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Why choose Tropo over Twilio

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Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#51

Post by visionik »

ra wrote: post #5
rriepe wrote: post #2

Every time I ask, "Why don't you use Tropo?" I invariably hear "What's Tropo?" It's a shame, because it is pretty great. I think the word is finally getting out now, though.

We use Twilio, and I hadn't heard of Tropo. FWIW we're not totally over the moon with Twilio, and I've since discovered freeswitch, which is much more developer friendly and scalable than asterisk. It's all but persuaded me to roll our own telco connectivity.

Freeswitch rocks. Great stuff, from a great team too.

If you like Freeswitch, you'd probably like Tropo. Tropo lets you program directly in Javscript and other languages, just like Freeswitch.

Tropo also lets you roll your own. You can download Prism, which include the Tropo engine, here:

http://www.voxeo.com/prism/

I've been in the telephony for 15 years now. If I can help with your explorations at all, feel free to email me: jtaylor at voxeo dot com

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#52

Post by visionik »

danielle17 wrote: post #43
garply wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outbound calls to a Chinese number had a failure rate of about 50% (failed with a couple of different error messages, can't quite remember what exactly they were anymore, although I remember thinking they didn't seem particularly relevant... like claiming the number dialed was busy even when it definitely wasn't, etc). Also sometimes the calls would go through but then disconnect immediately after I picked up and I w…

Thanks, there are different challenges with international routing by country and by receiving carrier. I'll definitely pass this information along, and if you have specific calls (I'd need your Twilio account ID to look at them, better sent via email) that will help a lot, too. We know international support is important to developers everywhere, and we're definitely working on it.

International is hard. I know from experience. That's where Tropo has one clear advantage over Twilio. Tropo is built on the Voxeo network, which has ten years of international experience, is deployed world-wide (seven data centers), and integrates directly with most of the carriers around the world.

I believe Twilio integrates directly with a single carrier (Level3). Last I checked they use/resell bandwidth.com for most of their calls.

-Jonathan (Voxeo CEO)

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#53

Post by visionik »

rriepe wrote: post #2

Every time I ask, "Why don't you use Tropo?" I invariably hear "What's Tropo?" It's a shame, because it is pretty great. I think the word is finally getting out now, though.

Thank you! We are working our actual and virtual asses of to make Tropo the best developer platform for all communications applications (not just voice and sms: also IM, Twitter, telephony-in-web-clients, etc). We are also working hard to get the word out!

-Jonathan (Voxeo/Tropo CEO)

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#54

Post by visionik »

garply wrote: post #3

I have a gripe against Twilio. Aside from their China service sucking, they keep sending me newsletters or emails that are tailored to look like they're personally written to me. The subject looks like "RE: Twilio's Developer Community" and then the text preview in gmail looks something like "Hi Joe, I wanted to drop..." Effective at getting me to open the email, but I always feel deceived when I open it up to see th…

If Tropo can do anything to help you in China please let us know. Asia is a key market for Voxeo/Tropo. We have two data centers there (Singapore and Hong Kong), as well as an R&D, support, and sales team with about a dozen people in Beijing. Feel free to email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#55

Post by visionik »

hopeless wrote: post #7

My more pragmatic reasons for choosing Tropi over Twilio: 1. having the voice scripts written in Ruby and hosted by Tropo was easier than building a web service to control every mundane aspect 2. Tropo would supply non-U.S. numbers if I needed them 3. Tropo made it easy to do the voice recording and POST it as an MP3 4. Tropo worked out cheaper for my little test service Some or all of these may now have changed but…

Thank you for a great summary of Tropo advantages!

-Jonathan (CEO, Voxeo)

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#56

Post by visionik »

AlexMuir wrote: post #11

Absolutely agree that Tropo is better than Twilio. Here are my reasons: 1. Cheaper 2. Multiple voices and accents (UK British Male & Female) 3. Use any number as caller ID. 4. Calls during development are free. 5. Recordings are a breeze 6. Voice recognition from a set of options instead of pressing digits (eg. "Say yes, no or repeat"). On the downside, I've found their system wasn't quite as easy to get going with a…

That's a great summary. A good analogy is that Tropo is 30% harder to learn than Twilio... but it can do 300% more than Twilio.

We've got a big release coming that makes Tropo much easier to use. Entirely new documentation, sanded off some of the rough edges on features, added new ones to make some use cases simpler.

I'd love to hear about the specific road bumps that made it harder for you, it would really help us improve our simplicity. We will give you $100 on Amazon or Paypal for your time. If you're interested email jtaylor at voxeo dot com.

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#57

Post by visionik »

adityakothadiya wrote: post #36
AlexMuir wrote: post #11

Absolutely agree that Tropo is better than Twilio. Here are my reasons: 1. Cheaper 2. Multiple voices and accents (UK British Male & Female) 3. Use any number as caller ID. 4. Calls during development are free. 5. Recordings are a breeze 6. Voice recognition from a set of options instead of pressing digits (eg. "Say yes, no or repeat"). On the downside, I've found their system wasn't quite as easy to get going with a…

I'm not sure why you're saying it's cheaper. As Danielle mentioned, the prices are actually very less. And as a developer, every penny difference counts. Also they give $30 credit, which is more than enough to "try and play" and release your app to production. I agree with point "3" though. I use Twilio for an app which sends voice call reminders to other people. But when automatic reminder call goes to these people,…

Hi - Tropo should cost about the same as Twilio depending on your use case, but Tropo does alot more than Twilio for a roughly equivalent price. For example. Twilio just does SMS, Tropo does SMS and IM. Tropo adds speech recognition and higher quality speech synthesis, etc.

Also, I wanted to make sure I understand, what kind of specifics did you feel are lacking in Diggz post? We love to learn how to improve our product and our communication about it. If you are up for discussing it we will give you $100 on Amazon or Paypal for your time. Just email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.

-Jonathan (CEO Voxeo)

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#58

Post by akalsey »

ericb wrote: post #41
akalsey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NuGram makes a product designed for just that. You could certainly build something yourself using either a hosted service like Tropo or using Asterisk, but using something purpose built may work better. We use NuGram to test things. If you run an asterisk server the easiest way to get it hooked up to the phone network is by setting up a SIP account for it.

Thanks for the recommendations! How is the pricing on NuGram? Is this it? http://www.grammarserver.com/welcome I'm finding their descriptions a bit opaque. Do you remember the product name off hand? Do they host it, or do I need to look into learning what an SIP is? :-)

Grammar Server is a product they make for building and managing speech recognition grammars. It's pretty awesome, too, and any recognition grammars you create can be used with Tropo.

NuBot is the IVR testing product http://www.nuecho.com/content/view/28/147

I'm not sure of the cloud per minute pricing, but they'll likely be pretty responsive on email. They're a good group of people.

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#59

Post by visionik »

stanleydrew wrote: post #47
akalsey wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Tropo, you can implement that in less than four minutes - it's two lines of code. Ruby: message "something important happened", {:to => '14155551212', :network => 'SMS'} And then one line of code to hit our session API over http and run the code.

This is pretty disingenuous. It's the same exact two lines of code to do this in Twilio. Yes if you know ahead of time what those two lines are then you can type them in less than four minutes. Same goes for Twilio. I think what patio11 is referring to is the amount of time it would take for a new developer who's never seen the Twilio API before to get up and running. This includes things like the time to understand…

You make a great point, but it's also somewhat disingenuous ;)

It takes some time to learn how to use a platform.

It takes some time to code on a platform.

The actual writing of code is easiest when you are doing small applications. However, when you are writing larger applications the coding becomes the larger portion of time.

Today it's easier to learn Twilio than Tropo - largely because Tropo needs better documentation (that's coming very soon). However, I will contend that once you know the platform, Tropo is easier - and much more powerful.

I think that's what others are saying in this thread. We've also heard that from customers who have switched from Twilio to Tropo.

None of this should be surprising to anyone. Voxeo has been doing developer-centric telephony for ten years. Voxeo knows all the little problems and challenges that can come up over time and we've built a platform to address them.

Twilio is new to the industry, they came at things with a fresh set of eyes and were able to "re-factor" the simplicity and usability yet again with that fresh perspective.

I say "re-factor" because it's exactly what we did at Voxeo when we started in 1999. The experience reminds me of Battlestar Galactica: All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#60

Post by akalsey »

danielle17 wrote: post #46
akalsey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Danielle said this during the API panel moderated by Thomas Howe at ITExpo West in October this year. When asked of the differences, she said that Twilio was focused on growing the market and making it easy for web devs instead of trying to keep up with Tropo on features. Many itexpo sessions are recorded. There may be audio or video of this somewhere.

That is very different from saying we'd never be able to keep up on features.

It's stretched?

That is very different from saying, as you did above, that "This quote is completely fabricated." (it also wasn't a quote).

I'm not trying to start a flame war here. I like you (and the rest of Twilio) quite a bit. I admired what you said and the goal it represented: Focus on and attack a different market from a different angle than we are. Build on your strengths and acknowledge your weaknesses. I wish more companies would do that. No company can be good at everything.

You did say something very similar to what Diggz referenced (not "quoted"). Then you accused him of outright lying. That's just not cool at all.

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