Speech recognition has become increasingly pervasive in recent years. This technology helps businesses provide a better customer experience and reduce organizational costs.

You can now take advantage of automatic speech recognition (ASR) with Plivo’s GetInput XML, an easy way to configure engaging, voice-driven user experiences.

Plivo’s ASR technology eliminates the heavy lifting that’s often associated with building AI-driven voice interactions. Our ASR helps build responsive applications that act on partial recognition results as your customer speaks, and we’re able to make voice transcriptions available to your application in real time.

Here are some ways ASR can enhance your end user experience, as well as help your customer service agents work more efficiently.

• Conversational IVR: Upgrade a manual, traditional IVR menu to a speech-driven experience that gets callers the answers they seek faster. Conversational IVR can do more than just say “Press 1.”
• Voice search: Build virtual assistants that intelligently provide relevant information based on the user’s query.
• Surveys and form fills: Prompt users with questions and automatically capture and transcribe their answers to fill out forms and surveys.

How does it work?

Plivo routes user responses based on a speech or a digit-selection prompt. When collecting a user’s speech as input, Plivo transcribes and relays the spoken phrases to the specified action URL in real time. When collecting input through digit press, the digits entered by the user are relayed to the specified action URL. For more information, see our documentation.

How much does it cost?

The amount you’re charged for ASR is based on the duration of the analyzed speech. Charges are calculated as USD $0.02 per 15-second pulse (rounded up). For example, if speech was recognized for 35 seconds, the account would be billed for 45 seconds (15 * 3) of speech.

What are some key features of Plivo’s ASR functionality?

Extensive language support: Plivo supports speech recognition for 27 major languages and their regional variants.

Speech adaptation with hints: Improve speech recognition accuracy by providing a set of hint words and phrases expected from the speaker. This feature can improve transcription accuracy of proper nouns, homophones (one, won), and domain-specific words rarely used in everyday conversation.

Prebuilt models: Reduce the amount of time spent configuring an IVR system and select from a range of prebuilt models, depending on your use case.

Profanity filter: Keep your transcriptions clean, and identify and monitor the use of profanity. The profanity filter masks specific words in the transcriptions programmatically forwarded to your application.

Simultaneous input detection: Augment your existing IVR applications with speech by enabling the simultaneous detection of DTMF and speech input — in other words, you can now prompt, “Press 1 or say ‘yes’ to accept.”

Advanced end-of-speech detection: Automatically detect the end of the user’s speech. Advanced timeout controls help configure end of speech detection behavior.

Interim transcription results: Reduce response times by receiving transcription results in real time with each word spoken by the caller.

Getting started

Getting started with ASR is easy. Head over to our product guide for detailed references and code samples. All Plivo server SDKs come with helper functions to work with GetInput XML. Read our language-specific guides on getting started with Plivo Voice API.

Not using Plivo yet? Getting started takes just five minutes. Sign up today!

Short codes offer a clean, fast, and legally compliant option for sending high-volume, one-way application-to-person (A2P) communications. Before you consider them, however, you should understand the common use case for short codes; what makes short codes a powerful, fast, and reliable medium; and the requirements for short code approval.

Common uses cases for short codes

The regulation and logistics surrounding short code usage are complex. Companies sometimes jump into A2P messaging without a clear understanding of how they should use short codes rather than other number types.

One of the most common myths about short code usage is that it’s only effective for marketing campaigns. In fact, you can use short codes in a variety of high-impact transactional applications across different industries.

For example, restaurants and food delivery services use short codes to update customers on the status of their table, order, or food delivery. Hotel chains, airlines, and parking companies use short codes to remind their guests of upcoming reservations or to handle itinerary changes.

SaaS applications and data storage providers often use short codes and an SMS API to support two-factor authentication, which is a convenient, cost-effective way to keep sensitive customer information and data secure by leveraging SMS to provide the “something they have” layer of 2FA.

In the public sphere, schools use short codes to update parents and students about closures or announce events. Municipalities and safety agencies use short code SMS to deliver emergency alerts, such as sudden weather changes or AMBER alerts. Shipping services like FedEx, USPS, and UPS use short codes to update residents on package statuses, including delivery notifications or delays. Political organizations leverage short codes to support voting, polling, and surveys to gauge public opinion.

While short codes are a dynamic and an effective way to deliver a wide range of A2P communications, they’re not the best number type for all promotional or transactional messaging.

When not to use short codes

If you’re sending a low-volume promotional campaign — fewer than 10 messages per second — it’s more cost-effective to use a toll-free number enabled for SMS or number pooling over long codes. Plivo can help you select the most appropriate number format and optimize your campaigns so that you remain in compliance with the regulations for text messaging set by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA).

What makes short codes powerful and reliable

SMS messages offer an immediate and powerful method for reaching customers. According to mobile research firm MobileSQUARED, 90% of people read their text messages within three minutes of receiving them.

When you combine this high read rate with the high-volume capabilities of A2P short code communications, you can reach more of your end users faster than you could with long codes or toll-free numbers. Plus, short codes are the only preapproved number type for sending promotional messages. This preapproval by the CTIA and Common Short Code Administration (CSCA) means short codes also have more consistent, reliable delivery rates than their long code or toll-free counterparts.

Similarly, short code communications are less likely to be blocked at the carrier level as spam because of their preapproved CTIA status. Before a company can use a short number, the CTIA reviews their program — a process that can take up to six weeks — to ensure that it meets the association’s guidelines.

Plivo can help you with the administrative legwork of getting approval, and advise you on how to compose short code campaigns so they have the best chance of getting approved. More on this later.

Rate limits on messaging via long codes makes them an inefficient way to send high-volume promotional or transactional messages, which often need to reach tens of thousands of recipients with time-sensitive information. While long code communications are limited to one message sent per four-second interval and up to 200 messages per day per number, short code messages can be sent out at the much faster rate of 50 messages per second.

Additionally, you can easily customize short code campaigns for different use cases, with campaign tracking for better deliverability.

Requirements for short code approval

Carriers must approve a short code and its content before rollout (and conduct audits at later dates). To gain approval, your short code must meet a few requirements.

A clear call to action (CTA)

A clear call to action doesn’t just encourage recipients to interact with the company sending the short code communication — it describes exactly what information customers will get if they sign up.

A clear CTA should include:

• The company and program name
• A program description, including how often recipients will get messages
• A link to the program’s terms and conditions
• Opt-in and opt-out instructions
• Instructions on contacting customer support
• Additional carrier cost disclosures for message and data rates

These requirements ensure that end users can recognize promotional and transactional messages.

An acceptable opt-in method

Before you can send promotional or transactional A2P messages to recipients, you need to get express written consent from end users. To do this, get opt-in via text message through a keyword, an online form, or an in-person, in-store signup.

Companies can get opt-in from customers in a number of ways:

• Online phone number entry
• A mobile-oriented message that includes the opt-in keyword
• In-store, point-of-sale signup
• Opt-in button on a mobile web page
• Interactive voice response (IVR) opt-in via phone call

To ensure you can prove compliance with the CTIA opt-in regulations, you should store customer records electronically.

Templatized content and message flow

For each short code program, you must submit a template of the content you plan to send for CTIA approval. Additionally, you must use one of the three approved message flows when sending communications to customers:

1. One-time messages: These transactional, nonrecurring messages are triggered when a recipient sends in a keyword, resulting in a single, immediate text message.
2. Recurring messages: These subscription-based communications require customers to opt in to receive multiple ongoing messages and dictate that businesses must include opt-out instructions in the first communication.
3. Two-factor authentication: These communications are used to verify the identity of the customer with a third-party service using a combination of two of the following: a password, a mobile phrase or authentication, or a fingerprint.

By ensuring every company complies with the above criteria, the CTIA can maintain a consistent user experience for recipients.

Terms and conditions

If you’re using short codes for transactional or promotional messaging, you must include the full terms and conditions for your programs on a web-accessible page. These terms and conditions pages can be shared between programs (unlike opt-ins) but must all contain the following information:

• Sponsor information and program description that tells the reader what the company does and what the program is for
• Call to action that includes opt-in instructions
• Statement of recurrence disclaimer for campaigns that are ongoing
• Additional carrier cost disclosure that includes the phrase “message and data rates may apply” or “Msg&DataRatesMayApply”
• Active keywords that are used to control the recipient’s involvement in the program (such as HELP or STOP)
• An explanation of opt-out mechanisms that explain how people can opt out of the program
• Customer support information in case recipients need additional information
• Link to the privacy policy that details how the company ensures the privacy of user information

By following these terms and compliance regulations, you ensure that program recipients understand what you’ll be sending them as part of your program and how to get more information if issues or questions arise.

The CTIA also forbids companies from doing a few things with short code campaigns:

• Using the same opt-in for multiple programs
• Affiliate marketing
• Using one short code for multiple use cases
• Selling or sharing user information
• Loan, debt consolidation, or other advertising for debt services
• Deceptive marketing
• Fraud or phishing scams
• Work from home, “secret shopping,” and similar job advertising

Additionally, the CTIA does not allow you to promote any content advertising sex, hate, alcohol, firearms, or tobacco (SHAFT) in approved short code programs.

Getting started with short codes

The SMS regulatory landscape is in constant flux, and keeping up with changing rules is a challenge even for seasoned professionals.

Compared to other SMS number types, such as long codes and toll-free numbers, short codes are the most heavily regulated, take the longest to get approval for, and have the most expensive rates.

To get started with short code messaging, companies first have to lease a five- to six-digit short code. Regulations require companies submit a lengthy short code application that discloses who they are and how they plan to use the number. Then they must navigate the complicated short code provisioning process, which involves getting approval from every carrier network in the US and/or Canada before they can launch a communications program over their new short code number.

Fortunately, Plivo does the heavy lifting of getting your short code program through all the regulatory hoops. Plivo provides both the high-quality carrier network and the industry expertise you need to achieve superior message deliverability. As the leading Twilio alternative, Plivo brings depth of knowledge and direct Tier 1 carrier relationships to the table, so you don’t have to stress over regulations or reliability.

Download our white paper on how to optimize SMS communication to learn how to create and execute better SMS campaigns, or contact one of our short code experts today to get started.

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.