Twilio vs Google Voice: Which is a better fit?

Allen E.: I'm Allen, President of Premier Spine and Sport, and I give Twilio a five. Prior to using Twilio, we were texting our customers manually, which was very time-intensive trying to figure out who to text, when to text. It was nothing convenient about it or efficient, so we were looking for a solution to help us streamline our SMS campaigns efficiently. The reason we chose Twilio was because a lot of my other colleagues were using them. They had great experience with it. We looked at a couple other softwares, but honestly, Twilio just came out of top. Onboarding Twilio was really easy. It's just a matter of signing up for an account, getting a phone number, and then using their API to basically connect it to your software. But it was pretty easy to get started. If you're looking to do SMS campaigns with compliance, because I know there's a lot of rules now around spam messaging, just get Twilio. It saves you a lot of time, a lot of headache. They actually make sure that you don't get into the spam then.

Speaker 1: My name is Michael. I'm a small business owner. I'm giving Google Voice a four out of five. For more reviews, click below. So before using Google Voice, I was simply just using my normal cell phone carrier to make calls for business purposes. We decided to switch over to Google Voice to have some anonymity there, and to sort of create a barrier between us, and not having people call our personal cell phones. So I didn't have anything exactly like Google Voice before using it, but it's a welcome addition. So all the reasons that we chose Google Voice, basically, a lot of it has to do with the brand name. You definitely have come to know and trust Google and their products since they're always of a very high caliber, very user-friendly, easy to use, and, oftentimes, free. So I think that that is probably the main reason, is the cost, as well as the brand name. So the cost is free, so I mean, it's hard to beat that. So there are some drawbacks to that, which we will get into, but that's probably the main reason that we chose it. So super simple and easy to get started with Google Voice simply sign up, they assign you a phone number. You can download the app right onto your phone, and it connects through your regular cell phone system, so it'll just show up as if you're getting a normal call, but they'll be calling a separate number, and you can make outgoing calls with the number, you can do texts with the number, all through the Google Voice app. Really kind of dead simple. It doesn't take any learning curve at all to use it. Really easy to get started with it. So if you're considering getting Google Voice, I would definitely recommend trying it out. The pros definitely outweigh the cons, being that it's free, a free service; you can get a number, no charge. Really great for small businesses like us, who we don't need some sort of big telephone system; we just want to have a number on our website that people can call if they want to speak with me, or my partner, and they want to just have a more person-to-person conversation, a consultation, to get some information about our business. So great for that, great for kind of putting up a barrier between your personal cell phone and your business contacts. You may not want everybody knowing your personal number, getting spam calls, that kind of thing. So this serves as a barrier between that. It's free, so can't complain about that. The only thing I will say, the connection, generally, probably not going to be as good as your cell phone carrier. It is all done through the internet, I believe, as far as the connection goes, so depending on how strong or weak your signal is, it's probably going to have an impact on your service. I do notice that there are a decent amount of dropped calls, this kind of thing. Again, small price to pay, considering it's free. So overall, definitely going to recommend Google Voice if you're considering it. There probably are some competitors out there, but with Google, you know you're getting a quality product, so definitely recommend it.