Zoom vs Twilio

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Our analysts compared Zoom vs Twilio based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Business Phone Systems, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Product Basics

Zoom is an online conferencing solution that provides HD-quality voice calls, video meetings and webinars. Available as a native app on Windows, iOS and Android devices, it enables intelligent call routing, auto-attendant, voicemail, call recording and call transcription. Call agents can elevate phone calls to a video conference call without needing to hang up, and engage customers through direct chat from within the call. Integrating with Salesforce, Microsoft Office and GSuite, it supports hardware from leading manufacturers to provide a traditional deskphone experience.

Organizations can choose to retain their existing phone service providers with easy number portability. It provides coverage across more than 40 countries through local number availability. Its advanced plans offer an intuitive admin portal to provision and manage accounts, track meetings and attendees and receive usage insights from a centralized hub.
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Twilio is a cloud communication platform as a service provider that enables businesses to embed phone, VoIP and messaging into web, desktop and mobile applications through web service APIs. Developers can design more efficient self-service call flows and trigger custom business processes through its low-code builder, Studio. Teams can make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages and communicate in other ways. Developers can build new apps with a wide range of existing global cellular networks and enhance audio conferencing infrastructure through its Voice API. It helps augment existing contact centers with voice, SMS, IVR and a chatbot and integrates with Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Webchat.

Omnichannel customer service ensures sustained engagement through click-to-dial, automated text notifications, intelligent routing and callback service during peak hours. It blocks unlawful robocalls and ensures increased call answer rates through call trust indicators. It empowers businesses to create video apps and embed videos through dedicated SDKs for Android, iOS and JavaScript.
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$13.32/User, Monthly
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$150/User, Monthly, Usage-Based
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Product Assistance

Documentation
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Videos
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Videos
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Product Insights

  • Build the Brand: Maximize ROI by building lasting customer relationships. Promote the brand through webinars and video conferences with thousands of attendees and design outreach strategies based on meeting data. 
  • Provide Customer Support: Attend customer queries and resolve issues by connecting to customers virtually, irrespective of the time zone. Never miss a customer call by configuring call forwarding. Monitor call quality via call recordings and transcriptions and share them with the team for training. 
  • Stay Connected: Never miss a business meeting while out of the office. Create and join meetings from anywhere on any device, including Android and iOS mobile phones. 
  • Establish Global Presence: Make the brand’s visible presence through localization. Port existing phone numbers to a local service provider, or get local phone numbers for seamless customer outreach and accessibility. 
  • Collaborate: Work in tandem with other team members through screen sharing and whiteboarding. Share and discuss insights via shared comments and annotations. Chat with co-workers in-meeting or create and join breakout rooms for focused discussions. 
  • Connect Within Business Apps: Build applications to get customer and team metrics within the host application. Manage user accounts and view meeting usage metrics by connecting to dashboards. 
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  • Global Reach: Twilio enables businesses to connect with customers worldwide through voice, messaging, and video, breaking down geographical barriers and expanding market presence.
  • Scalability: As your business grows, Twilio effortlessly scales with you, ensuring that your communication capabilities can expand to meet increasing demand without the need for significant infrastructure investments.
  • Flexibility: With its API-first approach, Twilio offers unparalleled flexibility, allowing businesses to customize and integrate communication features into their existing workflows and systems seamlessly.
  • Cost Efficiency: By leveraging cloud communications, Twilio reduces the need for expensive hardware and maintenance costs associated with traditional communication systems, providing a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes.
  • Enhanced Customer Experience: Twilio's advanced features, such as automated SMS notifications and personalized voice responses, enable businesses to offer a more engaging and responsive customer service experience.
  • Reliability: Twilio's robust infrastructure ensures high availability and reliability, minimizing downtime and ensuring that businesses can maintain communication with their customers around the clock.
  • Security: With a strong commitment to security, Twilio provides features like end-to-end encryption and compliance with industry standards, ensuring that sensitive communication data is protected.
  • Real-Time Analytics: Twilio offers detailed analytics and reporting tools, giving businesses valuable insights into their communication performance and customer interactions, enabling data-driven decision-making.
  • Multi-Channel Support: Twilio supports a wide range of communication channels, including SMS, MMS, voice, video, and email, allowing businesses to reach customers on their preferred platforms.
  • Developer Friendly: With comprehensive documentation, SDKs, and support resources, Twilio is designed to be developer-friendly, reducing the learning curve and accelerating the development of custom communication solutions.
  • Innovation: Twilio is at the forefront of communication technology, regularly introducing new features and capabilities that enable businesses to stay ahead of the curve and leverage the latest advancements in communication tech.
  • Integration Ecosystem: Twilio integrates with a wide array of third-party applications and services, enhancing its functionality and allowing businesses to create a seamless ecosystem of tools tailored to their needs.
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  • Business Calling: Make and attend 1:1 and conference phone calls, participate in video meetings and send chat messages. Switch from phone calls to video meetings with one click — no need for a separate conference bridge. 
    • Call Management: Ensure every call is answered with auto-attendants and skills-based intelligent call routing. Listen to recorded phone calls or view text transcriptions through a PC, desk phone or mobile device. 
    • Administration Portal: Provision and manage users, and view call quality and usage reports from its central admin portal. 
    • Global Availability: Provides local telephone service across more than 40 countries. Seamlessly port current business numbers and use existing cell phone service providers in any country. 
  • Video Conferencing: Schedule and attend webinars and 1:1 or group meetings, internally or with clients, with Google, iCal and Microsoft calendar syncing. Join meetings across other conferencing room providers with compatible hardware that includes speakers, headphones, cameras, microphones and monitors. 
    • Collaboration: Start and/or schedule a meeting with a personal meeting ID that stays the same always. Co-annotate on shared screens and whiteboards, share files in-meeting, message others, and create and join breakout rooms for focused collaboration. 
    • Meeting Recordings: Record and store meetings locally, and share these recordings with others through Google Drive, Dropbox and other file storage services. Allow or restrict access to recordings by participants through in-meeting admin controls. Direct recordings to the cloud are available with paid plans. 
    • Permissions: Set up role-based and in-meeting permissions, such as enable/disable screen sharing by participants, using chat and mute/unmute settings. 
  • Dashboards: Monitor data on overall usage for meetings, Zoom Rooms, webinars, instant messaging and Zoom Phone, all from a single, unified interface. 
    • Meetings: Get a bird’s-eye view of meeting metrics, such as top locations of participants, year-to-date trends and devices used, in the form of bar charts, pie charts, line graphs and more. View information for meetings and Zoom Rooms, live and past, to a high level of granularity. 
    • Zoom Phones: Get metrics on Mean Opinion Score (MOS) scores and view call logs, voice codecs, ISP and network details, all on one screen. Monitor call health with hardware and OS versions listed for each call in a tabular format. 
  • Reporting: Get reports on registrations, attendees, Q&A, performance and participation details for meetings and webinars. Administrators can view more detailed usage and user activity reports. 
  • Integrations: Ensure seamless workflows from within proprietary applications through its integrations with Microsoft Office 365, Google Suite, Salesforce and Slack. 
  • Mobile App: Join meetings from anywhere with its native mobile app for Android and iOS, with a live screen sharing option. Attend conference calls and video meetings while on the move through its Safe Driving Mode, compatible with Apple CarPlay. 
  • APIs: Host new meetings, add and remove users, view dashboards and reports on usage through its wide range of REST-based APIs. Seamlessly handles large API response payloads through pagination. Test API endpoints with testing tool widgets from within the API Reference Docs. 
  • App Marketplace: Build chatbots and apps to connect to dashboards for meeting metrics, conduct webinars and manage connected user accounts from within proprietary applications. 
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  • Phone Numbers: Use APIs to monitor a number’s entire lifecycle. Facilitate global innovation to ensure that all number-based apps are secure from disruption. Get a hold of numbers that have undergone intensive testing. Port your existing numbers through an online application or email. Choose from over 65,000 phone numbers from the inventory and pick from a range of phone number types.
  • Elastic SIP Trunking: Get PSTN connectivity for any SIP device in a network. Automatically scale up or down with unlimited capacity. Add innovative cloud communication features, including voice insights, Twilio Interconnect and call control. Simplify the network, don’t pay any channel or port fees and ensure optimized security. Make use of disaster recovery features to safeguard the service.
  • Short Code: Increase reachability with shortcodes available in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., and long code numbers available in over 100 countries. Enable throughput at 100 messages per second. Reroute to standard long-code phone numbers in the U.S. if a carrier is unable to receive messages from short codes. Access automatic picture transcoding, character encoding and message assembly, ensuring message delivery without custom code.
  • Email Marketing: Import and sync large contact lists within minutes. Use the powerful segmentation engine to manage and send emails to any number of people. Choose a design flow using the drag-and-drop option or the code editor. Easily schedule a one-time email or set up an automated email series.
  • Account Security: Eliminate fake account creation, secure new users and reduce fraud. Deliver detailed carrier and caller information using Lookup. Make informed decisions regarding who can contact and who cannot. Secure business and a large volume of customers with Authy, enabling two-factor authentication to the log-in via TOTP, push and SMS.
  • Enhanced Emailing: Deliver all emails without interruptions with the propriety MTA (mail transfer agent), intuitive console, email experts and more. Activate automated email queue handling and throttle risk detection. Use sender authentication, SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys), reverse DNS (Domain Name System) and dedicated IP addresses to improve deliverability and reliability.
  • Improved Video Experience: Integrate videos directly into the app to enjoy a customized experience. Design a layout or choose one from the pre-configured options. Monitor participant network quality with Network Quality API. Create engaging whiteboards, animation and more with DataTracks. Allow screen-sharing to improve collaboration. Add live chat and support phone dial-in when the internet is unavailable.
  • Voice API: Quickly scale and modify a voice experience and add a wide array of customizations and resources. Add features such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), recording transcriptions and speech recognition. Enable reliable, high-quality connections supported by the Twilio Super Network. Place quality calls by facilitating access to global carriers, infinite scaling and private links to the cloud.
  • Messaging API: Engage customers across the globe with 1,500 redundant partner carrier connections, phone numbers in over 100 countries and more than 200 types of numbers. Support channels such as SMS, MMS, OTT, email and more. Use intelligent sender selection for consistent, localized and compliant messaging. Message worldwide using over 200 phone number types, including shortcodes, alphanumeric and toll-free numbers. Use message insights to check status callbacks and real-time analytics.
  • Applications:  
    • Flex: Enable digital-first engagement with a broad span of communication channels managed through one platform. Continuously inspect, adapt and adjust any part of the contact center. Facilitate personalized interactions with customers by providing agents access to contextual information.
    • Frontline: Assist clients and forge relationships despite geographical location. Provide support on any channel, including SMS, MMS, WhatsApp and chat. Transfer conversations between channels and employees and direct inquiries to the next employee. Manage privacy and compliance with SSO authentication and number anonymization. Use native push and badge notifications, ensuring employees never miss any alerts. Send and receive media and messages across channels using a single app.
    • Segment: Unify data and enhance engagements by reaching out to the customers with the right message and using the right channel. Build personalized engagements by creating a single, holistic view of the customer journey rather than wasting endless hours on data. Collect user data from every interaction and combine it from various sources to better understand each customer. Catch quality data issues at the start and fix them automatically. Get rid of old, incomplete and inaccurate data.
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Product Ranking

#1

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Business Phone Systems

#9

among all
Business Phone Systems

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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Twilio
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Call Coverage Calling Features Collaboration Mobile Features Phone Numbers Phone System Voice Intelligence & Analytics Voicemail & Messaging 72 88 100 100 100 95 88 100 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 41293 reviews
Excellent User Sentiment 630 reviews
90%
of users recommend this product

Zoom has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 90% when considering 41293 user reviews from 6 recognized software review sites.

90%
of users recommend this product

Twilio has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 90% when considering 630 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

5.0 (12)
4.2 (15)
4.5 (33431)
4.5 (333)
4.37 (54)
n/a
4.6 (6279)
4.6 (241)
4.5 (533)
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4.4 (984)
4.3 (41)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Zoom and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Collaboration. Zoom stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award
Collaboration Award

Twilio stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Ease of use: Approximately 79% of the users who mention ease of using the platform say it’s intuitive and user-friendly.
Functionality: Around 64% of the users who review functionality say the platform has a rich feature set to enable seamless video conferences and meetings.
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Easy Setup: Twilio's user-friendly interface and comprehensive documentation make it easy for users to set up and configure their phone systems without requiring extensive technical expertise.
Scalability: Twilio's cloud-based platform allows businesses to easily scale their phone systems up or down as needed, accommodating growth and changing communication requirements.
Global Reach: With its extensive global infrastructure, Twilio enables businesses to establish a local presence in various countries and regions, facilitating international communication and expansion.
Integrations: Twilio integrates seamlessly with numerous business applications and CRM systems, streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity.
Customization: Twilio provides a wide range of APIs and tools that allow businesses to customize their phone systems to meet their specific needs and preferences.
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Pricing: Around 73% of the users who review its cost say it can be expensive for small organizations.
Security: Reviewing security, approximately 67% of users say the vendor should offer better safety and privacy features.
Performance: About 64% of the users who mention the software’s performance say it’s resource-intensive.
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Pricing Structure: Twilio's pay-as-you-go pricing can lead to unpredictable costs, especially for businesses with fluctuating call volumes or those that use premium features like call recording or transcription. The lack of bundled plans may also make it difficult to budget for communication expenses effectively.
Customer Support: Obtaining timely and effective support can be challenging, particularly for users on the free tier or those with less complex issues. The support structure often relies on community forums and documentation, which may not provide immediate solutions for urgent problems.
Learning Curve: Integrating Twilio's APIs and configuring its services can require a significant investment of time and technical expertise. This can be a barrier for businesses without dedicated development resources or those seeking a more out-of-the-box solution.
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Zoom is a popular web conferencing tool for online learning, training and collaboration at educational institutions, enterprises and government agencies. About 79% of the users who review the platform say it’s user-friendly, and novices can use it with minimal effort. Around 66% of the users who mention functionality appreciate the in-meeting audio and video quality. Team members can interact via whiteboarding, screen-sharing, annotation and commenting, though some users feel the chat interface can be improved. Local recording is available with both the free and paid versions, though quite a few users say recordings are storage-intensive, and the vendor doesn’t offer compression. On the flip side, around 73% of the users who mention pricing say it can be cost-prohibitive for smaller organizations, especially since webinars are available only for Pro and above accounts. Though the vendor offers unlimited meetings, approximately 36.6% of these users feel the 40-minute meeting time limit with the free version is restrictive. Of the users who review its performance, 57% say it lags on low bandwidth, with poor audio and video quality. Around 67% of the users who mention security say the vendor should provide additional safeguards to ensure secure meetings. To summarize, Zoom is a popular software for enterprises and education providers to connect remotely distributed teams, co-workers and clients. Though only paid subscriptions provide the high-end features, its free version can adequately support smaller organizations, with a user limit of 100 persons.

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Twilio has earned a reputation as a leading cloud communications platform, empowering businesses to build, scale, and operate customized communication solutions. Its flexible platform, powerful tools, and global infrastructure make it easy for businesses to create solutions that meet their unique needs and help them connect with customers in a meaningful way. Users appreciate Twilio's ease of use, scalability, and flexibility, making it a solid choice for businesses of all sizes that need a cloud-based communications platform. It offers a variety of features that can help businesses improve their communication with customers, such as call routing, voicemail, and analytics. The platform's ability to integrate with various channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Webchat ensures sustained engagement through features like click-to-dial, automated text notifications, intelligent routing, and callback service during peak hours. However, some users have expressed concerns about Twilio's customer support and its complex pricing structure. The pay-as-you-go fees can be more expensive compared to other CPaaS platforms, especially for businesses with high-volume communication needs. Despite these drawbacks, Twilio remains a popular choice due to its comprehensive features and ability to adapt to evolving business requirements. Its low-code builder, Studio, allows developers to design efficient self-service call flows and trigger custom business processes, while its Voice API enhances audio conferencing infrastructure. Twilio is particularly well-suited for businesses seeking a customizable and scalable communication solution that can integrate with existing applications and workflows. Its ability to handle various communication channels and provide detailed analytics makes it a valuable tool for businesses looking to enhance customer engagement and streamline communication processes.

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Screenshots

Top Alternatives in Business Phone Systems


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