Twilio WebRTC: Powerful Communication Technology
January 11, 2019
Twilio WebRTC: Powerful Communication Technology
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Twilio WebRTC
Overall Satisfaction with Twilio
Twilio WebRTC is being used by our company to power online calls between our customer support team and users as well as between different types of users themselves. As we already use Twilio's Programmable Chat API to power chat communications on our platform, this feature fits in quite naturally into our use case allowing users to communicate with each other directly from our chat interface. Twilio is the center of all communication on our platform for our users.
- Twilio's web client gives you everything you need to begin integrating Twilio WebRTC into your platform.
- It has quite a powerful tech stack where certain features are simply plug and play.
- The ability to call actual phone numbers and not just app to app phone calls is quite handy.
- There is some latency when calling international phone numbers.
- You are charged for both incoming and outgoing calls so your costs can go up quite quickly depending on usage.
- VoIP laws come into the picture depending on where you are located. You may need to get your IP whitelisted by your provider to allow VoIP calls within your location if this is the case for you. Would be great if Twilio could assist with this aspect.
- Twilio WebRTC allowed us to move a bulk of our communication to the cloud, giving us a lot of visibility on how we were communicating with our customers.
- It also gave us analytics on how much time users spent on communicating with each other over calls and helped us build features around it.
- Twilio became the center of all communication on our platform. From chat messages to phone calls, it powered everything.
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.