NumVerify vs. Twilio – Which REST API is Suitable for your business?

In today’s business world, a lot of things are automated and complex. As a result, how quickly and efficiently a company overcomes that complexity can make or break it. One of the most efficient ways companies nowadays simplify their business processes is with REST API integrations. 

With a well-designed and implemented REST API, your business can handle large data traffic with an efficiency that allows you to satisfy both your customers as well as focus on growth.

Most businesses struggle to choose the REST API that is right for their business. This article compares two popular SaaS solutions that offer a REST API that verifies phone numbers – NumVerify and Twilio. Pairing a phone number verification API with an email validator api is also a great option.

Understanding NumVerify and Twilio

Both numVerify and Twilio offer sophisticated phone validation services that make it easy for companies to provide their customers with the best service possible.

NumVerify

NumVerify is a Global Phone Number Validation & Lookup JSON API. It is a real-time REST API supporting users in over 232 countries.  

NumVerify offers its users a full-featured yet simple RESTful JSON API for national and international phone number validation. It also provides information lookup for many countries across the world. 

The NumVerify API by apilayer prides itself on processing numbers in real-time and cross-checking them with international numbering plan databases. The API returns results in JSON format for easy integration and use. Data returned includes carrier, geographical location, and line type data.

NumVerify helps businesses differentiate between fraudulent profiles and authentic users. This allows business to focus their resources on real users. It also ensures that your business can verify contact information right at the entry point of your database. 

Twilio

Twilio is a cloud communications platform that serves as the building block for adding messaging, voice, and video into web and mobile applications of businesses across the world. It offers a REST API that allows programmable communications for messaging, voice, video, and authentication. 

 

With Twilio, your team of developers can integrate phones, and VoIP, in addition to embedded messaging into our web, desktop, and mobile software. 

With REST APIs offered by NumVerify and Twilio, you can start building your applications using the programming language that you prefer. As a result, your development team can focus on building the application your business needs, instead of worrying about exposing the API endpoints of the platform you use.

Features of NumVerify

Number Validation: Clients can make validation requests to numVerify API by simply appending the number parameter followed by the phone number to the API’s validate endpoint. 

Country & Location: Three geographical identifiers come with every valid phone number request- a 2-digit country_code, the corresponding country_name, and an individual location object containing the city, state, or country of registration.

National Numbers: To display phone numbers in their national local format, you provide additional country information by appending the 2-digit country code to the API’s country_code parameter and adding it to your API request URL. 

Carrier Detection: NumVerify returns a separate carrier object containing the name of the carrier the phone number is registered with. Numbers associated with higher fraud registration instances need to provide additional authentication. 

Line Type Detection: NumVerify API detects a number’s line type and returns a line_type JSON object containing the necessary information needed to identify the kind of communications that a number can accept. 

Countries Endpoint: The numVerify API uses the countries endpoint to allow access to the comprehensive list of supported areas, including country names and dialing codes.

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Features of Twilio

Twilio offers a wide array of customizable voice options and resources. These features include Voice SDK, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), recording transcriptions, and speech recognition. Overall it is very complex if you are seeking simple number verification rather than an entire communications suite.

Some of the features Twilio offers include:

Call Tracking: The call tracking feature allows your business’s advertising ROI to be measured by accurately linking call resources, and route leads to representatives. 

Masked Calling: The Twilio API lets you and your customers enjoy seamless communication and the protection of sensitive data using temporary phone number proxies. 

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NumVerify and Twilio Documentation

NumVerify and Twilio are two of the API industry’s leaders. Here are things you should know about their documentation.

NumVerify

The numVerify API documentation is comprehensive and easy-to-follow. It also provides code snippets to allow developers to integrate its functionality into various platforms. In addition, the documentation is designed for quick access and easy definition. This is to ensure that developers do not waste time trying to understand functions and exposed endpoints. 

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Twilio

Twilio’s documentation is robust and links to other pages to better explain functions. It is a system of connected pages that extensively explain concepts. As a result, only developers with years of experience can effectively use the Twilio documentation. It is not designed for beginners in addition to people with no programming experience. 

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Ease of Use 

NumVerify

The numVerify interface is designed for easy use. It quickly exposes its major functionalities to the user with a clear interface, and also has easy-to-follow documentation. 

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Twilio

Twilio is described by users as a powerful API for phone services. Consequently, it allows companies to send and receive text messages, and also make and receive phone calls. However, most users describe it as a developer’s platform and not suitable for anyone without any programming experience. 

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Pricing

NumVerify and Twilio offer different pricing systems.

NumVerify

NumVerify offers its users four types of pricing plans including a free plan that offers the user 250 API requests, limited technical support, number validation, carrier and line type detection, and country and also location detection. The free plan, however, does not come with any form of 256-bit HTTPS encryption. The various plans include: 

Free Plan: $0.00/month 

Basic Plan: $9.99/month 

Professional Plan (The most popular): $39.99/month

Enterprise Plan: $99.99/month

NumVerify also offers the option to request custom pricing if none of the provided plans suits your business. 

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Twilio

Unlike NumVerify, Twilio does not offer fixed monthly payments. Instead, it gives its customers the option to only pay for what they use under a pay-as-you-go model.

The pricing plan used by Twilio is the pay-as-you-go model that ensures that a user only pays for used services. The pricing also depends on the type of services the user opts for. 

The programmable voice service offers unlimited capacity, global low latency, and advanced card control for $0.0085/min to receive and $0.013/min to make a call. 

The Programmable Voice service offers different prices for local calls, toll-free calls, browser/app calling, sip interface, and secure media. 

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Which API should I use for phone number validation and lookup?

The NumVerify interface and documentation are easier to use than those of the Twilio platform. While both platforms make use of REST API and offer robust call and messaging services, NumVerify requires less complex code syntax and enables developers to get straight to implementation. 

Twilio may offer a broader array of business communication solutions, but numVerify makes it so much easier to get complex tasks done with a simple codebase. 

If what you need is an API that is easy to integrate and requires minimum familiarization before implementation, then numVerify is the platform for you.

Head over to NumVerify today and sign up to start quickly validating and identifying phone numbers.