On Saturday 06 June 2026 at 18:14:21, spcbfr wrote:
Hi, I want to build a call tracking service where managers can route
What, manually, for every call?
potential sales to different agents on the app,
What is “the app”?
and manage the lead status, call length and most importantly call recording.
What do you mean by “manage” in that sentence?
I was planning on using twilio but I discovered there are open-source
solutions.
I personally am familiar with Twilio as a SIP connectivity provider. I cannot
comment on anything else they offer.
It is also my first time getting into telephony so I am not sure if
asterisk is the right choice for me, I read through some of the docs and
it seems like asterisk does most of what I need. but if this is not an
intended use for asterisk, it might be slow at this task or too power
consuming.
What is your anticipated call volume?
- peak number of concurrent calls
- peak number of new calls within one minute
- total duration of calls to be recorded per day
I wanted to know if asterisk was the right tool for the job and if so: what
are its advantages & disadvantages over something not self-hosted like
twilio?
I would say that the main thing you need to understand is that Asterisk is a
toolbox for building telephony systems. It is not a telephony system itself.
Imagine you buy a large quantity of mixed Lego bricks on eBay. Have you
bought a house, or a space station, or a car?
No, but you can probably make any of those (perhaps all of them), in different
sizes and amounts of detail depending on what quantity and what types of
bricks you bought.
Asterisk is a collection of Lego bricks. You can put its many and varied
parts together to build all sorts of different telephony systems, but on its
own it won’t do anything without instructions.
You say that this is your first time getting into telephony, so I’m inclined to
suggest that Asterisk itself is not the right tool for you - it can almost
certainly do what you want, but the time it will take for you to learn how to
make it do that is probably more than you (or your employer?) want.
I would suggest that you look instead at various fully-functional telephone
systems which other people have put together, based on Asterisk, such as
FreePBX. There are also commercial (non-free, non-Open Source) systems such
as Thirdlane and Bicom PBXware. You might also want to consider FusionPBX,
which is not based on Asterisk (it’s based on FreeSwitch), just in case it
offers features closer to your needs. Both FreePBX and FusionPBX (in its
standard form) are free and Open Source, so you can use them (including
commercially) without paying someone like Twilio.
(for instance, one thing I read is that asterisk doesn’t have an api for
provisioning phone numbers like twilio, this is not a dealbreaker but I
want to know if there are issues like this that I will face further down
the road.
Asterisk has no support whatever for provisioning phone numbers, or
telephones. It expects telephones to know how to register to it so it can
send them phone calls, and it expects phone numbers (from some external SIP
provider, who you will have to pay for their service) to be organised such
that calls arrive at Asterisk’s dialplan and that dialplan tells it what to do
with the calls.
Another useful (non-Lego) analogy is that you might want to build a car.
Asterisk is the equivalent of the engine and the gearbox, but you have to
provide the instrument panel, the bodywork, and the wheels before you have
something you can drive.
FreePBX and FusionPBX are like Open Source cars - they are fully functional
and you can drive them, but you can also add new bits to the instrument panel,
change the wheels if you want to, and add an extra gear to the gearbox once
you really know what you’re doing.
I hope that helps.
Antony.
–
3 logicians walk into a bar. The bartender asks “Do you all want a drink?”
The first logician says “I don’t know.”
The second logician says “I don’t know.”
The third logician says “Yes!”
