You can now send and receive multimedia messages using Plivo on toll-free phone numbers in the US and Canada.

If you’re already utilizing toll-free numbers, this extended capability streamlines your customer service by letting you use the same number for all three channels: voice, SMS, and MMS. You can now offer a better, more consistent user experience for your customers. Toll-free numbers also provide a higher messaging throughput rate — resulting in increased delivery speed — and are cost-effective for businesses to provision and maintain.

We recommend adding multimedia messaging to your engagement strategy if you haven’t done so already. Multimedia messaging helps you create a unique, personalized, and consistent experience for customers. MMS messaging also boosts the total character count for messages from 160 to 1,600, giving you ample room to convey your message effectively. You can send an image, a slideshow of multiple images, animated GIFs, audio, and up to 40 seconds of video.

With Plivo, you can leverage:

• Message queuing: As a safeguard to keep you within carrier regulations and guidelines, Plivo automatically queues your concurrent outbound messages for delivery in the order they were received.
• Built-in multimedia storage: Plivo provides built-in unlimited multimedia storage for both inbound and outbound MMS messages, so you can find and reuse your multimedia easily.
• Support for a variety of formats: Send JPEGs, GIFs, emojis, audio (MP3), and video (MP4) for a rich multimedia experience.

How much does it cost?

Like all of Plivo’s pricing models, you pay only for what you use, and there’s no upfront commitment to get started.

How do I get started?

To buy an SMS- or MMS-enabled toll-free number, go to Phone Numbers in the Plivo console, then click on Buy Number. Tick Toll-Free as the number type, and check-mark SMS and/or MMS as the capability. Not every toll-free number is enabled for SMS or MMS messaging, but you can have Plivo enable yours.

Once you’ve acquired a toll-free number that can send and receive MMS messages, you can upload multimedia directly to our system and start sending messages instantly. We also take care of the media hosting, if you need that.

Want to learn more? Read our detailed use case guide for sending MMS messages for step-by-step information. Not using Plivo yet? Getting started takes just five minutes. Sign up today!

By automating SMS and voice communication and integrating those communication channels with your applications, your business can more easily communicate with customers and meet their needs. But choosing the right communications API provider is critical to delivering the best experience for your customers.

While you may have started out with Twilio or another API provider to connect with your customers via SMS and voice, your first partner may not be the best long-term solution.

For many companies, Twilio’s communications APIs aren’t the right fit for three reasons:

1. You notice inconsistent quality or deliverability in certain regions.
2. You feel frustrated by lackluster customer support and ongoing technical issues that you can’t get resolved.
3. Their pricing seemed great at the beginning, but costs have risen as your customer base has grown, and the expense doesn’t fit your ROI plan.

If your goal is to improve uptime and reliability, you need to diversify your provider mix so you don’t rely on one partner alone and expose your business to the risks of a single point of failure. To do that, figure out your use case, then evaluate new platforms.

Twilio alternative: primary provider or backup?

The first key question is whether to replace Twilio or add a second platform to provide high availability and more throughput.

Adding a backup provider to existing services ensures access to redundant infrastructure and diversifies your services in case one provider goes down.

Switching your primary provider away from Twilio might be the right move if your usage has grown and you’re finding your overall spend to be too high. But you don’t want to trade off cost savings for quality, so you need to find a new primary provider that has equivalent, if not better, delivery rates globally.

Whether you’re looking for a better price point, higher quality, wider reach, or infrastructure redundancy, it’s important to know what to look for when evaluating your new communications API provider.

Make sure your Twilio alternative has these essential features

Once you decide you need a Twilio alternative, either as your new primary provider or as a redundant provider for your failover strategy, you have to determine which cloud communications platform is the right partner for your business.

To evaluate each provider’s unique platform, network, and features, focus on these six key areas.

Key features and essentials

Look for a voice API with programmatic building blocks that let you implement call forwarding, call recording, multiparty conference calling, voicemail, customized audio alerts, voice survey functionality, interactive voice response (IVR), text to speech, call transcription, and call transfers.

On the SMS API side, your team should be able to quickly and painlessly set up automated account alerts and SMS notifications throughout the user journey, send and receive messages, enable SMS autoresponders, send text message reminders, and implement common workflows such as two-factor authentication.

Additionally, look for advanced SMS API functionality like Plivo’s Powerpack, which, on top of ensuring high deliverability and better open rates, gives you the ability to connect and engage with your customers using local phone numbers and eliminates the need to worry about compliance regulations across the globe.

Compare your options to make sure your next provider meets — or exceeds — the bar set by Twilio.

Regional deliverability

If your business operates in multiple regions or countries, you know that not all providers perform equally well in every region. SMS and voice API providers all highlight great global reach on paper, but their SMS delivery rates and call quality vary across countries and regions.

If you decide to use two providers in tandem, then no matter whether Twilio is your primary or your backup API, your new provider should solve for Twilio’s coverage and quality gaps so you can improve your reach and reliability.

On the voice API side, your provider should let you easily integrate voice calling into your web and mobile apps to create a fully integrated user experience. For example, when making outbound calls to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), your provider should allow for specific caller IDs (domestic or international) as per your business requirements. The provider should have direct relationships with Tier 1 local carriers to efficiently connect calls over the PSTN.

For SMS services, your provider should support not only high SMS deliverability to in-country carriers, but also global coverage for businesses that cater to customers around the world. It should support customized sender IDs outside of North America to improve open rates.

Infrastructure reliability

Reliable, redundant infrastructure is critical in ensuring your messages and calls reach your customers every time.

Your API provider should offer at least 99.99% uptime. You can find Plivo’s 90-day uptime rate through our real-time and historical service status page.

Check to make sure that your communications API provider invests in its infrastructure to consistently deliver high quality globally. A strong provider should have:

• Globally distributed points of presence (PoP) across the regions where you do business
• Geographically distributed and monitored network operations centers (NOC) for 24/7 support
• Latency-free connectivity of less than 150 milliseconds to carriers and end phones
• Optimized routing and uptime through an intelligent routing system that routes based on quality

These infrastructure features ensure a robust, fault-tolerant, and reliable platform to support your communications needs.

Compliance and security measures

According to the 2019 CGS Customer Service Security and Compliance Survey, 69% of US consumers would not return to a business that exposed sensitive user information. Your new SMS Verification and voice API provider must implement the compliance and security measures necessary to keep customer information safe.

Your new provider should guarantee GDPR and CCPA compliance and adhere to any other compliance standards your business requires. Additionally, your provider should support features like smart queuing that give you automatic compliance with local carrier requirements. To ensure access security, the provider should support two-factor authentication. These features ensure you meet data protection requirements when personal consumer data is transferred between regions.

In addition to these features, a modern communications API provider should guarantee:

• On-premises security for their networks
• Application security through at-rest and in-transit encryption
• PCI-compliant payment security
• Role-based access control
• Authentication for accessing recordings
• Regular third-party penetration testing

By working with an SMS and voice API provider that provides these features, you ensure your company keeps customers happy and their data secure.

Easy migration

You need APIs that are easy to customize and implement to streamline migration from Twilio to your new provider.

Your Twilio alternative SMS and voice API provider should make it painless to add communications services to your existing setup. That’s why Plivo offers:

• Familiar REST APIs and XML code
• Extensive reference documentation and how-to guides
• SDKs for browser and mobile apps to integrate native voice calling
• Call Insights and debug logs for easier troubleshooting
• The PHLO low-code visual workflow builder

These features make it easy for your team to understand, customize, and troubleshoot applications.

Pricing flexibility

Pricing is one of the major pain points for Twilio customers. As companies scale their usage, they often find that Twilio becomes cost-prohibitive.

Relative to Twilio, Plivo saves customers 40% on outbound SMS, provides free inbound SMS, and offers 20% cost savings on calls to toll-free and local phone numbers. Additionally, Plivo offers lower outbound and inbound SMS rates and lower phone number rental fees.

Better pay-as-you-go pricing and volume discounts as you scale help you lower your TCO. Contact our team to explore pricing scenarios for your business.

Choose the Twilio alternative that best fits your business needs

When choosing an API provider, you should evaluate every facet of their offering to ensure that it meets your needs. Thousands of innovative businesses rely on Plivo for SMS API and voice API services. Every day, companies on our platform experience the benefit of our globally distributed, direct-to-carrier network with high SMS delivery and low call latency.

Our proven quality and scale, enterprise-grade platform, uptime of 99.99%, 24/7 customer support, and low cost of ownership make offering reliable SMS and voice services easy.

Working with an API provider to integrate voice and SMS communications functionality into apps and websites can help companies seamlessly connect with customers. However, not all communications platforms that offer API integrations provide the same capabilities.

After looking at platform features, pricing, API documentation, and the user experience, companies need to dig deeper to assess the quality of an API provider’s carrier network. Why? Because the carrier network is one of the factors that most affects voice quality and message deliverability.

At first glance, having connections within a large number of markets globally might make the provider appear to have a strong carrier network. However, carrier connections are not a commodity. Carriers have varying levels of coverage, reliability, quality, and service, and not all platforms have the infrastructure and technology to deliver a consistently high quality of service.

That’s why businesses should look at the components behind a carrier network, including:

• The quality of the underlying carriers
• How the underlying carrier relationships are established
• The network infrastructure of the communications platform
• The technology layer of the communications platform

To understand whether potential API partners have the right components in place to deliver consistent quality, businesses need to ask these five questions:

1. Do you work directly with local in-country carriers or via larger global carriers?

API providers that work directly with local in-country carriers can minimize multiple hops. Plus, they can directly assess the quality of each carrier and build relationships with them so they can quickly troubleshoot issues. In contrast, using only larger global carriers could put the communications platform several degrees away from the end network operator, which can increase call latency and make it difficult to get the root cause of network and call quality issues.

2. How do you assess and monitor the quality of the carriers you work with?

Having direct connections to local carriers can make it easier to assess and monitor quality thanks to the first-degree nature of the partnerships. Still, businesses need to make sure that their API providers have mechanisms in place to assess and monitor quality on an ongoing basis. For example, an API provider can use in-country physical test nodes to assess communications quality via these carriers. These physical devices simulate end users to test call and SMS quality in real time, so API providers can quickly spot issues and resolve them.

3. Do you have built-in redundancy in terms of multiple carrier connections and load balancing?

Even with quality carrier connections, outages can still occur, so businesses should look for API providers that have built-in redundancy by partnering with multiple carriers in each market where available. A strong communications platform should also have the technology to automatically load balance and switch carriers entirely if need be, due to carrier failures or an overload of traffic.

4. How does your underlying infrastructure and technology support connections to high-quality carriers?

An API provider should have dedicated PoPs in strategic locations to minimize hops, rather than relying on inefficient routes that can create lag time during calls. For example, suppose a provider uses a PoP in Hong Kong to connect all traffic in the Asia-Pacific region. In that case, a user making a domestic call within Australia would get routed through Hong Kong, and that extra distance would add noticeable latency.

Companies should also assess whether API providers have the infrastructure and technology to support carrier connectivity. Some providers use route blending, which blends high-quality local carriers with cheaper aggregators that use lower-quality routes, which can lead to inconsistent call quality. Look for an API provider that has an automated quality-based routing engine, which prioritizes the best available routes instead of trying to cut corners to save money.

5. How do you detect and resolve issues in your network?

Finding out whether an API provider has direct connections to carriers provides a clue into whether they can quickly detect and resolve issues, but companies should further question how an API provider identifies issues and how they surface the data to you so you can monitor the overall health of your voice calls.

A platform’s technology needs to be capable of analyzing network activity to spot issues and adjust in real time. Suppose a call lasts five seconds and then gets placed again; that could indicate poor call quality, as the participants had to reconnect after the first attempt. An API provider’s routing engine should be able to identify these types of issues and automatically adjust call routes.

Having a carrier operations team in place is also crucial. Such teams can help in instances where the technology cannot identify the issue, and strategize solutions directly with carriers.

Find an API provider that prioritizes quality

By asking these questions about carrier networks, technology, and infrastructure, you can find an API provider that consistently facilitates quality connections so that you and your customers can communicate with ease.

Plivo’s commitment to carrier quality makes it the best Twilio alternative. With seven strategically placed PoPs across five continents, latency-free connectivity, consistent deliverability, and optimized routing across our global carrier network, we’ve supported companies in every industry as they integrate communications capabilities into their web and mobile applications.

To learn more about the importance of carrier quality and what businesses should consider when choosing a communications platform, download our white paper “The Carrier Network: What Powers Quality in Voice and SMS APIs.”

Plivo now supports geo permissions for outbound calls on Zentrunk, Plivo’s cloud-based SIP trunking product. Geo permissions helps users prevent toll fraud attacks.

Toll fraud is a situation where fraudsters take control of a customer’s VoIP infrastructure and make calls to expensive destinations. An affected customer may experience a sudden surge in their call usage and expenses towards uncommon destinations.

With geo permissions enabled for your account, you can adopt proactive measures to prevent toll fraud.

Zentrunk geo permissions

Zentrunk users can now restrict the countries to which you can place calls globally. Configure country-specific rules for outbound trunks and set an account-level default by visiting Zentrunk > Geo Permissions on the Plivo console. See our documentation for complete info.

Enable calls to specific countries

You can enable and disable calling to selected destinations by choosing specific countries to which you expect to make outbound calls. You can configure these separately for different trunks. Zentrunk will allow calls to selected countries and block calls to all other destinations.

Block calls to high-risk destinations

Plivo periodically analyzes call patterns and rates of networks worldwide and identifies high-risk destinations susceptible to toll fraud. These high-risk phone networks are unlikely to be used by end consumers for regular use cases. You can enable high-risk destination blocking to ensure that calls made to these destinations are blocked.

To prevent losses from potential toll fraud, we recommend that you configure geo permissions to enable calls to only those countries that you or your customers expect to make calls, and enable blocking of high-risk network groups.

Zentrunk geo permissions is available at no additional cost.

Not using Plivo yet? Getting started takes just five minutes. Sign-up and get started today.

Studies show that more customers prefer to get transactional communications from businesses by SMS than over any other channel. That’s why it’s critical that you have an SMS API provider that offers you not only high deliverability at global scale, but also the best pricing, feature set, and support. Is it time for you to reassess your SMS API provider?

Two options you should consider: Adding a redundant SMS API provider to ensure higher availability and uptime, or switching over completely to a Twilio alternative. Unsure which is the right decision for your situation? Consider these factors, all of which drive companies to seek out a different partner:

• Improved deliverability
• Ease of migration
• Proactive service engagement
• Lower cost of ownership

Let’s take a closer look at each factor and see why a Twilio alternative like Plivo might be the upgrade your company needs.

Improved deliverability

A provider is only as good as their carrier relationships, and if the provider doesn’t work with carriers in regions key to your business, or hasn’t invested in network redundancies to protect service in those areas, you’ll want to explore secondary providers for those regions.

Plivo has direct relationships with local carriers globally. We connect customers to more than 1,600 carrier networks across 190+ countries. This robust carrier network ensures you can send messages anywhere in the world without worrying about coverage or deliverability.

By investing in the best infrastructure and global connections, Plivo offers its customers:

• High SMS deliverability by avoiding aggregators and resellers and connecting directly to carriers.
• Multiple local in-country carriers for the best connections possible without a single point of failure.
• High carrier quality thanks to a detailed evaluation process that ensures carriers meet or exceed benchmarks for highest deliverability.
• No route blending to ensure a high quality of service that isn’t compromised by low-quality network routes.
• Scalability via a distributed routing strategy and multivendor interoperability.
• Instant phone number provisioning thanks to a bank of ready-to-use mobile, local, and toll-free numbers.

Ease of migration

Twilio offers a solid SMS API platform, but on third-party review sites, Twilio customers report continuing issues using the platform’s billing and payment system, searching and viewing transactional logs, and sorting large amounts of SMS data through the web interface.

By contrast, Plivo’s user interface and API are consistently recognized as being some of the best on the market — and excellent documentation makes it easy for businesses to migrate to Plivo. In the words of one developer{ :target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow” }, “The API is one of the best documented I’ve ever read.”

Along with its easy-to-use API, Plivo also offers built-in visual templates that make it easy to create, customize, and implement complex workflows.

If you’re not ready to migrate entirely from Twilio, consider adding Plivo as a redundant API integration to mitigate risk of downtime or service failures in any region of the world. Because Plivo offers full feature parity with Twilio, you’ll keep the functionality you need with a more economical price point and better customer service. When you’re ready to migrate away, Plivo’s familiar API constructs let you implement SMS functionality quickly with a low learning curve.

Proactive service engagement

You turn to your provider’s customer service team for timely support when you have questions about your SMS services or need help troubleshooting feature integration. Your provider’s support team should also offer solution engineering during onboarding to ensure you have all the information you need for your use case. If customer support isn’t available or lacks expertise, you may experience prolonged issues, frustrating your customers and jeopardizing revenue.

With Plivo, companies can access timely and highly rated customer support.

Not only will a quality SMS provider help you navigate technical issues, but they’ll advise you on how to build a program that best fits your business use case. Or, as one customer said of Plivo, “What makes a company stand apart is the after sales/customer engagement […] Kudos to the team.”

Plivo is known for really listening to its customers, and we pride ourselves on offering clients hands-on customer engagement, whether you’re adding services to augment your Twilio program or are switching over entirely. Customers laud us for our accessible, consultative solution advice not only as they’re getting started but also as they grow and scale.

Cost of ownership

Look for a Twilio alternative that offers competitive pricing to maintain your total cost of ownership (TCO) or lower it, while still guaranteeing full feature parity.

When you’re choosing an alternative provider for your failover strategy or looking to switch your primary SMS API, you’ll want to focus on reach and reliability first and foremost. But better SMS rates overall make a migration choice a lot easier.

Plivo promises customers best-in-class functionality and global coverage with lower cost of ownership.

Plivo offers better pricing than Twilio in all categories:

• We promise lower phone number pricing than Twilio, saving customers as much as 20% for local and toll-free number types.
• We offer better standard SMS pricing across all message types, including outbound and inbound local numbers and short codes, plus free inbound SMS messaging.
• We charge less for inbound and outbound MMS messages, saving customers 20% per MMS message.

That means that if you’re sending, for example, 1 million messages via short codes to customers in the US, your company would save approximately 40% by switching to Plivo. International pricing varies, but international businesses enjoy similar savings when they make the change.

Don’t wait: Explore our Twilio alternative today

Customers love Plivo because they get the quality and features they’re used to with Twilio’s SMS API, but with better pricing, more attentive service, and, according to many of our users, better documentation and ease of use.

Thousands of innovative companies rely on Plivo’s global, enterprise-grade SMS API. Sign up for free today, or talk to one of our communications experts to learn more about how Plivo can support your business.

A quality voice API enables you to easily build and integrate customer engagement flows without dealing with the complexity of telecommunications. Maybe you used an API provider like Twilio to help you get started, but now you realize your needs have changed. You still expect best-in-class call quality, but you want better customer service, more global coverage, or a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

If this sounds familiar, you have two options:

• Add a Twilio alternative as a failover strategy to bolster your voice communication integration.
• Replace Twilio with a new voice API service provider that offers full feature parity.

Either way, you need to know what to look for. Here are five things to assess when deciding whether it’s time to add or switch providers.

Call quality

Twilio’s infrastructure is reliable but it’s not perfect. If your customer base is global, you can’t risk spotty coverage in any region where you do business.

The ideal Twilio alternative has direct relationships with Tier 1 carriers around the world and has invested in its network infrastructure so that it can offer high-quality voice calls that don’t drop audio or have annoying lags and delays.

If you’ve noticed poor call quality with your existing voice service or have been inconvenienced by outages, consider switching voice API providers or adding a second company as a failover option.

By using Plivo as a redundant API provider, you get access to our premium global carrier network with seven regional points of presence (PoP), which gives you high call quality while mitigating the risk of a Twilio service failure. Plivo offers better voice quality than Twilio in some geographies.

Ease of use

Twilio may have been the first to market with a developer-friendly voice API platform, but it’s not the only competitive option around. Other providers offer better service and easier-to-use platforms.

Twilio customers report that the company’s API can be complex to navigate and hard to learn, while Plivo customers laud its extensive API documentation. Or, as one customer put it, “API documentation and ease of use have been my strongest ‘likes’ of Plivo.”

If you’re thinking of switching to a new primary provider or adding on a failover solution, Plivo’s Voice API offers guaranteed ease of use, so you spend less time coding and more time delivering on customers’ needs.

Feature parity

Twilio offers a robust set of features, and you shouldn’t have to sacrifice the capabilities you need to get better coverage or a better price point. Luckily, you don’t have to, as long as you choose a quality Twilio alternative.

Customers who add redundancy with or migrate to Plivo can use all features they’re accustomed to getting from Twilio, such as voice transcription, call transfer, call queuing, call whisper, and call hunting and documentation to support a variety of use cases, including:

• Two-factor authentication
• Voice notification
• Phone verification
• Phone system IVR
• Voice surveys
• Click to call
• Call forwarding
• Call tracking
• Number masking

Plivo’s best-in-class feature set ensures that you don’t have to compromise on functionality. Instead, you can enjoy the same capabilities at a better price with more reliability.

Better pricing

If you’ve scaled your voice service and found that differences in voice rates have started to add up, it might be time to switch.

But before you commit to migration, don’t look at just the price. A good Twilio alternative will balance per-minute and per-number rates with quality-based routing alongside high voice call quality thanks to its direct relationships with voice carriers in each geographic area. Evaluate each provider’s available volume discounts to see which offers the best savings for your business.

For instance, you can see in this price breakdown that Plivo offers consistently lower price points than Twilio.

Plivo customers can save as much as 50% on the cost of similar programs relative to Twilio. Plivo’s low customer acquisition costs and direct relationships with underlying carriers let us pass our savings on to our customers.

World-class customer support

If you’re frustrated with Twilio’s customer service wait times, you’re not alone.

Find a voice service provider who offers 24/7 customer support with a fast turnaround so you’re not waiting hours — or days — to get answers. Also, find out if the API provider you’re considering as a Twilio alternative has experience helping companies implement the use cases you need most, so they can guide your migration and implementation and quickly troubleshoot any issues that arise.

Plivo customers often report that the company’s support team isn’t just quick to respond, but also friendly and dedicated to finding collaborative solutions for each of their clients’ use cases.

Want better voice quality? Plivo delivers

Every month, Plivo handles more than 1 billion API requests on our premium carrier network. We promise high-quality service and low-latency voice calls across more than 190 countries.

Plivo has helped thousands of innovative companies worldwide create cutting-edge customer experiences and streamline their operations with voice services. Leveraging our Voice API platform, businesses can easily make calls to all regions and buy virtual phone numbers in 65 of them.

And the strengths of Plivo voice service extend beyond our best-in-class coverage. Companies like IBM, Intel, and PagerDuty turn to us because our simple API allows their developers to work smarter and faster.

With our voice API, you can quickly reduce response times to customer inquiries, make your team more productive by reducing call center volumes, and easily manage voice notifications, appointment reminders, and service updates.

To get started, sign up for free or talk to a Plivo migration expert today.

SMS is one of the most widely used forms of communications around the world, and one of the most efficient, thanks to instant delivery and open rates of up to 98%. The demand for enterprise application-to-person (A2P) messaging is growing, driven by several factors, including smartphone availability, a mobile-first mentality, and demand for real-time and personalized communications.

In the US alone, businesses send billions of SMS messages daily to their customers to communicate everything from delivery statuses to order notifications to security alerts to two-factor authentication notices.

SMS and MMS messages let you communicate directly with current and potential customers. Two critical factors determine the business impact of your SMS programs: delivery reliability and cost.

In this post, we focus on the second factor. Plivo stacks up as the best Twilio alternative across three pricing categories:

• Phone number rates
• SMS rates
• MMS rates

Compare Twilio Vs Plivo phone number pricing

Phone number rates are the starting point of your pricing plan. While the cost of leasing one or more numbers from your provider doesn’t have the largest impact on your budget, the price will influence your overall return on investment (ROI).

Plivo’s phone number pricing is competitive across the board, saving customers as much as 50% compared to Twilio when it comes to toll-free and short code numbers.

Competitive SMS rates support mobile communications

Now let’s look at per-message rates. You need a cost-effective framework that provides competitive SMS rates at any volume.

Below, we’ll break down what goes into Plivo’s and Twilio’s standard and carrier-set fees and outline the difference those price points make with a real-world campaign example.

Standard text message pricing : Plivo Vs Twilio

Message for message, Plivo’s pricing saves customers 33% on message send via local outbound numbers, 23% on toll-free numbers, and 40% on short codes. Even better: Local inbound messages are free with Plivo (vs. $0.0075 for Twilio).

How much of a difference can those savings make? If you were to plan a campaign of 1 million outbound short code messages, as outlined in the graphic above, that 40% rate difference would translate to $3,000 saved in standard text message fees.

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Carrier passthrough fees

Rates may be the main cost of sending messages, but carrier passthrough fees also apply. Passthrough fees for outbound messages vary depending on the carrier network used to deliver the messages. Your SMS verification API partner adds these fees to the per-message rate.

Think of this like a sales tax — every provider charges the fee based on what each carrier charges them. For example, Verizon charges $0.0025 per SMS message for local and short code numbers, and US Cellular charges $0.0035 for outbound messages from short code numbers and $0.005 for outbound messages from local numbers.

When planning your budget for SMS campaigns, a good rule of thumb to estimate the fee you’ll be charged is to multiply your monthly message volume by each network carrier’s market share ratio. For a campaign of 1 million outbound short code messages, for instance, Verizon would charge around $730 in carrier passthrough fees and US Cellular would charge about $42, based on Q3 2019 market shares.

When we take a look at how standard SMS fees combined with carrier passthrough fees add up across a month-long campaign of 1 million short code messages, it’s easy to see which provider is more affordable. By using Plivo for those messages to US customers, you’d save close to 35% compared to the cost of the same program with Twilio.

The difference is clear: Plivo has better SMS pricing across the board.

Having said all this, we would be remiss if we didn’t note that cost isn’t everything; reliability and deliverability count for a lot. Plivo uses a quality-based routing (QBR) system to ensure you get the best deliverability possible for each dollar you spend.

And Plivo offers inbound and outbound toll-free SMS services, which Twilio does not support.

MMS Pricing comparison: Plivo Vs Twilio

MMS gives businesses more engaging impact for their messaging by using rich-media formats like images, video, and audio.

Because more data is required to deliver the extra media, MMS pricing differs from SMS costs.

Plivo offers more economical price points for both inbound and outbound local MMS pricing.

General MMS pricing : Plivo Vs Twilio

Like SMS pricing, your MMS pricing rate is set by your SMS API on a per-unit basis.

While per-message rates go down as volume goes up, subtle differences in Twilio’s per-MMS-message pricing can lead to a significant difference in total cost between it and competitors. On average, Plivo customers save 20% on outbound and inbound MMS message costs.

When scaled up to that same campaign of 1 million messages we used for SMS pricing, these price points make a big difference.

As is the case with SMS messages, API providers pass along carrier-set fees for MMS messages. These are equal between Plivo and Twilio.

Picking the best Twilio alternative

The numbers are clear, and thousands of innovative companies know Plivo is the best Twilio alternative because of our combination of quality, reach, and affordability.

If you’re ready to get better mileage out of your SMS budget, download our full pricing guide for all 190+ countries in our network.

As a business leader, you know that one of the best ways to reach your customers is via text messaging. But you also know that finding an SMS provider and API that can reliably and cost-effectively reach your customer base across multiple geographies is difficult.

It may be time to find an additional or new SMS provider if

• you need better professional technical support and troubleshooting resources
• you need reliable global SMS coverage
• you need reliable network coverage and higher uptime
• you need robust, direct integration with third-party plugins
• you want to pay only for what you use.

Whether you’re looking for a backup provider to Twilio, planning on switching your primary provider to an SMS API with more features, or wanting to ensure that your messages make it to all your customers in every geography, it’s important to know how to evaluate each product as you shop around.

Steps to Choose the Right SMS Service Provider

The “right” SMS service provider means something different for every business. However, there are some key features to look for as you weigh your options. Evaluate features like coverage, integration ease, security, scalability, cost, and analytics to find the right fit. By prioritizing your needs and comparing providers, you can find the perfect partner to deliver your SMS marketing messages reliably.

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1. Look for an SMS provider with the essentials

At the end of the day, the most important thing an SMS API provider must do is ensure that your messages reach your customers. A suite of cutting-edge features is appealing, but there are a few key bases your provider must cover first.

Look for these five essential features in your SMS API provider:

• Character support across multiple languages with built-in, network-standard GSM and Unicode characters and emojis ensures that messages display as you’ve intended — whether you’re reaching customers in China, the United States, or Yemen.
• Multiple sender ID support allows you to use long codes, toll-free numbers, short codes, and alphanumeric sender IDs. Your provider should help you figure out which format is right for your business case.
• Long message concatenation prevents long texts from arriving at receivers in multiple parts by automatically concatenating them.
• Delivery report notifications allow you to track real-time delivery data from your messages and measure the performance of each SMS campaign you send.
• Message queuing reduces the amount of work you have to do per SMS campaign and lets you send multiple messages in a single API request. Your provider should ensure that you follow the throughput recommendations of your downstream carrier.

If you find an SMS provider that offers these five features, you’re well on your way to ensuring that messages reach customers as intended.

2. Check that your SMS API provider meets compliance standards

69% of consumers think that companies are vulnerable to cyberattacks, and only 25% think that companies handle sensitive data well. Your SMS provider must be able to help you keep customer information secure.

Local carrier rules change by location. You need an SMS provider that helps ensure you’re in compliance. The SMS API provider should also offer

• Purging and protection of sensitive data. Your provider shouldn’t store message details that contain sensitive, identifiable customer information, including phone numbers.
• Smart rate limiting. Every country has regulations around SMS messaging. Your provider should help you understand and comply with each country’s per-number messaging frequency limits and throughput regulations.
• Automatic opt-out handling. SMS API providers should support simple, automatic opt-outs and auto-replies such as “stop” and “cancel” on long code messages.

These three compliance measures, combined with the expertise of your SMS API provider, help to ensure that your SMS communications meet relevant regulations and reach your customers without issue.

3. Ensure that the SMS provider delivers to all your geographies and channels

No matter where you and your customers are located, your SMS API provider should guarantee fast, global delivery with a quality-based routing engine that integrates with other features and selects the best delivery route based on historical performance data.

But that’s not all. Look for these other delivery features when assessing an SMS API provider:

• Free incoming SMS. This feature improves ROI and overhead by delivering SMS long codes at no cost to you.
• Intelligent message encoding. Your SMS provider should ensure delivery support for destination networks where Unicode isn’t supported with an intelligent message system that exchanges Unicode characters for similar GSM characters.
• Number pooling. Avoid sending rate delays and carrier flagging by spreading messages across a pool of numbers.
• Conversion API. Look for real-time feedback from your API to inform future campaigns and improve carrier routing.
• Geo permissions. Make sure you can easily control which geographies your messages can reach without having to code.
• Local match. Improve open rates and response rates with auto-selection of a local number based on the destination area code.

As your business grows, it’s important that your SMS messaging campaigns serve every geography your customers live in. By checking for these key delivery features you ensure accurate, cost-effective, and data-informed delivery every time.

4. Make sure your SMS API provider has the reliability you need to succeed

Your SMS provider should give you the peace of mind that comes from knowing your messages will reach your customers and that issues, should they arise, will be quickly resolved. This means extreme reliability (such as guaranteed uptimes of 99.95%) and a team that cares about you.

Make sure that your SMS provider can support you and your business with a

• Tier 1 carrier network. You need to know your messages will get to every one of your customers. By partnering with a Tier 1 carrier network, SMS providers can promise high deliverability.
• Redundant carrier network. Ensure messages reach your customers by choosing a vendor with a redundant carrier network. This means that if messages fail to be delivered, they’re automatically routed to the next best carrier.
• High availability and reliability. Uptimes of at least 99.95% should be guaranteed by a service-level agreement (SLA).

Spend your time reaping the benefits of a killer strategic SMS messaging campaign, not troubleshooting APIs or wondering whether messages made it to customers, by ensuring that your SMS API provider has these reliability features.

5. Look for low, flexible, and transparent pricing

SMS messaging should help you realize ROI, not eat up your budget. Make sure that you’re paying only for the features and data you use.

No matter where you’re looking to reach customers or how large your SMS messaging campaigns are, your SMS API provider should offer transparent pricing plans:

• Pay-as-you-go pricing. Pay only for what you use with usage-based pricing.
• Volume discounts. Your rate should get cheaper as your messaging volume increases.
• Committed-use discounts. Get a discount on your pricing if you switch from a pay-as-you-go model to a committed-use pricing package

6. Look for the ability to customize and integrate SMS provider features

Pricing isn’t the only thing that should be flexible to your needs. Your SMS provider should let you easily and quickly customize, scale, and integrate cutting-edge features that help you stand out from your competition and delight your customers.

• Sticky sender. Maintain a continuous thread of communication with customers when using a number pool by delivering messages from the same number or sender ID each time.
• Low-code development. Customize your code, and deploy quickly through visual, low-friction editors and reusable templates.
• Built-in multitenancy: Segment your customers based on use case, spend capacity, or risk profile to track performance and billing.
• Detailed debug logs. Streamline troubleshooting with informative debug and error logs.
• Extensive documentation. Integrate easily with the tools you use most, thanks to detailed documentation and sample code.
• Server-side software development kits (SDK). Ensure that your team can program in their language of choice, whether it’s Java, Python, Ruby, Node.js, or others.
• Serverless environment. Enjoy all the benefits of custom code without the headache of hosting it yourself.

Your SMS API provider shouldn’t paint you into a corner when it comes to functionality. Flexible features allow you to take what you love and trim the rest to build the best SMS messaging campaigns possible.

7. Make the most of your investment with premium support

Customer support may not rate highly on your wishlist for an SMS provider. But, if (and when) something goes wrong, you’ll be grateful you invested the time to investigate the customer service options available from your chosen vendor. 

Reviewers on G2 can give you good feedback about the customer service of different SMS providers. For instance, Plivo is rated highly for its customer satisfaction and 24/7 premium support. Support teams can give you the right feedback to make sure you’re using all the platform’s features to their full potential. Plivo’s consultative approach to customer success ensures its users get technical guidance and industry expertise, maximizing the ROI of your investment.

8. Look for a vendor that takes compliance seriously

There are strict regulations governing SMS marketing, so it’s important to find an SMS service provider that takes compliance seriously. Look for a trusted service with a deep understanding of consent management and the necessary tools to ensure smooth legal compliance.

As a baseline, your provider should adhere to regional laws and industry standards, like GDPR in Europe and TCPA in the US. Plivo has achieved SOC 2 Type 2 and PCI DSS certification, HIPAA compliance, and ISO 27001:2022 certification. These certifications demonstrate a commitment to data security and compliance with privacy regulations. You should also look for features that streamline opt-in processes, effortless opt-out management, list cleaning tools, and robust data security measures.

How to find the SMS API provider that’s right for your business and your customers

You want to make sure that when it comes time to reach out to customers with SMS, development and integration are easy and messages reliably get where they need to go.

If you’re looking to add a backup vendor for failover situations, or if you’ve grown your business to new geographies that your current provider can’t reach, consider what your primary SMS API provider does well and where you need to supplement.

If you’re looking for a new primary SMS provider, it helps to develop a visual representation of how each company stacks up. That’s why we created our downloadable SMS API provider evaluation checklist [PDF]. Use this document to compare SMS provider offerings.

You want to give your customers the best experience. To do that, you need an SMS provider with the highest-quality support, features, and infrastructure, without breaking your budget. Plivo is the best Twilio alternative. With globally distributed PoPs, latency-free connectivity, high deliverability, and optimized routing, we’ve supported companies in every industry. Our SMS API and global delivery network have helped businesses such as GoDaddy, Deckers Brands, and Wix make a lasting impact, backed by free, 24/7 technical support and ease of integration and scaling — all with a 35% cost savings compared to Twilio. Sign up for a free trial today.

We live in an era where customer choice is top of mind. B2C (business to consumer) companies have to address consumers’ expectations to choose exactly what they want, when they want. Similarly, B2B (business to business) companies need to adapt to the personalization trend and allow customers to choose specific products and services that fit specific price, performance, and geography considerations.

We see an unbundling trend in the communications industry, on both the B2C and B2B fronts. Consumers want to unbundle internet service from TV and phone service, leveraging a traditional telco like AT&T for phone (if they still have a landline), an internet service provider like Comcast for internet, and a streaming TV service like Netflix, Hulu, or Sling for programming.

Similarly, businesses are looking to unbundle their communications services. Business VoIP technology is particularly ripe for unbundling as more organizations transition to IP-based solutions and more service providers enter the market.

Understanding the VoIP infrastructure landscape

The VoIP landscape includes a mix of hardware and software components that provide products and services such as VoIP-enabled telephones, IP PBXs for transmitting and routing calls to VoIP-enabled phones, and SIP trunks to connect IP PBXs to phone networks. Some VoIP vendors package these components together for an all-in-one solution. For example, some vendors package proprietary telephone hardware with IP services, often for a premium. For some businesses that are new to VoIP or have limited resources, this type of turnkey, multipronged solution may be beneficial. For other companies, unbundled VoIP solutions offer greater flexibility and control over pricing, but could come at the cost of functionality.

As businesses consider unbundled VoIP services, they should understand the layers of the VoIP infrastructure, the market players at each layer, and the pros and cons of unbundling.

The layers of VoIP infrastructure

VoIP may involve several kinds of technology, such as:

• Hardware phones: For companies that want to use physical phones with their VoIP service, a number of companies, such as Grandstream, Polycom, and Yealink, offer VoIP-enabled phones. While these are hardware phones, they include built-in software that allows them to work with VoIP and offers features such as caller ID and conferencing.
• Software/soft phones: In contrast to hardware phones, some organizations leverage software-based virtual phones that let users make calls through their computers. Soft phones can provide more flexibility than investing in hardware phones. They’re often bundled into a VoIP package by companies such 8x8 Inc., RingCentral, and Vonage.
• IP PBXs: VoIP users can leverage software-based private branch exchanges (PBX), known as IP PBXs, to transmit and route voice and data communications to VoIP-enabled phones. Providers such as 3CX, Asterisk, and FreePBX offer solutions that interface with other components of the VoIP infrastructure.
• SIP trunks: SIP trunks connect a IP PBX to the internet so you can make calls. Providers like Plivo, Twilio, and Voxbone offer SIP trunking solutions.

A savvy company could buy VoIP-enabled hardware phones to put on-premises, pair the phones with an open source IP PBX system, and plug in a SIP trunking service for a best-of-breed unbundled solution.

The bottom line is that a broad array of service providers address the VoIP landscape. No company owns a majority share of the market, so it’s worth shopping around to get the best mix to suit your needs.

UCaaS isn’t the be-all, end-all

Another alternative is unified communications as a service. UCaaS providers offer a cloud-based package of communication tools, typically with a white-labeled SIP trunking solution bundled as part of the service. While UCaaS can be advantageous for businesses looking to quickly transition from having a separate landline phone system, video conferencing system, and SMS system to one all-inclusive system, it generally lacks the level of customization offered by other options. Rather than being able to pick the specific technologies they need at the right price and right level of service, UCaaS customers may end up with a solution that falls short in certain areas or includes components they don’t need.

Moreover, there seems to be a dizzying array of UCaaS companies, with widely varied descriptions of UCaaS and terminology about optimal solution packages. First-time buyers (and even those pretty well-versed in the market) can be confused by the similar-sounding descriptions. Buyers should look past the nomenclature and assess the specific features and services offered by a UCaaS provider and compare them to unbundled options.

Unbundle your network

While UCaaS providers address a set of communications needs, it is possible for a business to plug a VoIP feature like SIP trunking from one provider into a UCaaS solution from another provider.

This growing trend, known as bring your own carrier (BYOC), allows businesses to use a VoIP provider’s platform to develop custom messaging and voice applications, for example, but also bring their own carriers for voice service and phone numbers. The benefits can be numerous.

Unbundling benefit #1 — cost savings

Some UCaaS vendors package VoIP solutions and charge a monthly subscription fee on a per-user basis. But not every business needs every feature within a VoIP provider’s package. Unbundling enables businesses to negotiate a lower rate by picking and choosing only the elements they use. Or, businesses might prefer a pay-as-you-go model to gain flexibility for scaling call volume up or down in certain regions or during different times of the year.

Unbundling benefit #2 — global reach

Another benefit of unbundling is global communications coverage. Not all carriers are equal when it comes to global reach and quality, so a business with multiple regional operations may seek a carrier that has points of presence (PoP) in the areas of the world where they do business to help ensure consistent call quality. By contrast, if your business is only in North America, you need not pay a premium for a carrier with PoPs on six continents.

Unbundling benefit #3 — redundancy

SIP trunking providers often work with multiple carriers and have redundant infrastructure so that if one area has an outage, calls can be routed through other infrastructure that’s still running. Unbundling allows organizations to choose SIP trunking providers that have a level of redundancy they’re comfortable with, rather than being locked into whatever a bundled solution offers.

Unbundling benefit #4 — call quality

Similar to the benefit of redundancy, businesses that unbundle can choose SIP trunking providers that work only with high-quality, Tier 1 carriers. Doing so helps ensure consistent calls connections and clear communications.

Some carriers offer least-cost routing (LCR), which means calls may be routed to whatever network provides the lowest rate for a particular time and location, regardless of connection quality. A focus on LCR often leads to less-than-ideal call quality and issues such as high jitter, one-way audio, dropped calls, high latency (connection delay), and lack of support for DTMF or CLI.

Unbundling benefit #5 — feature customization

In addition to cost savings and improved reach, unbundling can enable businesses to better customize their VoIP infrastructure with the technology , customer service, and compliance features that meet their business needs.

For example, a business that’s concerned about compliance can use a carrier that offers built-in features such as call recording or call logging for maintaining call records. Another business may want to use a carrier that has guaranteed DMFI support and CLI retention, and promised uptime.

Unbundling benefit #6 — VoIP hardware/software customization

Unbundling can also give businesses the ability to customize their hardware and software setups. Some VoIP providers offer all-in-one deals that include phones and other hardware, but businesses often want to bring their own hard or soft phones to save money or address unique business needs. For example, some businesses may prefer equipment that’s suited for conference calls, while others may prefer feature-rich desk phones.

Communicate with VoIP providers to understand your unbundling options

By taking advantage of unbundling, businesses can reduce costs and increase customization. Still, some businesses will benefit more from an all-in-one package, so it’s important to not assume that one approach is inherently better than the other.

Depending on your current telecom infrastructure, your in-house resources, and your business goals, you may be able to customize a package that fits your needs, or you may be able to negotiate an all-in-one deal that helps you come out ahead. Some UCaaS providers may be willing to unbundle certain services or reduce pricing by leaving off a few features that you don’t need.

As in the consumer telecom business, the power of choice in VoIP is increasingly shifting to buyers, and providers increasingly realize that they need to open up in order to thrive. If unbundling helps your business save money or gain control, take advantage of this opportunity to customize your VoIP infrastructure.

Originally published in slightly different form on GetVoIP.