Thanks to technology, there are many solutions on the market to support the communication process, which is becoming an integral part of company operations and customer service. Today, many organizations find themselves in a dilemma regarding which communication platform to choose between CPaaS and UCaaS. This is because consumers are increasingly demanding direct and authentic interactions. Yet, CPaaS vs.UCaaS are easily confused because they both focus on giving a business a modern communication stack but differ in providing essential services to clients. Between CPaaS and UCaaS, which one should small businesses prefer and why?
What Is CPaaS?
CPaaS, short for Communication platform as a service, is a communication-focused platform as a service (PaaS). It is a cloud-based platform that allows a business’ IT teams to build, customize, and deploy applications without the need to manage the support infrastructure, such as servers, hardware, storage, etc., which PaaS provides. Usually, the IT teams use their own features in SDK and API integrations to build and deploy applications. Examples of CPaaS communication capabilities in Real-telecommunication (RTC) include:
- Video and teleconferencing
- Short message services (SMS)
- Voice and VoIP
- Multimedia message services (MMS)
- Rich communication services (RCS)
- Social channels (WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc.)
The benefits of CPaaS solutions are:
- They give businesses greater flexibility to personalize their communications stack and meet their unique business and communication security needs.
- They allow companies to develop communication features like voice, video, and instant messaging, which they can then embed into software and apps.
What Is UCaaS?
UCaaS is the acronym for Unified communication as a service. Typically, UCaaS integrates multiple communication tools within a business through cloud-based resources to make access easy with a simple click. For example, a typical UCaaS combines cloud phone, team messaging, and video conferencing into a single enterprise application, allowing users to switch between these different communication modes with a single click.
UCaaS is almost similar to a traditional on-premise communication platform that gives a unified communication landscape combining everything a business needs into a single environment. But it delivers these integrated essential communication tools through the cloud, which makes it a modern PaaS. This is why UCaaS is a popular collaboration service. UCaaS also removes the need for a business to house IT infrastructure since they’ll access everything online.
The Difference Between CPaaS Vs UCaaS
CPaaS is partially similar to UCaaS. Both CPaaS and UCaaS are delivered over the cloud and support communication capabilities such as cloud phone, team messaging and video conferencing, and cloud phone. But they have different features and functionalities.
UCaaS comes as a ready package and ready for use. All a business needs to do is install the UCaaS PaaS and deploy the system. CPaaS, on the other hand, is an open foundational platform. It allows business and developers to add their own communication features. This allows companies to expand and evolve, but without the need to develop a different back-end. CPaaS comes out as more of a “build-your-own” model, as it can combine various applications through modules and APIs.
Endnote
While CPaaS is designed to help improve collaboration among teams and clients, UCaaS benefits internal communications more. The customizable capability that is in CPaaS makes it more bent towards consumer-focus, which is what many businesses want. However, the choice of either platform depends on what an established or startup company wants.
Article by Austin Dease
