For many companies just exploring voice and video, knowing which platform to use in building out their services can be a daunting task. Finding the right balance of control, specialization, and cost can be difficult, especially with a market of extensive platforms.
In this post, we break down several voice and video platforms with differing levels of control and specializations to give you a sense of which platform may best fit your use case.
Specifically, we delve into each individual platform to understand what they do best and why. We judge level of control based on the inclusivity and extensiveness of their APIs and SDKs, as well as their scalability and the comprehensiveness of available features. For example, platforms that provide more freedom, but may be more difficult to use because of the broad array of features and options, are ranked higher on the control scale than easier to use platforms that have limited options but quicker implementations.
TokBox 🔧🔧🔧🔧
TokBox’s OpenTok platform is a powerful WebRTC platform on the market, offering a plethora of capabilities and options. Along with that power comes full control over the development process. OpenTok gives developers access to what features to add, how to add them, and the level of functionality they provide. For example, adding video, messaging, or voice to your application, while choosing whether you want to integrate recording or screen sharing. Apart from that, the API gives you the ability to build interactive video, voice, and messaging.
There is a high level of control that comes with OpenTok and a comprehensive set of mobile solutions for WebRTC. However, OpenTok hides the WebRTC PeerConnection API, which means if you want access some of the native methods, you are unable to directly. Despite that, we give it a high score on the control scale. If you want to have plenty of options and dive deeply into communication integration, OpenTok is a good fit.
Level of Control: 4/5 Wrenches
Vidyo.io 🔧🔧🔧
As its name suggests, Vidyo.io has a strong focus on real-time video. The platform’s claim to fame is the ability to provide industry-leading performance at the extreme ends of the quality spectrum.
Vidyo.io’s platform provides multi-party video APIs for the web, mobile, and native endpoints. They specialize in enabling developers to rapidly embed rich communications in any web, mobile, or desktop app. They focus on extreme reliability, flexible customization, and mobile optimization. Particularly, they pride themselves on how vidyo.io is able to simplify the complexity of creating cross-platform interactive video to reduce build times and bugs.
Vidyo.io’s PaaS solution is fairly new, due to the nature of rapidly embedded video chat. Despite this, it scores high on the control scale compared to other solutions. It is great for people who want to integrate video quickly and easily, but if you want to get into the nitty gritty of video integration, a different solution may be a better fit.
Level of Control: 3.5/5 Wrenches
Plivo 🔧🔧
Plivo is a voice and SMS-focused platform, with services spanning the globe. It concentrates on a fast go-to-market strategy by providing pre-packaged templates for specific use cases. Their goal is to reduce the amount of code you need to integrate, so you can get up and running as fast as possible.
Given its specialization in fast implementation, we give Plivo a lower control score than other platforms. This platform is excellent for companies that need quick SMS or voice integrations, even providing templates for implementation. This is a great solution as long as you are able to sacrifice some control.
Level of Control: 2/5 Wrenches
Voxbone 🔧🔧
Voxbone offers cloud telephony services that focus on providing a wide geographical reach. They offer compelling features like speech analytics and click-to-call interfaces. In particular, Voxbone specializes in giving enterprise clients with international audio conferencing needs additional control over costs, geographic reach, and security. Their API purports to redefine global business communications by reducing complexity and managing call capacity in real-time.
Given their ability to give more control to enterprise clients with international needs, combined with how they simplify business communications, we give Voxbone a mid-range score for control. This service is targeted at teams with international needs, so complete control is not explicitly their focus.
Level of Control: 2/5 Wrenches
Twilio 🔧🔧🔧
Twilio is one of the most well-rounded audio platforms available. In addition to offering voice, SMS, and OTP capabilities, the company offers a good balance of out-of-the-box features and developer customization.
Customers can start integrating Twilio’s services using existing functionality. For those looking for customized solutions, Twilio’s APIs provide a lot of flexibility while offering powerful scalability, which you control. It was specifically developed for tinkerers and creators, so it is simple, yet powerful to use.
We give Twilio a mid-range score on the control scale. Not only does it allow for easy out-of-the-box implementation, but it also provides developers with the tools to fully customize and build out the features they want and need. However, the developer needs to pick the regions of the world where the service is available, so the app will require monitoring as you grow globally.
Level of Control: 3/5 Wrenches
Jitsi Meet API 🔧🔧🔧🔧
Jitsi Meet is an easy to use, open-source WebRTC application that provides high-quality, secure, and scalable video conferences. This includes video, audio, screen sharing, recording, chat, document editing and custom URLs. The Jitsi Meet API lets developers easily embed Jitsi Meet directly into their applications. It is the best open-source video platform on the market.
Integration is very easy, requiring just a couple lines of code. Simultaneously, there are many options available for customization, though you may have to run it against a deployed infrastructure that you control. Because of this, we give the Jitsi Meet API a high score on the control scale.
Level of Control: 4/5 Wrenches
Sinch 🔧🔧
Sinch is a cloud-based, mobile communications platform built to provide voice, verification, SMS, and video for mobile apps. The company prides itself on being built for developers, with a powerful range of SDKs and APIs. It is built for iOS, Android, JavaScript, and REST services. Sinch looks to reduce the complexity of building and maintaining real-time communications infrastructures through their SDK.
Sinch focuses on building an easy-to-integrate API so developers can get to the meat of their application, instead of focusing on the real-time communications aspect. With that said, we give Sinch a lower score on the control scale.
Level of Control: 2/5 Wrenches
Voximplant 🔧🔧🔧
Voximplant is a versatile cloud communications platform that integrates voice, video, and messaging for businesses and developers. They have a straightforward SDK for SIP, web, and mobile that works in real-time using JavaScript. Their platform comes with some exciting features, including text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and voice recording.
Voximplant gives a significant level of control to the developer by offering many options and features. Because of this, we give it a mid-range score on the control scale.
Level of Control: 3/5 Wrenches
WebRTC has many high-quality platform providers. The competition between them can be intense, and each successful one has found their particular niche. The level of control between platforms varies, so it’s important to find the best one for your particular use case.
In this blog post, we have covered conversational WebRTC platforms. There are several platforms offering low-latency live video, which we will cover in a future blog post.
callstats.io is integrated with many of the popular WebRTC providers, and we’re continuously adding more integrations. To find out more, take a look at our SDK library.
Want to contribute to the story or add your own SDK to the list? Send a note to growth(a)callstats.io.
