Clickatell alternative SMS-Gateway? [closed]

Question

We're just about to go live but Clickatell seems to be problematic. Billing AND Server issues!!

A quick google search shows a long record of problems.

They did however made good impression at first but now we're simply not sure - they don't seem to be stable!

So, which reliable SMS gateway would allow me to send simple English SMS to Israel (programmatically through an HTTP API)?

Saw so far:

• http://www.bulksms.com/

Cowslip

Do you need any other features, like a local number, a shortcode, or the ability to receive messages? – Somehow

None. Purely for SMS sending. – Cowslip

Twilio supports sending text messages to Israel inexpensively. I've toyed with them for small projects but can't really speak to their reliability. – Somehow

@Somehow thanks, they do look VERY good! Sadly, they can't send SMS to the "new carriers" (Golan Telecom, Rami Levi etc'). Just checked it. Voice does work - weird! – Cowslip

Man.. Just found out BulkSMS doesn't send to Israel (new carriers).. – Cowslip

Do the new carriers you're trying to reach have email-to-SMS gateways set up? I assume they impose a cap if you're using them for some huge enterprise project, but I've seen moderately large projects (at least 100 messages per day) that use them exclusively. Some carriers might have stricter policies, though. – Somehow

Same problem here. I do not recommend Clickatell. Slow SMS and not customer support – Ardoin

Answer 1

Disclaimer, I do developer evangelism part time at Nexmo.

If you're looking for an API to send SMS with a large global reach and high deliverability, you should check out Nexmo.

I don't recall the exact number, but for outgoing SMS over 200 countries/800 carriers (I think that's more like 1K now) are supported. It doesn't seem like you'll need incoming, but if you do, you can get inbound numbers in 14 (that number is also growing) countries.

As to reliability, I believe Nexmo is the only SMS provider that publishes delivery stats. I've pasted the delivery status for Israel here:

Network         | Success Ratio | DLR Ratio
42503 Pelephone | 91.47         | 99.99
42502 Cellcom   | 92.01         | 99.95
42501 Orange    | 93.14         | 99.97

Success ratio is messages delivered to handsets, DLR ratio is messages that resulted in a delivery receipt - so for Pelephone, 99.99% of the time, your application will be sent a report notifying of the message status, even when it's not part of the 91.47% of the time the message is successful delivered to the handset.

Schnapp

@poni The API is pretty easy to implement; however, probably a pain point as you've already written code for another API. If you post a message to Nexmo support and ask for me, I'll do what I can to make that transition as easy as possible. – Schnapp

Answer 2

For high quality SMS services you should check out my employer´s website. Consider enabling delivery report callbacks. This will trigger a script at your server with information about if and when a message was successfully delivered to the users phone.

PHP example:

<?php

// Register here to get a username and password:
// http://www.vianett.com/en/free-demonstration-account

if (vianett_sendsms('username', 'password', 'example', '[phone]', 'Hello world', $error)) {
    echo 'Success!';
} else {
    echo $error;
}

function vianett_sendsms($username, $password, $from, $to, $msg, &$response=null) {
    $url = 'https://smsc.vianett.no/v3/send.ashx';
    $data = array(
        'user'  => $username,
        'pass'  => $password,
        'src'   => $from,
        'dst'   => $to,
        'msg'   => $msg
    );
    $qs = http_build_query($data);
    $response = file_get_contents($url.'?'.$qs);
    return $response == '200|OK';
}

Disestablish