RECOMMENDATIONS Best Softphone for Mac OS X

[ncg]

I've tried a few softphones on Mac and I'm not having much luck. Does anyone have any recommendations please for a small distributed team all using Mac OS? We are happy to pay for a reliable client.

I would also consider a hosted WebRTC client if such a thing existed.

Features I would like are: Busy lamp fields / presence indicators; Call transferring; Contacts sync with the Mac OS X app. Ideally I would also like it to have a range of places to look up numbers on incoming calls, so I can get shared company customer lists into the look up somehow. It would be fab if it could screen pop - for example passing a website URL to my browser including the Caller ID number.

Here's a summary so far:

Telephone App - Free on the App Store and Open Source. Few features, simple UI but clutters the screen with discarded windows after calls end. Drops 50% of calls when transferring. (Your mileage may vary... ...and hopefully does.)

Yate client - Free from their website. Clunky UI ignores mac conventions. I can;t send this out to non tech colleagues. Colleague told me she could hear noises in test call - like a metronome. Quickly discarded.

Blink Pro - £49.99 in App Store. Crashes on incoming phone calls, I think whilst trying to do an address book lookup. Real shame - looks good otherwise. Would work (I think) without address book integration, and they offer a plug in so you can dial from Mac OS Contacts App. But that means no Caller Line ID look up. I've spent too many hours fiddling already. Next. Incomplete instructions on their website. I feel ripped off.

X-Lite - no call transferring

Bria 4.0 - $49.99 from their website. Forums report crashes in version 3 if there are too many contacts syncing. Haven't tried it yet. They don't offer a trial version.

 

[ncg]

To continue...

iSoftphone has a fairly polished UI although in the nasty design of a phone. They've clearly put some effort in. SOme poor reviews on the App Store, but none since v. 4.0 launched in Feb 2016.

£34.99 on App Store, but full featured 30 day trial from Xnet's website. Testing now...

 

[henry]

Aren't some of the desired features / crash problems backbone dependent?

What server/service do you use?

 

[ncg]

Aren't some of the desired features / crash problems backbone dependent?

What server/service do you use?

Possibly some are, but the service was rock solid for three years previously using a mixture of Snom and Grandstream handsets.

We first encountered problems transferring calls when we moved to the 'Telephone' app.

 

[henry]

Have you tried Zoiper?
http://www.zoiper.com/en/voip-softphone/download/zoiper3#mac

 

[ncg]

Have you tried Zoiper?
http://www.zoiper.com/en/voip-softphone/download/zoiper3#mac

Not yet - It's another paid for option so I am testing one at a time, and Bria had better comments on line.

 

[wardmundy]

Telephone app has worked flawlessly for us. A single mouse click to close out a call doesn't seem like much of an imposition. And it supports multiple, simultaneous SIP connections. We've never had problems with call transfers. That sounds more like a DTMF problem with your Asterisk setup.

 

[ncg]

Telephone app has worked flawlessly for us. A single mouse click to close out a call doesn't seem like much of an imposition. And it supports multiple, simultaneous SIP connections. We've never had problems with call transfers. That sounds more like a DTMF problem with your Asterisk setup.

That's interesting. We can't make it reliably transfer calls, whereas our Snoms and Grandstreams were 100% reliable on the same network.

 

[ncg]

In case this is useful to anyone we have tried Bria 4.0 on two Macs. It has presence (via XMPP in our case) and works reliably on one Mac. The other crashes continually and is un-useable. Most people are still on Telephone, and we're dropping too many calls as we transfer them.

Anyone other alternative ideas would be helpful!

 

[wardmundy]

If you're using Incredible PBX for XiVO, you don't need a softphone at all. You can use WebRTC with your browser.

 

[ncg]

Thank you Ward. This looks awesome - but not something I'll have running by Monday!

Does using WebRTC means all the possible NAT/SIP issues are avoided?

 

[wardmundy]

Correct.

 

[ncg]

So finally we have a winner: https://www.bria-x.com

We've been able to use the basic routing tables our ISP provides with the numbers / SIP trunking, and Bria X to totally avoid setting up a PBX, and still have good functionality with fewer risk points and less complexity. (Less fun too though!)