Twilio

Twilio is way better quality than most in terms of video, I find customer support excellent and personable, no feeling of a bot as opposed to some other companies! Well-thought-out product and you don't need your own crack DevOps team to launch.

I haven't evaluated any other products.

The others have a ton of built-in features that are very nice to have with a traditional PBX or CC platform. For some companies, these aren't necessary. Twilio is great because, if you have a very specific use case that doesn't involve most of those other features, then Twilio may be perfect for you.

I used both Google Authenticator and Duo before switching to Authy. With both of them, I lost access to resources because I forgot to disconnect the device before moving/replacing it. That resulted in absolute hassles with having to reach out to the resource's support and filling out forms to prove my identity. Save yourself the hassle, just use Authy.

We previously used Skype for communications, however the price per minute or second per call was more expensive, and it didn't give us the flexibility of integrating calls with our CRM (Vtiger), allowing our sales force to initiate a call with a prospect just by clicking on its opportunity's phone number.

Similar, Authy seems to have slightly better UI.

To be honest, I don't know of any Twilio SMS competitors that have the robust transactional SMS that Twilio SMS has. I know of a few marketing SMS platforms such as Textedly but that's more of an email blast (or SMS blast) to your list then something targeted based on user action inside our application that Twilio SMS can provide. On top of that, in Twilio SMS I can push them through my own segmentation and sequences programmatically to even make the marketing SMS's more targetted compared to some of the pure blast competitors.

Twilio SMS works better than Salesforce LiveMessage.

I had some experience with SendHub. SendHub did not integrate with Salesforce (which was problematic).

Amazon Connect, Plivo, and Tokbox are other services that offer WebRTC solutions. Amazon connect, while a good solution if you're already using AWS for your website, is quite expensive compared to the other two options here. Comparatively, Plivo is slightly cheaper than Twilio WebRTC. It can be a good avenue to pursue assuming their support team is as responsive as Twilio's. Finally, Tokbox is quite a popular WebRTC solution. Their prices are comparable to Twilio's, however, their solutions can get expensive when you look to archive communications.

Twilio SMS blows Google Voice away by allowing us to have a fully integrated product in our system that we can monitor in real-time without the use of third-party applications or completely separate websites.

Google Authenticator — There's no contest here, Authy feels like a much better choice. It's much easier to recover from a lost phone, and it's one less Google app on my phone.

1Password — This is actually the next product we plan to evaluate; it's more promising for sharing accounts across multiple users.

Bandwidth is 2/3 the price of Twilio for sending SMS messages. However, we decided to simply go with the market leader because it was the safer choice. At our scale, the increased developer effort outweighed the marginal increase in costs due to the per-SMS pricing differential. Overall we feel confident we made the right decision.

Given our contact centre is all Twilio based it makes sense to stay on a single communications API platform.

Twilio rates were much higher, but their assistance and support were much higher rated so we decided to go with them. We need more support as we are a small team with a limited number of employees, meaning we must outsource questions and information when we can to optimize our efficiency. Nexmo was cheaper but less support overall.

Twilio is considerably more expensive than its competitors but has far better documentation. If cost is a problem then I would recommend Nexmo over Twilio, although the customer service and documentation is nowhere near as good. I have also had a much less reliable service on Nexmo. In my opinion, the ease of implementation and reliability is well worth the additional cost. If you are looking to be able to send one off campaigns then Twilio is not the tool for you, I would recommend FireText if you are in the UK. That enables texts to be sent via uploading a CSV file, perfect for nontechnical team members. If you want to use a much simpler API that can be accessed via a GET request and no required modules look at Voodoo SMS. Voodoo SMS is also significantly cheaper per message. Twilio customer service is superior to all its competitors, it really is a premium service. Customer support ticket response times are normally well below 24hrs, the only negative is the difficulty in finding a telephone number. Above a certain threshold, you are given an account manager to solve this for you. Two-factor authentication tool saves a lot of time setting up your own service.

We used Cdyne before Twilio and their prices were higher and the tools a far cry from Twilio. Things are much faster to build in Twilio and the UX was night and day difference.

We had a hardware-based SMS system first. Which was expensive and hard to maintain. Using Twilio made everything easy for us.

I have only used Twilio for these services. It was the first platform I tried and I have been totally satisfied with it ever since. I'm not even sure what other products are available in this space. Anyone that I know who offers the kind of services I do, uses Twilio to do it.

Twilio has better integration capabilities.
Twilio is less expensive.
Twilio has a more difficult user interface.

We went with Twilio voice in recommendations from others around competitors not being as easy to work with, and not having any clear advantages. Many APIs and vendors clone Twilio's model, rather than innovating on it themselves. The feature sets, then, are nearly identical.

Twilio is a decent sized company, now public, and so we know that they will not pivot or change their Voice product.

SMS providers are similar in function - obviously. The main area where Twilio is different and better is their API. It's very well thought out and the documentation is superb. The API is complete - it can do everything you need - and it's intuitive. That's what really sets it apart from its competitors.