This is the fourth blog post of our 8 post series on the subject of Asterisk vs. Switchvox phone systems. Subscribe to our blog by submitting your email into the box on the right to receive an email notification for each blog post in the series.

Switchvox Business Phone System Features

The Digium Switchvox was designed as a full-featured commercial business telephone system, which provides a robust Unified Communications feature list, equal that of its PBX phone system competition.

Telephone Calls: Switchvox provides all of the standard calling features of any modern PBX phone system, plus expanded features, such as hold, transfer, conference calls, and call parking.

Switchvox Applications: Switchvox launched into the app world well before its competition and apps are provided as part of the base system feature set at no extra cost. For example, a Google Maps integration pops up a Google Map on a browser to indicate the location of the incoming call.  A Salesforce integration allows communication between Switchvox and Salesforce. Finally, you can build your own integrations with the Switchvox Extend API, too.

Switchboard: Switchboard is a web-based communications productivity application, which includes features like click to call, drag-and-drop transfer, instant messaging, and presence.

Switchvox Mobility: Link employees desk phones with their cell phones through the Switchvox Mobile application. Employees can be anywhere and access the features and call handling of the Switchvox phone system.

Customer Service Features: Switchvox standard features include powerful customer service tools, such as call queues, call recording, monitoring, and interactive voice response. 

Management Reporting: Switchvox provides rich data that helps management make informed decisions. Managers can retrieve detailed logs, create graphs & charts, and call center reports. These reports can be scheduled to be sent automatically.

System Administration: Switchvox has a built-in simple GUI to make ongoing management of the phone system a breeze by making it easy to control and manage the communications experience for your organization.

Click here for for a comprehensive list of Switchvox features.

Asterisk Phone System Features

The Digium Asterisk is much more than a business phone system, providing a broad range of telecommunications capabilities.  It provides all of the necessary building blocks to create complete telecommunications solutions.  The customer, or their developer, uses building blocks to design an application (in this case, a PBX), select the features they wish to use, and program them to work together in a seamless fashion. 

Asterisk can also be customized to create call distribution systems, VoIP gateways, and conference bridges. Asterisk includes both low and high-level components that significantly simplify the process of building complex applications. See the Asterisk Applications section for more examples

Features in the world of Asterisk are not really features, but underlying technologies. Here are some sample “features” in the Asterisk:

• Alarm Receiver
• Distributed Universal Number Discovery
• ENUM
• Transcoding
• Asterisk Gateway Interface
• Protocol Conversion

These “features” are alien to the vast majority of people who understand business telephone systems but are the basic language of Asterisk designers. For further information, please see the Full List of Asterisk Features.

Summary of Switchvox vs Asterisk

So, which solution has the most features and flexibility? The Asterisk wins that competition, providing near limitless capabilities, only being limited by the skills and creativity of the Asterisk developer.  

Between Switchvox and Asterisk, which provides a total business solution without descending into geekdom? The Switchvox wins by a mile, with the complex development completed when the product was developed. The customer sees a well-designed and polished business phone system, ideally designed for business use.