CPaaS (Communication Platform as a Service) is the most dominant form of telecommunication service today. All thanks to the merging of traditional telephony and messaging services into the Internet. From basic voice, video, and messaging to more advanced collaboration features, CPaaS has superseded all forms of traditional telco services. CPaaS platforms take advantage of the API interfaces to offer a pluggable user experience that blends realtime voice/video calls with messaging, notifications and other value added services into any software application.
This blog post explores the CPaaS platforms which are offering top-notch communication services. These platforms enable various forms of cloud communication use cases ranging from simple voice/text messaging to more complex applications that require call routing, bulk messaging, and multi-party collaboration facilities and more.
If you are on a lookout for the ideal CPaaS platform to address your business requirements, you have to make a choice based on the plethora of feature set, broadly classified based on two factors, service tiers and essential features.
CPaaS Service Tiers
Service Tiers | Description |
---|---|
1. Foundational | CPaaS platforms that offer the foundational cloud communication APIs to let developers embed voice, video, email, messaging (SMS/WhatsApp/RCS/Chat) capabilities within their application's source code. |
2. Applications | CPaaS platforms offering higher level APIs on top of the foundational services for addressing specific application needs like telecommuting, marketing campaigns, and providing integrations with other business collaboration platforms. |
3. Solutions | CPaaS platforms offering full-fledged UCaaS or SaaS solutions for addressing specific industry use cases like customer relationship management, recruitment, and education. |
CPaaS Platform Essential Features
Essential Features | Description |
---|---|
1. Messaging | Sending and/or receiving messages through various mediums like SMS, WhatsApp, custom chat interface. |
2. Voice | Initiating and managing voice calls or sending voice messages. |
3. Video | Initiating and managing video calls or sending video messages. |
4. Email | Sending and receiving email messages. |
5. IoT | Interfacing with IoT devices and exchanging data via IoT specific protocols. |
6. Phone | Provisioning virtual phone numbers to make or receive calls from anywhere. |
7. Streaming | Live streaming of voice/video feeds from an ongoing event. |
The Top 10 CPaaS Platforms in 2024
Here is our pick on the Top 10 CPaaS Platforms of 2024
1. Twilio
Supported Service Tiers
Foundational | Applications | Solutions |
---|---|---|
Supported Essential Features
Messaging | Voice | Video | IoT | Phone | Streaming | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Twilio is an industry leader and by far the most comprehensive CPaaS service provider available in the world. Founded in 2008, Twilio spearheaded the CPaaS revolution and has built a very robust product portfolio of communication services supporting voice, messaging, and email.
Twilio offers an extensive suite of applications and solutions such as:
1. Online marketing campaigns (SendGrid).
2. Contact center (Twilio Flex).
3. Customer engagement (Twilio Engage).
2. Plivo
Supported Service Tiers
Foundational | Applications | Solutions |
---|---|---|
Supported Essential Features
Messaging | Voice | Video | IoT | Phone | Streaming | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Plivo offers SMS and Voice APIs, as well as phone numbers of various types with SIP trunking solution for deploying call center infrastructure. It also supports number lookup and a verify API with intelligent automation to identify, intercept, and prevent fraudulent messages.
Plivo offers a few solutions for:
1. Omnichannel contact center for B2C scenarios (Contacto).
2. Custom voice or SMS flow design for use cases like SMS surveys and IVR (PHLO).
3. Exotel
Supported Service Tiers
Foundational | Applications | Solutions |
---|---|---|
Supported Essential Features
Messaging | Voice | Video | IoT | Phone | Streaming | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Exotel is another CPaaS service focused on voice and messaging with support for WhatsApp. Together with virtual phone numbers, it offers all the basic voice and messaging services for integrating with business applications.
Exotel offers an extensive suite of solutions for:
1. Enterprise grade contact center (Ameyo).
2. Online marketing campaigns through calls and SMS (ExoCampaigns).
3. AI powered voice and chat bot (ExoMind).
4. DialMyCalls
Supported Service Tiers
Foundational | Applications | Solutions |
---|---|---|
Supported Essential Features
Messaging | Voice | Video | IoT | Phone | Streaming | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
NA | NA |
DialMyCalls is a bulk notification service supporting voice, SMS and emails. It offers a suite of APIs for effectively managing contact lists to schedule message broadcasts, and two way messaging, along with a mobile app. DialMyCalls has an impressive list of supported integrations for all kinds of business applications like Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot, Zoho and more.
DialMyCalls offers some advanced features on top of their bulk messaging solution, like:
1. Mass notification portal.
2. Social sharing of broadcast messages.
3. Embeddable widgets for websites.
5. Vonage
Supported Service Tiers
Foundational | Applications | Solutions |
---|---|---|
Supported Essential Features
Messaging | Voice | Video | IoT | Phone | Streaming | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Vonage is a full stack CPaaS platform with a suite of APIs offering voice, video, messaging services with an extensive list of supported messaging mediums including SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook messenger. Vonage commands a bouquet of enterprise solutions such as:
1. Meetings API to design interactive voice and video workflows for business applications.
2. A full featured UCaaS offering.
3. Contact center and SIP trunking gateway for managing various inbound and outbound enterprise calling scenarios.
4. AI Studio to deploy customer engagement experiences that operate in natural language on any channel .
6. Gupshup
Supported Service Tiers
Foundational | Applications | Solutions |
---|---|---|
Supported Essential Features
Messaging | Voice | Video | IoT | Phone | Streaming | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
NA | NA |
Gupshup is a conversational messaging platform. It is designed to be a one stop solution for customer engagement across a host of messaging mediums, like SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram and more. It is very well suited for companies looking for a full fledged conversational messaging platform for their marketing and customer support requirements. It also provides integrations with many third-party messaging and data streaming platforms, and offers a Bot Studio to build customized conversational experiences with support for human agent in the loop.
7. EnableX
Supported Service Tiers
Foundational | Applications | Solutions |
---|---|---|
Supported Essential Features
Messaging | Voice | Video | IoT | Phone | Streaming | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
EnableX is one of the feature rich CpaaS platforms supporting a good mix of all the service tiers, including a UCaaS based collaboration suite for enterprise collaboration and webinar hosting. It also offers AI video analytics for facial emotion analysis, which is offered in the form of an API, as well as a recruitment solution, built on top of their collaboration suite and designed for candidate screening and video interviewing.
8. Infobip
Supported Service Tiers
Foundational | Applications | Solutions |
---|---|---|
Supported Essential Features
Messaging | Voice | Video | IoT | Phone | Streaming | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Infobip is another full stack CPaaS platform offering an extensive suite of APIs across voice, video and many messaging channels. Infobip also supports multi tenant CpaaS deployment, through which system integrators can offer custom CPaaS solutions backed by Inforbip APIs and their global reach of telcos. It also offers a robust portfolio of solutions including:
1. Cloud contact center (Conversations).
2. Omnichannel broadcasts (Moments).
3. Customer data platform (People CDP).
9. Sinch
Supported Service Tiers
Foundational | Applications | Solutions |
---|---|---|
Supported Essential Features
Messaging | Voice | Video | IoT | Phone | Streaming | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sinch is also a great option for full stack CPaaS platform with support for a wide range of messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, FB mesenger, RCS and more. It also offers its platform as a white labelled UCaaS solution and supports advanced capabilities like SIP trunking, and interfacing with FAX and traditional PSTN services. Sinch offered CPaaS solutions include:
1. Cloud contact center (Contact Pro).
2. Conversational AI Bot (Chatlayer).
3. Document based communication using PDF.
10. Telnyx
Supported Service Tiers
Foundational | Applications | Solutions |
---|---|---|
Supported Essential Features
Messaging | Voice | Video | IoT | Phone | Streaming | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Telnyx is a telco grade CPaaS platform and cloud provider with distributed infrastructure that runs on private backbone network with multiple points of presence across the globe. Apart from the basic communication APIs, Telnyx also features SIP trunking, FAXing and IoT SIM. As a cloud service provider it offers storage, compute services like all major cloud providers, and a unique offering around programmable network service to facilitate seamless data exchange between multiple cloud providers.
In case you are looking for detailed technical analysis on specific CPaaS platform feature set, send us an email.
Great coverage of cpaas providers based on services. Thanks for sharing this info.