April 8, 2019 at 16:17Personal experience. How we connected international telephony: comparison of 6 virtual exchanges
Not so long ago, I was faced with the need to choose a virtual PBX. Some changes have occurred in the business of my company: new services have appeared, including those aimed not only at the b2b segment, but also at b2c. And with the advent of private clients, it turned out that many people still prefer to talk on the phone.
I don’t have such a big start-up, but I have clients all over the world, so I needed a solution that would be suitable in this case. I also wanted to start interacting with Russian-speaking developers.
An important clarification : I did not have any knowledge on the subject of telephony, I had to google everything from scratch, so there may be inaccuracies in the text. Correct / supplement the material in the comments - this will make it only better.
So let's go!
Who participated in the comparison
A couple of days of reading reviews and reviews helped form a shortlist of systems for further analysis. Hit him:
The main point at this stage was a large number of mentions, reviews and articles about these products - I did not want to connect the recently introduced raw system on the market for the development of a new business line.
Comparison
Since we were just starting any kind of interaction with potential customers over the phone, we did not need the very “tainted” functionality of the PBX. Much more important was ease of use, flexibility, and, of course, price.
Here are the points I paid attention to when analyzing:
Integration
The PBX itself is not as interesting as in combination with other systems important to business - for example, CRM, tools for working on projects and communication tools. Therefore, we analyzed the available capabilities of those products from which we selected.
Telephony from Yandex has two debugged integrations - with Bitrix24 and amoCRM. In this case, the API is listed as a beta version. The function is available in trial mode and in the tariff for 1299 rubles per month.
Mango office has a much more extensive list of ready-made integrations. They are even divided into categories, for example, there are lists of integrations with resources for specific industries (medicine, tourism, etc.) It may be useful to someone, but in our particular case 99% of these integrations will not be useful to us.
In the case of Zadarma, the plus is a more comprehensive list of systems for connecting. It includes not only CRM (and not only Russian, but also foreign), but even messengers - in the end, you can send alerts, for example, that the manager missed a call directly to his telegram.
Sipuni are only integrated with amoCRM, which we do not use. I prefer Zoho. Telfin has only 4 of its own ready-made integrations. Megaphone has not much more of them (5), and all of them are aimed at working with various CRMs.
Cost
I’ll repeat the introduction once again: telephony was needed for a new line of business, it is currently experimental, so I did not want to spend a lot of money on the infrastructure for receiving calls.
The basic version of the Mango Office PBX costs 685 rubles per month. For this money they give three users included in the tariff, 3 numbers on 10 channels. At the same time, additional functions cost money - so connecting the most basic version of call tracking will cost another 3050 rubles / month.
Yandex.Telephony billing is based on a batch approach. The basic “Start” tariff itself is free, you need to pay in it only for calls and numbers (one simple number is free, then 180 rubles, also the monthly fee for the number 8-800 is 999 rubles / month). But there are packages, for example, one of them unites all web widgets ”, such as a call from a site, ordering a call back, etc. - its price is 499 rubles. If you need a beautiful number, you will also have to pay extra for it.
The cost of “beautiful” rooms in the Yandex service
Zadarma - a free telephone exchange, the fee is taken for an increased storage of records and for minutes. The numbers themselves are frankly inexpensive - the connection fee is often zero, the subscription fee for most not quite exotic countries is 100-120 rubles (for some reason, the Belarusian number will cost 2900 rubles for connection and 950 rubles per month).
The list of popular countries for ordering numbers in the Zadarma system
Pricing Telfin seemed to me rather confusing. Confuses the lack of a single page with tariffs - information has to be collected in different parts of the site - as well as the word "from" in many prices (type of service from 299 rubles per month). Moscow number in code 495 is more expensive - 1490 against 990 rubles for code 499.
In the Sipuni service, connecting one number will cost 1000 rubles plus a 266 monthly payment. Basic integration with CRM will cost another 286 rubles.
The subscription fee for using the PBX from Megafon is 1000 rubles per month (it doesn’t matter, 1 employee or 7), recording and storing calls will cost the same amount, integration with CRM costs another 500 rubles.
Functionality: calls abroad, call back and call tracking
We had to receive calls from customers from different countries - at least from the USA, Russia and Europe. It was also important to use the call tracking function - we launched several advertising campaigns, we needed to understand where the call came from. The presence of additional functions such as callback widgets was also considered a plus - right now we do not need this, but we wanted to have a development perspective.
I found foreign numbers only in Zadarma. As for call tracking, it is not in the PBX from Yandex and Megafon, also on the Telphin website there is a URL dedicated to this function , but for some reason there is no page itself.
All analyzed systems have - at least declared - the ability to use the callback widget. Information on this feature is available on all product sites. Unless the Megafon website mentions the possibility of installing a widget to order a call back, but it was not easy to find.
What is the result
| System | Foreign numbers | Free access | Number of integrations | Call tracking | Callback widget |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mango office | Not | Yes (only through the manager - you need to leave a request and wait for the call) | Many industry services | Yes (3050 / month for the basic version) | Yes |
| Zadarma | Yes | Yes (automatic telephone exchange is free, payment only for numbers) | Popular CRM (including Zoho), task managers, instant messengers + API | Yes (free, pay per room) | Yes |
| Telfin | Not | 14 days | 4 | Not | Yes (450 rubles / month) |
| Yandex.Telephony | Not | 14 days | Bitrix24 + AmoCRM | Not | Yes |
| ATS Megaphone | Not | 14 days | 5 | Not | Yes |
| Sipuni | Not | 14 days | 1 (AmoCRM only) | Yes | Yes |
That's all. I hope that the material will be useful to those who, like me for the first time, faced with the task of choosing a PBX for their startup. Thank you all for your attention!
