Twilio Flex Review and Pricing

Why We Chose Twilio Flex for Complex Communication Needs

Businesses can typically integrate various third-party apps with call center software to customize a solution to fit their needs. However, finding an app that delivers the exact functionality you want isn’t always possible, and many companies have security concerns when sharing data between multiple tools. You may also have more advanced or unique communication requirements that typical call center software can’t address.

Twilio Flex solves many of these issues. You can tailor the platform for highly specific use cases while still connecting it to your customer relationship management (CRM) system, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and other business tools. Your company’s administrators, agents and supervisors will appreciate Twilio Flex’s clean, intuitive interface, and you can configure the experience to your precise specifications to fit your existing tech stack.

Most businesses will need developers or coders to fully unlock Twilio Flex’s capabilities. Think of it as a build-your-own omnichannel contact center — a flexible foundation you can program to support the customer and agent workflows you want. It helps to start with a clear vision of the features and functionality you need so your team can build and deploy the system efficiently.

Twilio Flex is ideal for businesses that need a highly customizable call center solution, which is why it’s our top choice for companies with complex communication needs.

Ease of Use

Twilio Flex is built for companies that want to design a customized communications framework from the ground up and integrate it seamlessly with their existing business software. While this level of control is a major advantage, it also makes Flex more complex than traditional call center platforms.

We appreciate that Twilio offers extensive developer documentation and resources, including hundreds of support pages and a growing app marketplace to streamline setup and expansion. These tools give teams a strong foundation to start configuring the platform.

Out of the box, Flex’s user interface is clean and intuitive, but consider it a starting point. To truly tailor the platform to your workflows, you’ll need to build and add functionality, which often requires support from developers or technically skilled staff.

The good news is that Flex is built by developers, for developers. The documentation is well-organized, clear and designed to guide teams from initial planning to launch and ongoing iterations. For businesses with development resources, Flex provides an adaptable, well-documented environment for building a customized contact center.

Twilio Flex Features

Twilio Flex starts as a lean, highly customizable platform that you can build out with the specific call center features your business needs to manage complex communication workflows. Here are some standout capabilities we noted.

Customizability

While Twilio Flex works out of the box, most businesses enhance the platform to match their exact workflows. In addition to traditional coding, teams can use Twilio’s Studio app to tailor the system more efficiently.

Studio adds drag-and-drop, low-code functionality for creating workflows, starting with triggers such as “incoming call” or “incoming message.” You can build your own interactive voice response (IVR) system to present callers with menu options and route them to the right agent — for example, 1 for sales, 2 for support, and so on. It’s not fully no-code, but it substantially reduces development time.

Some of the most useful Studio capabilities include:

• Creating two-way conversations between agents and digital channels
• Building a WhatsApp customer support menu
• Setting conditions for forwarding calls
• Setting up autoresponders
• Sending appointment reminders

For businesses with in-house developers or access to development resources, Studio can significantly speed up customization, helping you create your ideal call center experience without building everything from scratch.

Omnichannel Communications

Twilio Flex includes built-in omnichannel tools that allow agents to communicate with customers across multiple digital channels. The Chat tab shows all current and past conversations with a customer, and the Info tab displays customer details and order history when linked to your CRM. Nearly every interface element, from layout and labels to content, can be customized to match your workflows.

We were impressed by Flex Conversations, a prebuilt tool that supports two-way communication across channels like SMS, WhatsApp, X (formerly Twitter), AI chatbots and more. It can also route each interaction to the appropriate agent or team, reducing the need to build interfaces or workflows from scratch and saving developers significant time.

This level of omnichannel flexibility ensures consistent, personalized customer experiences no matter where each conversation begins.

Admin Dashboard and Tools

We like that you can create new workflows, manage users and connect Twilio Flex to your existing apps or third-party integrations built specifically for the platform. Flex lets you build custom inbound and outbound routing, evaluate workforce engagement, manage staffing levels, transcribe calls and analyze transcripts for customer sentiment. Many popular functions already have prebuilt apps, so you won’t need to code unless you require something highly specific.

Flex also provides strong visibility into performance and quality metrics. You can monitor average handle time, wait time, call abandonment, first-contact resolution, cost per contact and customer retention, and program these key performance indicators (KPIs) directly into the system or use an app to track them. We also like the Survey Dynamic app, which gathers feedback and calculates customer satisfaction scores after each interaction.

As with most call center platforms, supervisors can assign skills and skill levels to agents and set rules that route customers to the most qualified representative. Flex also tracks call transfer rates, helping managers identify coaching needs and ensure customers reach the right agents faster. These admin tools give supervisors the control they need to maintain quality and scale more sophisticated communication workflows.

Agent Dashboard and Tools

Twilio Flex’s agent dashboard is designed to keep all customer interactions in one place. Agents can manage inbound and outbound calls, as well as digital conversations, and view the live call queue at the top left of the screen. We like that agents can instantly see which channel a customer is using — SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, email, voicemail or live chat — and scroll through past interactions for helpful context. Agents can end a digital conversation at any time by selecting End Chat.

When integrated with one of the best CRM software options, ERP tools, a payment system and other business apps, Flex can display valuable customer information on the right side of the screen. This may include contact details, payment history, membership status, past orders and more, giving agents the background they need for personalized support.

We also like that you can preprogram on-screen components for common requests, such as password resets or subscription changes. Automated responses tied to specific keywords or triggers help agents resolve issues faster, supporting high-quality, efficient customer service.

Additionally, agents can use their dashboard to track their performance against KPIs, while supervisors can review the same data to identify coaching and training opportunities.

Supervisor Dashboard and Tools

Twilio Flex’s supervisor tools are robust and thoughtfully designed to support coaching, quality control and team performance. Here are some highlights:

• Dashboard homepage: Supervisors get a real-time overview of team activity and performance, including the number of waiting and active tasks, the longest wait time, each agent’s status, service-level performance across channels, tasks by queue and more.
• People view: Selecting the People icon shows what each agent is working on and whether they’re assisting customers by phone or a digital channel, giving supervisors quick insight into workload and coverage.
• Reporting: We were particularly impressed with Twilio Flex’s reporting capabilities compared with competing platforms. Supervisors can:
  • Access detailed team and individual performance metrics.
  • Schedule recurring reports and send them to designated recipients.
  • Review individual calls and digital interactions, leave feedback and coach agents directly in the platform.
  • Use a drag-and-drop builder to create custom reports, charts and dashboards focused on the metrics that matter most.
• Whisper messages: Supervisors can pop in with a quick “whisper” message during a call or chat to coach an agent in the moment; the customer only hears the agent, not the coaching behind the scenes. Agents can also pull in a supervisor when they need backup. It’s a smart way to keep quality high while helping agents feel supported, not alone on the line.

Text Message Marketing

Twilio Flex allows you to run SMS and MMS marketing campaigns and promotions across channels like Google Business Messages, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. These built-in tools make Flex one of the best text message marketing platforms for businesses that want to integrate customer communication and marketing in one place.

Twilio’s robust business texting and text message marketing features include click tracking for URLs, link shortening, message scheduling, automated responses and more. We appreciate how seamlessly these functions are incorporated into the platform, making it easy to run promotions, drip campaigns and loyalty programs without juggling separate tools.

Twilio Flex Pricing

Twilio Flex offers two pricing models to accommodate different staffing needs:

• Per-hour pricing: $1 per active user, per hour. This option is ideal for teams with part-time agents, seasonal fluctuations or variable staffing levels.
• Per-month pricing: $150 per user, per month. This flat-rate plan covers agents, supervisors and administrators, regardless of usage or activity level.

Other pricing considerations include the following:​

• AI add-on: Twilio’s Agent Copilot, which provides AI-powered assistance for agents, is billed separately at $0.035 per voice minute and $0.005 per digital message. Additional professional services may be required for deployment.
• Customization and development: If you hire a developer to tailor your Flex platform, expect upfront implementation costs.
• Additional software costs: You may need to budget for a separate CRM or ERP system to integrate with Twilio Flex and unlock full functionality.
• Telephony fees: For telephony with Twilio’s SIP Trunking infrastructure, outgoing (termination) calls to U.S. toll-free numbers start at $0.0011 per minute, while calls to Zone 4 U.S. regions reach $0.0620 per minute. Incoming (origination) calls start at $0.0034 per minute. Call recording is $0.0025 per minute, and storing those recordings is an additional $0.0005 per minute per month.
• Support plans: Premium customer support plans come at an additional cost (see the Customer Support section for details).
• Free trial: Twilio provides a free trial of 5,000 active user hours to test and customize the platform. Note that the trial excludes access to Insights (the supervisor analytics tool) and self-hosted user interfaces for historical reporting.

Pricing for Messaging

If you plan to use Twilio for SMS and MMS campaigns, it’s important to understand the per-message costs. Here’s a quick look at Twilio’s current messaging rates:

Other notes: 

• Carrier fees apply on top of Twilio pricing (e.g., major U.S. carriers add about $0.003 per outbound SMS).
• Volume discounts reduce per-message costs as volume increases.

Implementation and Onboarding

Setting up Twilio Flex is fairly straightforward. When you open the platform for the first time, you’ll create a project, add team members, choose your communication channels, build workflows in the Studio app, and select your live analytics and reporting options. At that point, you should be able to receive calls and texts via a number provided by Twilio and enable the webchat function for your website.

Twilio provides four main views from the left-hand menu:

• Admin dashboard: Start integrating your CRM here if you wish. Salesforce integrates directly with Twilio, but other CRMs may require API or SDK work. If you’re not comfortable with coding, consider hiring a developer to connect your CRM and other apps. You can also enable and disable Flex features, set up queues and more from this dashboard. [Read related article: Best Websites for Hiring Developers]
• Agent desktop view: Agents can see live, incoming and ready-for-resolution tasks, as well as the actions they can take on those tasks.
• Teams view: Administrators and supervisors can monitor team performance for up to 200 agents on this screen.
• Queues view: View task summaries, including how many agents are available, unavailable or offline.

While the initial setup isn’t difficult, deep customization is where complexity increases. Integrating Twilio Flex with the 60 available built-in apps (covering everything from IVR enhancements to workforce management) is easier than coding from scratch, but still requires planning and testing.

Because of this complexity, we appreciate Twilio’s extensive technical support resources. The vendor provides API reference documentation in the Developers section of its site and a knowledge base with answers to hundreds of questions. The Twilio CodeExchange also offers code samples for common use cases, such as setting up text notifications. We also like the effort the company puts into its YouTube channel, including video tutorials for Flex subscribers.

Customer Support

Every account gets access to the free Developer support option. There are also paid support plans that are billed monthly (you can switch with 30 days’ notice):

• Developer plan (free): Community, documentation and email support; response times are not guaranteed.
• Production plan: The price is the greater of 4 percent of your monthly spend or $250 per month. Includes live chat support and guaranteed response times of three to nine hours, depending on priority.
• Business plan: The price is the greater of 6 percent of your monthly spend or $1,500 per month. Adds phone support plus live chat, with faster response times of one to three hours.
• Personalized plan: The price is the greater of 8 percent of your monthly spend or $5,000 per month. Includes everything in Business, plus a technical account manager, escalation line access and quarterly service reviews.

Twilio isn’t the only provider that charges extra for premium support. As noted in our Salesforce Service Cloud review, Salesforce limits phone support to certain tiers. Keep these costs in mind if your team relies on quick technical assistance.

Limitations

While Twilio Flex is a powerful and highly customizable platform, it’s not the right fit for every business. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind before committing:

• Customization costs: While Flex is affordable on a per-user or per-message basis, the real expense comes from building and tailoring the platform. Most businesses will need developer support to customize workflows and integrations, which can increase your upfront investment.
• Technical complexity: Flex offers extensive configuration options, but that level of flexibility can feel overwhelming. Even with great documentation, businesses without in-house developers or the budget to outsource coding may struggle to implement the solution efficiently. If you need a more plug-and-play platform, see our Five9 review.
• Additional software required: To unlock full value, many companies will need separate tools like a CRM or ERP system. This adds licensing costs and setup work. If you prefer an all-in-one call center platform with built-in sales and service tools, consider a provider like Salesforce Service Cloud.
• Longer setup timeline: Flex isn’t a quick deployment compared to turnkey call center platforms. Building your ideal environment takes planning, testing and iteration. If you need to ramp up a call center quickly — particularly for a smaller team — a more out-of-the-box system may be a better fit. Check out our GoTo Contact Center review to learn about a great plug-and-play option.

Methodology

When researching the best call center software providers, we evaluated each vendor’s features, usability, setup process, pricing, drawbacks and customer support. We looked for key capabilities such as inbound and outbound communication, call routing, analytics, management tools and integrations, as well as the availability of add-ons and customization options. Whenever possible, we participated in demos and trials for hands-on experience. To determine the top platform for businesses with complex needs, we also considered whether the software was plug-and-play or required configuration, how customizable it was, and whether it could be programmed to perform the way you’d like.

Bottom Line

We recommend Twilio Flex for …

• Companies that want maximum flexibility and control in a communications platform.
• Organizations that need a highly tailored call center solution for complex communication needs.
• Software development firms or tech-savvy teams that can build custom communication workflows for clients​.

We don’t recommend Twilio Flex for …

• Businesses with straightforward call center needs that can be met by more affordable, plug-and-play platforms.
• Companies without access to developers or the budget to hire one for customization and ongoing maintenance.
• Teams that need fast implementation with minimal configuration or training.