Twilio vs. Voxology for Voice
June 4, 2024 // Product
Comparing Programmable Voice Providers
How do you know which Programmable Voice provider is the best fit for you? Most CPaaS products are foundationally similar. You can expect them to offer a REST API to initiate calls and provision new numbers as well as a method to programmatically control what happens once a call connects. Sometimes price differences can make this decision simple, but what else should you look for? This guide will help you identify the key differences between Voxology and Twilio’s offering so you can make an informed decision.
| Feature | Voxology | Twilio |
|---|---|---|
| Global Reach | ✔ | ✔ |
| SDK Support | ✘ | ✔ |
| SIP Interface | ✔ | ✔ |
| Batch API | ✔ | ✘ |
| Programmatic Call Control | ✔ | ✔ |
| Control Flow Actions | ✔ | ✘ |
| Session Data | ✔ | ✘ |
| Text-To-Speech | ✔ | ✔ |
| Call Recording | ✔ | ✔ |
| Call Transcription | ✔ | ✔ |
| Media Stream | ✔ | ✔ |
| Conferencing | ✔ | ✔ |
| Call Queues | ✔ | ✔ |
| Call Transfer | ✔ | ✔ |
| Call Whisper | ✔ | ✔ |
| Call Barge | ✔ | ✔ |
| Speech Recognition | ✔ | ✔ |
| DTMF Detection | ✔ | ✔ |
| Answering Machine Detection | ✔ | ✔ |
| STIR/SHAKEN | ✔ | ✔ |
| Caller ID Name | ✔ | ✔ |
| Hosted Call Scripts (TwiML Bin) | ✘ | ✔ |
| Free Developer Support | ✔ | ✘ |
So how does a company decide which provider is a better partner for them?
With so much crossover in our product offering, let’s explore some of the key differences between Voxology and Twilio that can make a big impact in your application design and time to onboard.
Batch API
Many use cases, such as emergency notifications or other voice alerts, require applications to scale to incredible volumes for a short period of time. Oftentimes this leads to engineering teams spending outsized effort to handle peak volumes that may only account for a small fraction of their overall traffic. Twilio only allows you to place a single call per API request. Need to place half a million calls as quickly as possible? Better spin up some more servers.
On the other hand, Voxology’s Batch API supports placing up to 100 calls with a single API request. We engineered our platform to handle massive call volumes, and we’re happy to pass that advantage on to our customers. Why place 500,000 API requests when you can achieve the same result with 5,000?
Control Flow Actions
Consider the following scenario: you are building an advanced IVR, with multiple decision trees and countless combinations of caller inputs. When you have an unknown number of concurrent calls on your IVR, each one at a different step of the IVR, how do you know which call is at which stage? 10 calls just pressed 3 in your IVR menu, which part of the menu were they in? Are they trying to get to support or sales? Or maybe they are leaving a voicemail and just pressed 3 to playback the recording. I already have a headache.
Twilio’s TWIML call control forces you to handle this. Your application has to keep track of every live call, the stage it's in, the previous step, the next step, and so on. For lack of a better term, their call controls are designed to be dumb. The intelligence needs to exist in your application. Heard of a multi-threaded state machine? Want to build one? Me neither.
Voxology tracks the state of every Programmable Voice call placed on our platform and we have control flow actions used to program logical decisions into your call flows. No need to create an intelligent application to handle your calls. Continuing the advanced IVR example, your Voxology call flow can include each decision tree and also the logical next step. Your application is no longer needed to tell us what to do next. The entire IVR logic can be hosted in a static JSON file on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
To learn more about how Control Flow actions simplify your CPaaS deployment and reduce needless callbacks, review our Call Flow Design Guide.
Session Data
“But wait, what good are static call flow scripts if I need every call to include personalized details?”
I’m so glad you asked, allow me to introduce you to Voxology’s Session Data, our method of including custom, user-defined variables in any call flow. The session data object can be referenced at any point in a call flow. Simply write your call flow with placeholders where personalized information is needed and tell us the values to insert when you place the call.
For example, consider an application that sends voice alerts for appointment reminders. Each call needs to include the name, location and time of the appointment. Rather than serving a custom call flow for the thousands of voice alerts that need to go out today, write a single call flow with placeholders for name, location and time, we’ll fill in the values provided when the call is placed. All of the back and forth between our platform and yours is eliminated.
Customer Support
Voxology believes in providing holistic support to our customers. We staff a technical customer experience team to offer not only support with our own product, but also industry best practices from real experts in the telecom space.
If you’re tired of being referred to help center articles, would like to get someone on the phone every once in a while, and don’t want to pay the cost of a full-time employee to get the help you need, say no more. At Voxology we pride ourselves on the partnerships we’ve built and creating an environment where our customers feel heard.
As one customer stated:
"We grew up on Twilio, but we found a home with Voxology."
Product Manager, Market Leader in Call Tracking