
Voice Essentials
$105
per month per user
Elite
$165
per month per user
Elite
$165
per month per user
Industry Experience Clouds
$225
per month per user
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
Grasshopper
Talkdesk
Twilio
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
20% discount available for annual pricing.
*Talkdesk also offers per hour login consumption pricing and concurrent pricing. Prices are based on a minimum 3 year commitment to these Editions. Additional telco and usage fees not included. Due to foreign exchange rate approximation, list price is not the exact price that will be quoted.
1. Pay-as-you-go pricing: Simple usage-based pricing without contracts.
2. Volume discounts: Discounts trigger as usage grows.
3. Free trial credit that includes full API access.
Grasshopper was fine when we were smaller, but it was definitely a burden to have to take all calls to me cellphone - it basically made it so that my cell phone rang off the hook all hours of every day. Talkdesk allows me to unplug in my off hours.
We switched to Talkdesk because Dialpad could not handle the scale of our company. We were most impressed with Talkdesk compared to other companies because of how modern their product line was, how quickly they iterate on products, and because they had the best API on the market.
Talkdesk is much better than the old phone systems we were using. We will definitely continue to use them for their great platform and customer service.
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.
Talkdesk is a very innovative company. They truly want to be at the forefront of emerging technologies. That was shown when they developed the current platform. But, its also being shown with the rapid growth and change brought on by AI today. Talkdesk wants to be an innovative solution that not only leverages emerging technologies but also wants to develop their own to be a leader in this space. While Talkdesk has a lot of resources available to their clients, if you do not have IT resources available to admin the system and continue to leverage the technologies Talkdesk offers, then this solution may not be for you. We have not identified a managed services service offered by Talkdesk. So, you have to manage the solution yourself or outsource to a vendor to help ensure your system is optimal and continues to be developed.
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.
Talkdesk excels at reporting. It offers a wide range of reports, such as Aux, AHT, and productivity reports, which are great for monitoring performance.
Talkdesk has speech-to-text analytics. This is an AI transcript system. The AI detects speech and transcribes it.
Talkdesk is easy to integrate with other apps. Such as Calabrio and Zendesk.
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.
From experience, customer service is terrible, we've had 5 account executives over 18 months, extremely difficult to get timely answers to pressing issues.
Integration with other tools, such as ServiceNow, is not truly integration (in my opinion). There was a marked difference between what the salesperson communicated during the evaluation period and what we actually got once we purchased and implemented the product.
We continue to have stability issues which force our agents to restart the Talkdesk client. I frequently receive vague error messages ('something went wrong') that can be frustrating as there's no actual detail to what happened. To be fair, it has improved since we implemented the tool, but if you were to ask our agents what frustrated them, Talkdesk would be at the top of their list.
Being a multi-channel platform was one of the things that drew us to Talkdesk; however, the chat channel lags way behind voice in customization and reporting.
Lack of training resources. The 'Talkdesk Academy' is often very out-of-date. Would be nice to have actual webinars or online training (even paid training) for various functions of the tool like reporting, WFM, IVR, etc.
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
One of the best tools our there to tackle alot of our needs or issues within the organisation's and is value for money as you find alot of the features already in bedded and the Ai features are user friendly no need for additional training and Talk desk support when any issues arise is amazing
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.
Talkdesk is helpful because we use it to receive calls in our BPO. Not only do we track live ques and statuses from agents, but we also receive feedback from our assessors through the talk desk as well as coaching, and it also stores customer contact data; I can track all my calls, and It records all the calls so we can come back to review them. You can also listen live and track your daily productivity. You can change your aux statuses very quickly, and there was an update talk desk that allows you to queue another status while you are on a call or after-call work, which is a great feature.
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.
Talkdesk is very handy but, sometimes we do face issues were the system can just kick you out and not be able to do calls or receive calls but, what I like about the system once you start refreshing or troubleshooting, everything becomes normal it is a unique system and very modern we don't usually have system issues with Talkdesk.
reports are good until a report is a big one in size then the wait is longer and some call reports delay by an hour or so which is not ideal as we pull these hourly and need them from Work force management perspective and Quality reports are perfectly fine
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.
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.
If Talkdesk had a dedicated phone support line I would have given this rating an overall 10. Their knowledge base is absolutely HUGE and at times very helpful. It's easy to search through and their customer support chat system works perfectly fine, but there are just some times that you need to speak to a human on the phone to ensure you are always on the same page.
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.
The training that was given to us was very smooth and professional. I give my trainer 10/ 10 rate the training was so smooth and very helpful she would make sure we also watch videos of how to use the system which made it very easier for us and what was interesting it is because, the system is also easy.
Nothing is perfect!! Needing the ability to repeat the training so everyone was on board was important. Not real sure how many people had to repeat the training as they trained on their own and given 30 minutes at a time.
We were very satisfied with the implementation of Talkdesk. The team was able to gather all the data and information about the system we had in place at the moment and delivered us a Talkdesk plan that suited our needs. We had a few calls after implementation where our questions were answered and gave us the confidence to continue using the system.
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.
Talkdesk is used to take inbound and outbound calls, which helps improve customer experience. It also provides evaluations through quality management. Talk desk scores are sometimes behind, but they still work well regarding taking and receiving calls. Some agents blame the Talk Desk because they lack knowledge of how to use 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.
talk desk has helped us massively with flexibility of one system giving us all the relevant information we need to be able to drive improvement and also good service from work force management to quality improvement to the reporting of the work and inputs going in and assess outputs to determine the success of our work and remaining development areas
Reduced hold times with callback feature = better CX
Easy transfer option between teams where we can talk rep-rep first before bringing the caller in = less repeated information the customer has to provide = better CX
Modified call dispositions allows for better call management & organization = less work on our end!
