Bird (previously called MessageBird) was chosen because of its extensive range of SMS features, pricing, reliability and customer service.
It provides an innovative range of global SMS features for UK businesses.
The Bird SMS Gateway service is relatively new to the UK after a sustained period of success overseas. They began in 2011 and now claim they have been connecting businesses to their customers on billions of devices around the world. Their APIs have been built in-house by some of the top telephony engineers in the IT industry. Bird has offices on 4 continents with employees from over 20 different nationalities to support their services.
Today, over 15,000 global customers rely on Bird to solve their communication challenges by routing important messages and calls on their behalf. Their SMS, Chat, and Voice APIs provide a variety of ways to interact with customers with ease, efficiency and accessibility.
Bird’s major global customers include the likes of Domino’s, Levis and Heineken with SMS Gateway integration including Magento and Zendesk. They specialize in industry sectors such as healthcare, transport logistics and retail.
View the full MessageBird SMS gateway review focusing on price, features, and customer service to other SMS Gateway providers below.
The current price to send, receive and monitor a text message through MessageBird SMS gateway is relatively comparable to other SMS companies dependent on the locations but not the cheapest. On their website, it is confusing as to the price of an outbound text message. It states for local SMS it is £0.028 which can mean that in their country of origin the Netherlands, that is the charge. However, in their pricing schedule, they state a price of £0.069 which is much dearer by over 100% than their comparable SMS gateway providers in the UK. Inbound SMS is free as are other UK SMS providers. It does mention that bulk volumes of over 100,000 can be negotiated directly with the supplier. It must be noted that it does not include a tax (VAT) so this matter needs to be considered.
Bird offers a whole range of pricing displayed on their website including voice calling, text-to-speech, voice numbers, SMS numbers, and short code. They do have a pay-as-you-go service. Their text message gateway service does not have a setup fee or a monthly fee account but there is no contract.
A dedicated virtual mobile number service is also available which allows clients, customers and employees to be reached at any time, anywhere by setting up their own VMN. There is also a service to review the currency of the client contact information and whether there needs to be a clean-up of the database thereby reducing the number of undelivered messages. There is a fee for this service.
Bird’s platform, its applications and its APIs help businesses streamline conversations through their customers’ preferred channels — like WhatsApp, Email, SMS, Voice, WeChat, Messenger, and Instagram – and build powerful and engaging experiences. Bird’s out-of-the-box functionality and omnichannel expertise tips the scales for knowledge workers and helps them be productive right away, with tools to build great marketing campaigns, customer service experiences, or automated business processes.
They state that their API, dashboard, and integrations can connect to seven billion mobile phones anywhere in the world. So a business can send and receive messages worldwide with an SMS API trusted by over 400,000 developers. Additionally, this can be accomplished by their use of over 900 carrier connections worldwide.
Like several other SMS providers, this company has all the features of other gateway providers in having a web SMS platform that can be easily integrated into the client web system. It has the infrastructure to ensure that it can connect its high-speed telecommunication networks to ensure the messages are promptly delivered by low-cost means. They can provide both a direct carrier and a hybrid carrier usage dependent on what are the client’s immediate requirements
MessageBird provides an Email to SMS service as well as two-way SMS communications so both the client and customer know what is being delivered. They also provide Bulk SMS as well as SMS marketing services. Some of the additional features are illustrated in the table below.
Other than an email address as a form of contact, MessageBird displays a phone contact number Support & Help on +44 203 695 32 51 support@messagebird.com@messagebird for interested parties or potential clients to discuss issues or matters relevant to text message distribution. This is the only phone number contact provided so be mindful of the one-hour time difference between the UK and Amsterdam. Their website covers some customer support from accounts, SMS campaigns, Voice, WhatsApp business solutions, Chat API to developers and more.
The other factor that needs to be considered is that MessageBird offers a free trial of 15 SMS, like a number of their UK gateway competitors. They do offer real-time reporting like other SMS gateway companies in the UK.
When reviewing the reliability of this provider’s gateway SMS service, it was pleasing to note that it has a Service Level Agreement that offers a guarantee of 99.95% uptime, which indicates their reliability in the dissemination of text messages is both efficient and effective. If a server goes down or another problem occurs, this provider assures the client that they receive an alert and will action the problem immediately.
This company is very conscious about its security and privacy particularly when many of its clients are hospitals, banks and government institutions. It outlines its rules and regulatory requirements, employee-screening and data encryption to ensure security and reliability. The data it collects depends on the relationship it has with the business. Setting privacy settings on their website, signing up for a newsletter, downloading marketing materials, or using any of our products and services all require the business to leave appropriate details, specific to the purpose. MessageBird never collects more data than it needs and may ask for additional data at the appropriate time if necessary. They are General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) compliant from May 2018.
There are many significant clients of MessageBird SMS Gateway which indicates that they are a reputable company. They are also a member of the GSMA which represents over 300 mobile operators globally. On the website, it shows TNT, Dominos, Levis and Heineken. Whether they are British clients is not stipulated on their website.
As a result of prospective clients wanting to engage a reliable, cost-effective SMS Gateway Provider, this group of experts in the text message service arena formulated and developed a simple-to-follow and understandable SMS Comparison Table and associated sites. They only developed these sites after leaving the SMS field to explore other IP ventures and so felt they could present an independent, unbiased assessment of the various SMS providers.
The SMS Comparison Table displays the most important SMS platform review features, a pricing structure, customer service, reliability as well as security issues to ensure you, as the reader, are well informed as to the important aspects of selecting the right provider for your needs.
The Comparison Table and associated sites are free of charge to you. However, should you use the site and then engage one of the Text Message Gateway providers then the authors may request some type of commission from the provider. As you will have noticed there is no form of advertising on the site.
The authors hope you will benefit from this SMS Comparison review.
The latest update was on 10 March 2024.