Plivo
More info
- Released
- 2011
- Type
- Communications platform (CPaaS)
A voice and SMS API that began life as an open-source framework on top of the FreeSWITCH telephony engine.
Plivo appeared in 2011 as an open-source project for building telephony apps on the FreeSWITCH softswitch, and soon turned into a hosted service with the same pitch as Twilio: an HTTP request instead of a contract with a carrier. Much of the engineering has happened in Bangalore, making it one of the early Indian examples of software built for a global developer audience.
Plivo has never been the biggest, and has made a virtue of it: prices sit lower, and the API is deliberately close to Twilio's, so switching is mostly a matter of changing a few URLs. In a market where SMS is a commodity, that's a sensible strategy.