Alternatives to Agora logo

Alternatives to Agora

Twilio, Zoom, WebRTC, Jitsi, and Twilio SendGrid are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Agora.
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What is Agora and what are its top alternatives?

Agora.io provides building blocks for you to add real-time voice and video communications through a simple and powerful SDK. You can integrate the Agora SDK to enable real-time communications in your own application quickly.
Agora is a tool in the Voice and SMS category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Agora

  • Twilio
    Twilio

    Twilio offers developers a powerful API for phone services to make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more easily integrate various communication methods into their software and programs. ...

  • Zoom
    Zoom

    Zoom unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, and cross platform group chat into one easy-to-use platform. Our solution offers the best video, audio, and screen-sharing experience across Zoom Rooms, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and H.323/SIP room systems. ...

  • WebRTC
    WebRTC

    It is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple JavaScript APIs. The WebRTC components have been optimized to best serve this purpose. ...

  • Jitsi
    Jitsi

    Jitsi (acquired by 8x8) is a set of open-source projects that allows you to easily build and deploy secure videoconferencing solutions. At the heart of Jitsi are Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet, which let you have conferences on the internet, while other projects in the community enable other features such as audio, dial-in, recording, and simulcasting. ...

  • Twilio SendGrid
    Twilio SendGrid

    Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's. ...

  • Amazon SES
    Amazon SES

    Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. ...

  • Mailgun
    Mailgun

    Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly. ...

  • Mandrill
    Mandrill

    Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp. ...

Agora alternatives & related posts

Twilio logo

Twilio

11.5K
521
Bring voice and messaging to your web and mobile applications.
11.5K
521
PROS OF TWILIO
  • 148
    Powerful, simple, and well documented api
  • 88
    RESTful API
  • 66
    Clear pricing
  • 61
    Great sms services
  • 58
    Low cost of entry
  • 29
    Global SMS Gateway
  • 14
    Good value
  • 12
    Cloud IVR
  • 11
    Simple
  • 11
    Extremely simple to integrate with rails
  • 6
    Great for startups
  • 5
    SMS
  • 3
    Great developer program
  • 3
    Hassle free
  • 2
    Text me the app pages
  • 1
    New Features constantly rolling out
  • 1
    Many deployment options, from build from scratch to buy
  • 1
    Easy integration
  • 1
    Two factor authentication
CONS OF TWILIO
  • 4
    Predictable pricing
  • 2
    Expensive

related Twilio posts

Ravi Sathanapalli
Director Product Management at Centime · | 7 upvotes · 198.7K views
Shared insights
on
TwilioTwilioAmazon SNSAmazon SNS

Hi, We are looking to implement 2FA - so that users would be sent a Verification code over their Email and SMS to their phone.

We faced some limitations with Amazon SNS where we could either send the verification code to email OR to the phone number, while we want to send it to both.

We also are looking to make the 2FA more flexible by adding any other options later on.

What are the best alternatives to SNS for this use case and purpose? Looked at Twilio but want to explore other options before making a decision.

Would be great to know what the experience with Twilio has been, especially the limitations/issues with Twilio...

Appreciate any input from users of Twilio and others who have had similar use cases.

See more
Cheri Booth
Vendor Relationship Manager at Storage Asset Management · | 6 upvotes · 102.6K views
Shared insights
on
ClickatellClickatellTwilioTwilio

Searching for options for SMS that integrates with SiteLink and will allow personalization of text and tracking of both incoming/outgoing messages with reporting (Time, date, call#, etc) Have been looking at Twilio, and seems most leaning toward this. Are there any other options known that integrate into SiteLink? Also looked at Clickatell.

See more
Zoom logo

Zoom

1.8K
155
Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing
1.8K
155
PROS OF ZOOM
  • 25
    Web conferencing made easy
  • 16
    Remote control option
  • 13
    Draw on screen
  • 12
    Very reliable
  • 11
    In-meeting chat is pretty good
  • 9
    Free
  • 9
    Pair programming sessions with shared controls
  • 8
    Easy to share meeting links/invites
  • 7
    Good Sound Quality
  • 6
    Cloud recordings for meetings
  • 5
    Great mobile app
  • 4
    Virtual backgrounds
  • 4
    Recording Feature
  • 4
    Other people use it
  • 4
    User Friendly actions
  • 2
    Reactions (emoticons)
  • 2
    Auto reconnecting
  • 2
    Chrome extension is great to easily create meetings
  • 2
    While sharing screen, you can still see your video
  • 2
    Mute all participants at once
  • 2
    When ending the videocall, everybody gets kicked
  • 2
    Different options for blocking chat
  • 1
    Easily share video with audio
  • 1
    /zoom on Slack
  • 1
    Registration form
  • 1
    Meant for business and education
  • 0
    Zoom
CONS OF ZOOM
  • 20
    Limited time if you are a basic member
  • 14
    Limited Storage
  • 11
    Hate how sharing your screen defaults to Full Screen
  • 10
    Quality isn't great (Free)
  • 9
    No cursor highlight on screenshare.
  • 8
    Potential security flaws
  • 7
    Onboarding process for new users is not intuitive
  • 5
    Virtual background quality isn't good
  • 5
    Security
  • 4
    Editing can be improved
  • 4
    Doesn't handle switching audio sources well
  • 4
    The native calendar is buggy
  • 4
    Dashboard can be improved
  • 3
    Pornographic material displayed
  • 3
    Any body can get in it
  • 3
    Not many emojis
  • 3
    Past chat history is not saved
  • 3
    Recording Feature
  • 3
    En In reality,the chat in the meet not is excelent,noo
  • 3
    Zoom lags a lot

related Zoom posts

Yonas Beshawred

Using Screenhero via Slack was getting to be pretty horrible. Video and sound quality was often times pretty bad and worst of all the service just wasn't reliable. We all had high hopes when the acquisition went through but ultimately, the product just didn't live up to expectations. We ended up trying Zoom after I had heard about it from some friends at other companies. We noticed the video/sound quality was better, and more importantly it was super reliable. The Slack integration was awesome (just type /zoom and it starts a call)

You can schedule recurring calls which is helpful. There's a G Suite (Google Calendar) integration which lets you add a Zoom call (w/dial in info + link to web/mobile) with the click of a button.

Meeting recordings (video and audio) are really nice, you get recordings stored in the cloud on the higher tier plans. One of our engineers, Jerome, actually built a cool little Slack integration using the Slack API and Zoom API so that every time a recording is processed, a link gets posted to the "event-recordings" channel. The iOS app is great too!

#WebAndVideoConferencing #videochat

See more

Server side

We decided to use Python for our backend because it is one of the industry standard languages for data analysis and machine learning. It also has a lot of support due to its large user base.

  • Web Server: We chose Flask because we want to keep our machine learning / data analysis and the web server in the same language. Flask is easy to use and we all have experience with it. Postman will be used for creating and testing APIs due to its convenience.

  • Machine Learning: We decided to go with PyTorch for machine learning since it is one of the most popular libraries. It is also known to have an easier learning curve than other popular libraries such as Tensorflow. This is important because our team lacks ML experience and learning the tool as fast as possible would increase productivity.

  • Data Analysis: Some common Python libraries will be used to analyze our data. These include NumPy, Pandas , and matplotlib. These tools combined will help us learn the properties and characteristics of our data. Jupyter notebook will be used to help organize the data analysis process, and improve the code readability.

Client side

  • UI: We decided to use React for the UI because it helps organize the data and variables of the application into components, making it very convenient to maintain our dashboard. Since React is one of the most popular front end frameworks right now, there will be a lot of support for it as well as a lot of potential new hires that are familiar with the framework. CSS 3 and HTML5 will be used for the basic styling and structure of the web app, as they are the most widely used front end languages.

  • State Management: We decided to use Redux to manage the state of the application since it works naturally to React. Our team also already has experience working with Redux which gave it a slight edge over the other state management libraries.

  • Data Visualization: We decided to use the React-based library Victory to visualize the data. They have very user friendly documentation on their official website which we find easy to learn from.

Cache

  • Caching: We decided between Redis and memcached because they are two of the most popular open-source cache engines. We ultimately decided to use Redis to improve our web app performance mainly due to the extra functionalities it provides such as fine-tuning cache contents and durability.

Database

  • Database: We decided to use a NoSQL database over a relational database because of its flexibility from not having a predefined schema. The user behavior analytics has to be flexible since the data we plan to store may change frequently. We decided on MongoDB because it is lightweight and we can easily host the database with MongoDB Atlas . Everyone on our team also has experience working with MongoDB.

Infrastructure

  • Deployment: We decided to use Heroku over AWS, Azure, Google Cloud because it is free. Although there are advantages to the other cloud services, Heroku makes the most sense to our team because our primary goal is to build an MVP.

Other Tools

  • Communication Slack will be used as the primary source of communication. It provides all the features needed for basic discussions. In terms of more interactive meetings, Zoom will be used for its video calls and screen sharing capabilities.

  • Source Control The project will be stored on GitHub and all code changes will be done though pull requests. This will help us keep the codebase clean and make it easy to revert changes when we need to.

See more
WebRTC logo

WebRTC

327
6
A free, open project that provides browsers and mobile applications with Real-Time Communications
327
6
PROS OF WEBRTC
  • 3
    OpenSource
  • 2
    No Download
  • 1
    You can write anything around it, because it's a protoc
CONS OF WEBRTC
    Be the first to leave a con

    related WebRTC posts

    Hello. So, I wanted to make a decision on whether to use WebRTC or Amazon Chime for a conference call (meeting). My plan is to build an app with features like video broadcasting, and the ability for all the participants to talk and chat. I have used Agora's web SDK for video broadcasting, and Socket.IO for chat features. As I read the comparison between Amazon Chime and WebRTC, it further intrigues me on what I should use given my scenario? Is there any way that so many related technologies could be a hindrance to the other? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks. Ritwik Neema

    See more
    joseph zeiad

    I am trying to implement video calling in a React Native app through Amazon Kinesis. But I was unlucky to find anything related to this on the web. Do you have any example code I can use? or any tutorial? If not, how easy is it to bridge the native library to RN? And what should I use WebRTC or Amazon Chime?? Thanks

    See more
    Jitsi logo

    Jitsi

    249
    93
    Multi-platform open-source video conferencing
    249
    93
    PROS OF JITSI
    • 32
      Open Source
    • 20
      Entirely free conferencing
    • 19
      Unlimited time
    • 5
      Accessible from browser
    • 3
      Desktop, app and browser tab sharing
    • 3
      WebRTC standard
    • 2
      Secure & encrypted video conference
    • 2
      Great API to develop with
    • 2
      Live stream to youtube
    • 1
      Dial-In and Dial-Out via SIP
    • 1
      Full HD
    • 1
      FSB Approved
    • 1
      Share youtube videos in conference
    • 1
      Easy installation and good support
    • 0
      MCU
    CONS OF JITSI
    • 7
      UnLimited time
    • 5
      No multiplatform
    • 1
      Great quality
    • 1
      Good support
    • 1
      Live conference statistics
    • 1
      Great features

    related Jitsi posts

    Shared insights
    on
    JitsiJitsiZoomZoom

    A common issue with Zoom is the "half-duplex" operation, where only one person can speak at a time, and another person speaking will cause an interrupt and take control. Hence the infernal mute button is so needed. Does Jitsi allow for a "full-duplex" communication to occur? An example scenario is two people singing a duet, which is impossible on a Zoom call.

    Many Thanks, Garry

    See more
    Twilio SendGrid logo

    Twilio SendGrid

    10.8K
    720
    Email Delivery. Simplified.
    10.8K
    720
    PROS OF TWILIO SENDGRID
    • 190
      Easy setup
    • 137
      Cheap and simple
    • 107
      Easy email integration!
    • 86
      Reliable
    • 58
      Well-documented
    • 28
      Generous free allowance to get you started
    • 25
      Trackable
    • 21
      Heroku add-on
    • 15
      Azure add-on
    • 13
      Better support for third party integrations
    • 6
      Simple installation
    • 6
      Free plan
    • 4
      Helpful evangelist staff
    • 4
      Great client libraries
    • 3
      Great support
    • 3
      Better customer support than the competition
    • 3
      Great add-ons
    • 2
      Nice dashboard
    • 2
      Scalable
    • 1
      Web editor for templates
    • 1
      Cool setup
    • 1
      Within integration
    • 1
      Easy set up
    • 1
      Free
    • 1
      Great customer support
    • 1
      Google cloud messaging
    CONS OF TWILIO SENDGRID
    • 3
      Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific
    • 1
      Shared IP blacklist removal takes months
    • 0
      Shares IP blacklist removal

    related Twilio SendGrid posts

    Luke Hamilton
    Sr. Engineer at StackShare · | 4 upvotes · 113.8K views

    At StackShare we were discussing how to increase the retention of our newly signed up users. We hypothesized that if we made certain changes to the emails in our on-boarding process we could increase our retention and activation of users.

    We decided to use sendwithus because it offered us the ability to A/B test our transactional emails. We also utilized the sendwithus analytics dashboard to gain real time insight into the performance of our email campaigns. Furthermore sendwithus has a Rails gem that allowed us to easily integrate the product into our application. We were also able to integrate sendwithus with our SendGrid account. #ABTestingAnalytics #TransactionalEmail

    See more
    Julien DeFrance
    Principal Software Engineer at Tophatter · | 3 upvotes · 580.6K views

    Nexmo vs Twilio ?

    Back in the early days at SmartZip Analytics, that evaluation had - for whatever reason - been made by Product Management. Some developers might have been consulted, but we hadn't made the final call and some key engineering aspects of it were omitted.

    When revamping the platform, I made sure to flip the decision process how it should be. Business provided an input but Engineering lead the way and has the final say on all implementation matters. My engineers and I decided on re-evaluating the criteria and vendor selection. Not only did we need SMS support, but were we not thinking about #VoiceAndSms support as the use cases evolved.

    Also, on an engineering standpoint, SDK mattered. Nexmo didn't have any. Twilio did. No-one would ever want to re-build from scratch integration layers vendors should naturally come up with and provide their customers with.

    Twilio won on all fronts. Including costs and implementation timelines. No-one even noticed the vendor switch.

    Many years later, Twilio demonstrated its position as a leader by holding conferences in the Bay Area, announcing features like Twilio Functions. Even acquired Authy which we also used for 2FA. Twilio's growth has been amazing. Its recent acquisition of SendGrid continues to show it.

    See more
    Amazon SES logo

    Amazon SES

    10K
    328
    Bulk and transactional email-sending service.
    10K
    328
    PROS OF AMAZON SES
    • 102
      Reliable
    • 97
      Cheap
    • 57
      Integrates with other aws services
    • 52
      Easy setup
    • 18
      Trackable
    • 2
      Easy rails setup
    CONS OF AMAZON SES
      Be the first to leave a con

      related Amazon SES posts

      Cyril Duchon-Doris

      We decided to use AWS Lambda for several serverless tasks such as

      • Managing AWS backups
      • Processing emails received on Amazon SES and stored to Amazon S3 and notified via Amazon SNS, so as to push a message on our Redis so our Sidekiq Rails workers can process inbound emails
      • Pushing some relevant Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms to Slack
      See more
      Shared insights
      on
      Amazon SESAmazon SESMailchimpMailchimp

      I would like to know how I can implement a transactional email, or if it is possible to do so, like Mailchimp, using Amazon SES. I want to have the flexibility of creating emails like MailChimp, with a bulk email sending capability. Is it as simple with AWS SES as it is with MailChimp? If so, then how can I implement that for my own product? Thanks!

      See more
      Mailgun logo

      Mailgun

      7.9K
      656
      The Email Service for Developers.
      7.9K
      656
      PROS OF MAILGUN
      • 178
        Quick email integration
      • 148
        Free plan
      • 91
        Easy setup
      • 67
        Ridiculously reliable
      • 53
        Extensive apis
      • 30
        Great for parsing inbound emails
      • 25
        Nice UI
      • 22
        Developer-centric
      • 15
        Excellent customer support
      • 12
        Heroku Add-on
      • 4
        Easy to view logs of sent emails
      • 4
        Email mailbox management for developers
      • 2
        Great PHP library
      • 2
        Great documentation
      • 2
        Great customer support, love rackspace
      • 1
        Better than sendgrid not ask too many question
      CONS OF MAILGUN
      • 2
        Cost
      • 2
        No HTTPS tracking links supported
      • 1
        Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun
      • 1
        Cannot create multiple api keys

      related Mailgun posts

      Todd Gardner
      Shared insights
      on
      MandrillMandrillMailgunMailgun
      at

      We've moved our transactional email away from Mandrill to Mailgun. We had continued using Mandrill after Mailchimp deprecated the service awhile back, because the amount of credits we were offered essentially made it free.

      However, following a couple weeks of frequent downtime and poor service transparency from Mandrill, we decided it was time to make the switch. It appears they no longer had any engineers with the ability to identify the core problems.

      Mailgun has been more reliable, yet not as reliable as we expected. We still see issues a few times per week with the API failing when we attempt to make a call. The Reporting UI is way better.

      See more
      Mandrill logo

      Mandrill

      4.4K
      926
      Send transactional, triggered, and personalized email, then track results.
      4.4K
      926
      PROS OF MANDRILL
      • 189
        Simple installation
      • 141
        Great api
      • 123
        Generous free allowance to get you started
      • 114
        Cheap and simple
      • 99
        Trackable
      • 59
        Well-documented
      • 54
        Doesn't go to spam
      • 47
        Great for mailchimp users
      • 32
        Webhooks
      • 28
        Client libraries
      • 7
        Heroku Add-on
      • 6
        Easy to use
      • 5
        Meaningful Metrics
      • 5
        Free
      • 3
        Advanced Tagging and Reports
      • 3
        Mobile Access
      • 3
        Status Update
      • 2
        Very chimp-like
      • 2
        Great Documentation
      • 2
        love this service
      • 1
        Free Plan
      • 1
        Webhooks for bounce mail
      CONS OF MANDRILL
      • 1
        Really hard to pull analytics out via api

      related Mandrill posts

      Todd Gardner
      Shared insights
      on
      MandrillMandrillMailgunMailgun
      at

      We've moved our transactional email away from Mandrill to Mailgun. We had continued using Mandrill after Mailchimp deprecated the service awhile back, because the amount of credits we were offered essentially made it free.

      However, following a couple weeks of frequent downtime and poor service transparency from Mandrill, we decided it was time to make the switch. It appears they no longer had any engineers with the ability to identify the core problems.

      Mailgun has been more reliable, yet not as reliable as we expected. We still see issues a few times per week with the API failing when we attempt to make a call. The Reporting UI is way better.

      See more
      Shared insights
      on
      MailchimpMailchimpMandrillMandrill

      Hi, I've noticed my Mandrill emails are being received fine but my Mailchimp emails, about 75% are going into junk mail. I was wondering is it possible I have missed some sort of integration or can I send my Mailchimp marketing emails via mandrill?

      Need help to somehow reduce the number of my emails going into junk mail, can someone help?

      See more