Wednesday, December 1
A few weeks ago I was in Portland at the CivicWebs Hackathon talking with Amber Case and Aaron Pareki when Amber asked me why Tropo is better than Twilio. She acknowledged that while she and Aaron love Tropo and built their GeoLoqi app on Tropo’s API, a lot of other people seem to like Twilio.  “So why is Tropo better?” she asked.
I responded with all the certainty, aloofness and charm I could muster: “Because we are!”
For most normal people, that answer might suffice, but Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist. It’s hard to win her over with just charm. So I started laying out some of the reasons why Tropo is just plain better, and I figured rather than just keep them between me and Amber and Aaron, I’d share…
1) Features – Twilio for pranks, Tropo for business
This is where Tropo really blows Twilio away, and even Twilio’s own people acknowledge it. At an API vendor shootout session at Internet Telephony Expo earlier this year, Danielle Morrill, Twilio’s head of marketing, said that Twilio would never be able to keep up with Tropo on features.
Twilio is great for making prank phone calls
Tropo offers a ton of advanced features that Twilio just can’t match: Voice recognition, SIP connections (critical for integration with other VoIP systems), Skype integration, instant messaging, short codes, hosting, numbers in 41 countries, speech in multiple languages, and a host of other things.
Furthermore, Tropo is a unified API. The days of needing one app for voice calls, another for SMS and a third for conferencing are over. The same code you use to say something over the phone can also respond via SMS, IM, and Twitter.
2) Tropo’s Extreme Support
Twilio works on a credit system that requires developers to pay to play.  Tropo is and always will be 100% free for developers. No credits, no limits on minutes, no ads played to you or your callers. Every developer gets 24×7 support from engineers that know how to write code. Paying customers measure their response times in minutes. Our support team is consistently ranked the highest in customer service and satisfaction, at the top of not only our industry, but above all other software and telephony companies.
3) Scalability, Reliability and Portability
Twilio’s service is based on Asterisk, a free and open source telephony framework and runs on Amazon’s EC2 network.
Tropo runs on Voxeo’s SIP Cloud, the largest worldwide voice application host. Voxeo has been running phone+web applications for 10 years. Because Voxeo’s been doing this stuff for so long they know that business customers demand security and reliability, which is why Voxeo manages their own datacenters that connect directly to major carriers and delivers tens of millions of voice minutes a day for the largest companies in the world, including half the Fortune 100.
Portability is another factor.  If someone develops an app on Twilio, they’re pretty much locked in to Twilio. Hopefully it will be a happy marriage, but what happens if they want to switch providers?  Tropo, on the other hand, can be run in your own network.  You can even run Tropo on Amazon EC2 (if you want to).
If you haven’t tried out Tropo, you should give it a whirl. Here’s a great tutorial to help you get started: How to build a Twitter Bot using Tropo and JavaScript
Related Post:Â Twilio vs. Tropo AKA A little more noise for Dave McClure
12, December11:00
For what it’s worth, Tropo has been a huge supporter of the Baltimore tech scene. They sponsored our last Hackathon and they sent down some Tropo experts to help. We had a lot of cool voice projects, including a blog that posts from transcribed voice messages, and a remote entry system that uses the phone to grant access.
Clearly I’m biased, but I saw some amazingly powerful apps built in 48 hours, I’m sure with more time just about anything phone related could be done using Tropo.
12, December18:52
We’re currently Twilio customers, but have been eyeing Tropo from afar for our customer base.
We’ve started a beta project here, which is slated for the early part of next year, and will be evaluating the two side-by-side.
15, December12:39
1. I’d like to see you provide a link to the quote from Danielle about not keeping up with Tropo features. That smacks of being taken out of context.
2. Real businesses have been and will continue to be deployed on Twilio. GroupMe just launched and cauth the attention of a lot of people – built on Twilio – just to provide one example.
3. Twilio gives you $30 of credit to get started developing when you sign up for an account. Even when you exhaust the $30 it’s not exactly expensive. Twilio support is also very well done and your questions are answered by people who know the system inside and out.
4. “Twilio’s service is based on Asterisk, a free and open source telephony framework ad runs on Amazon’s EC2 network.”
Firstly, typo.
Secondly, the Twilio team have put an enormous amount of work into building a dynamic, scalable platform that works extremely well.
5. I’m not sure how you could claim Twilio’s API is not “unified”. There’s only one endpoint and only one set of verbs. Yes, you use different API methods to create SMS vs phone calls. Does that make it “not unified”?
I’m not a Twilio employee, just a developer that has built a number of products on their platform. I assume by your statements about bias that you are a Tropo employee?
17, December11:27
Hey Andrew. Thanks for your comments. I’ll try to address them one by one…
>>1. I’d like to see you provide a link to the quote from Danielle about not keeping up with Tropo features. That smacks of being taken out of context.
I haven’t been able to locate a recording or transcription of the event that Danielle said this, and admittedly, I was not there. I’m referring to statements of people who were there, specifically
Adam Kalsey: “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.”
And Jason Goecke: “I was on the forum in October, representing Tropo, with Danielle at ITExpo West in LA moderated by Thomas Howe (http://thethomashowecompany.com/). Danielle did make the statement that Twilio could not, and would not, catch up with Tropo on features. Instead, Twilio would focus on simplicity for the broad web developer community.”
>> 2. Real businesses have been and will continue to be deployed on Twilio. GroupMe just launched and cauth the attention of a lot of people – built on Twilio – just to provide one example.
There is little doubt there are startups using Twilio. Many of them are simply SMS based. There are a ton of companies offering SMS API’s. Twilio has done a good job of marketing to this crowd.
>> 3. Twilio gives you $30 of credit to get started developing when you sign up for an account. Even when you exhaust the $30 it’s not exactly expensive. Twilio support is also very well done and your questions are answered by people who know the system inside and out.
I’ve never used Twilio’s support, so I’ll have to trust your word on that. Tropo is free for developers, always. We are not trying to make money off of your development efforts, only after you launch and you are making money.
>> 4. “Twilio’s service is based on Asterisk, a free and open source telephony framework ad runs on Amazon’s EC2 network.”
Yes, and they are moving off of it as confirmed by one of their staff during CloudCamp Qcon in San Francisco. Further, Digium themselves recognize cloud support needs to be handled differently, hence why they launched Asterisk SCF (http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk/scf).
>> 5. I’m not sure how you could claim Twilio’s API is not “unified”. There’s only one endpoint and only one set of verbs. Yes, you use different API methods to create SMS vs phone calls. Does that make it “not unified”?
That one is easy, Twilio’s Voice and SMS APIs are different. Tropo’s are the same. Also Twilio doesn’t support Twitter or Instant Messaging in their API.
I’m not a Twilio employee, just a developer that has built a number of products on their platform. I assume by your statements about bias that you are a Tropo employee?
I’m the Chief Technology Evangelist for Tropo. I also co-founded Voxeo. So yes, I’m a little biased
21, December2:32
Is it true that Twilio does not allow international delivered SMS but Tropo is ? (from a US number of course).
I vote for Tropo anyway, till now all was working ok. Cheers!
21, December18:38
Correct. Twilio does not allow SMS messages to be sent to International numbers. Tropo does allow this, as long as they are sent FROM a U.S. number.
11, March20:22
is there a Tropo equivalent of OpenVBX… that would be hot.
22, April5:22
Jonny you omitted that Twilio only accept US credit cards, which makes the rest of your points above somewhat academic for non-US customers
22, April13:53
@Alan: Yes…check out OpenVoice
http://blog.tropo.com/2010/05/19/introducing-openvoice-your-number-open-source/