Metrigy published their inaugural CPaaS MetriRank report this month. The top spot went to Infobip.

Not Twilio. Not Sinch. Infobip.

If you’re not deep in the communications platform space, that result might surprise you. If you are, it probably doesn’t. I spent years working on the platform side at Google’s RCS Business Messaging team, and the CPaaS layer—the bit that sits on top of messaging protocols—was always the part of the ecosystem I found most fascinating. And the most misunderstood.

Let me break down what Metrigy measured, why the results look the way they do, and what this actually means for the messaging industry.

What MetriRank Actually Measures #

Most analyst reports in the communications space rely on revenue and market share. Metrigy’s approach is different. Their MetriRank methodology evaluates providers across multiple dimensions: financial strength, market share momentum, product mix breadth, customer sentiment, and (this is the interesting one) customer business success.

That last criterion is worth pausing on. It’s not asking “do customers like the platform?” It’s asking “do customers’ businesses improve when they use the platform?” That’s a fundamentally harder question—and answering it requires surveying end customers rather than just the CPaaS vendors themselves.

The five evaluation axes create a composite score that weights both provider capability and customer outcome. A company could have dominant market share but poor customer sentiment (think: a platform people use because they have to, not because they want to). MetriRank would penalize that.

Why Infobip Won #

Infobip’s top ranking reflects something I’ve observed from the other side of the table. When I was at Google managing the RBM developer ecosystem, I interacted with most of the major CPaaS providers. They were our distribution layer—the companies that integrated RCS Business Messaging into their omnichannel platforms and sold it to enterprises.

Infobip consistently stood out in three ways.

Geographic breadth. They operate in over 190 countries with direct carrier connections. This isn’t just a number on a slide. When an enterprise wants to send RCS messages in Southeast Asia or Latin America, Infobip often has the carrier relationships already in place. Twilio is strong in North America and Europe; Infobip covers the rest of the map with fewer intermediaries.

Channel diversity. The CPaaS market is moving from single-channel (just SMS, or just WhatsApp) to omnichannel. Enterprises want a single API that handles SMS, WhatsApp, Viber, RCS, email, and push notifications. Infobip’s platform covers all of these, and the integration between channels is genuinely smooth. I’ve seen demos where a conversation starts on SMS, escalates to RCS when the device supports it, and falls back to WhatsApp if RCS isn’t available. That kind of channel orchestration is hard to build—and harder to maintain.

Enterprise focus. Infobip’s go-to-market skews toward large enterprises rather than developers. This is the opposite of Twilio’s strategy (developer-first, land-and-expand). Metrigy’s methodology, which weights customer business success, naturally favors vendors whose customers are large enough to measure business outcomes. A startup sending 10,000 SMS messages per month can’t really evaluate “business success.” An enterprise sending 50 million per month can.

Where Twilio Stands #

Twilio not taking the top spot in an inaugural analyst report is a significant moment for the CPaaS industry. For years, Twilio was synonymous with CPaaS. They coined the category, dominated developer mindshare, and built the API-first model that everyone else copied.

But the market has matured, and maturity tends to favor breadth over developer experience. Twilio’s API is still the best in the industry for developers—cleaner documentation, better SDKs, faster time-to-first-API-call. In Metrigy’s framework, though, developer experience isn’t a standalone dimension. It’s folded into product mix and customer sentiment.

Twilio’s challenges in the MetriRank framework are structural. Their enterprise motion came later (the Segment acquisition, the Flex contact center push), and their geographic coverage outside North America and Europe relies more heavily on aggregator partnerships. These aren’t weaknesses in a developer-first strategy; they’re exactly the dimensions where a globally diversified competitor like Infobip pulls ahead.

I don’t think this ranking means Twilio is losing. I think it means the definition of “winning” in CPaaS is expanding beyond developer adoption.

The Broader CPaaS Landscape #

The MetriRank report includes several other providers—Sinch, Vonage (now Nexmo under Ericsson), Bandwidth, MessageBird, 8x8, among others. The full ranking reflects the consolidation wave that’s been hitting CPaaS for the past three years. Sinch acquired MessageBird. Ericsson absorbed Vonage. Bandwidth is expanding beyond voice into messaging.

What’s interesting is where RCS fits in all of this.

RCS Business Messaging is still a growth channel in the CPaaS mix. SMS remains the revenue backbone; WhatsApp Business API is the fastest-growing channel by message volume. RCS sits in a peculiar position: it’s the protocol that carriers and Google are pushing, it offers richer experiences than SMS (carousels, suggested actions, verified sender branding), but its addressable market is limited to Android devices with Google Messages.

From my time at Google, I know the RCS adoption numbers inside the carrier ecosystem are encouraging. But the CPaaS layer—the Infobips and Twilios—ultimately determines how many enterprises can actually use RCS. A protocol without distribution is just a spec.

The MetriRank report doesn’t break out performance by channel, which is a gap I’d love to see addressed in future editions. Knowing which CPaaS providers are strongest specifically in RCS delivery would be valuable for enterprise buyers evaluating the channel.

What the Rankings Miss #

No ranking system captures everything. Here are the dimensions I think Metrigy’s framework underweights:

Developer experience. As I mentioned, this isn’t a standalone axis. For enterprises with dedicated integration teams, this matters less. For mid-market companies where the developer IS the buyer, it’s everything. Twilio’s developer experience advantage doesn’t show up adequately in MetriRank’s composite.

Pricing transparency. CPaaS pricing is notoriously opaque. Per-message costs vary by country, channel, volume tier, and negotiated contract terms. Some providers publish transparent pricing (Twilio does this well); others require a sales conversation before you can even estimate costs. A ranking that incorporated pricing clarity would shift the standings.

Platform reliability. Uptime and deliverability metrics aren’t prominently featured in the MetriRank methodology, at least not in the published criteria. For messaging platforms, reliability IS the product. A 99.9% uptime that drops 0.1% of your authentication SMS messages is a business disaster at scale.

Innovation velocity. How quickly does a provider adopt new channels and capabilities? RCS support, WhatsApp Business API features, Apple Business Chat integration—the speed at which a CPaaS platform integrates new channels matters for forward-looking enterprise buyers.

What This Means for the Industry #

The fact that Metrigy created a CPaaS-specific ranking methodology at all signals industry maturation. When a market is young, everyone competes on the same basic capability (can you send an SMS via API?). When analysts start building multi-dimensional ranking frameworks, it means the market has enough depth for differentiation.

For enterprises evaluating CPaaS providers, the MetriRank is a useful starting point. But I’d encourage any buyer to weight the dimensions based on their own priorities. If you’re a developer-led team building a startup, Twilio’s developer experience might matter more than Infobip’s geographic reach. If you’re a multinational enterprise deploying messaging across 40 countries, the MetriRank’s composite might align well with your needs.

For the RCS ecosystem specifically, the CPaaS layer’s maturation is a positive signal. Enterprise demand for programmable messaging channels is growing, and RCS stands to benefit as the channel that offers the richest native messaging experience on Android. The CPaaS providers ranked in this report are the ones who’ll ultimately make or break RCS’s commercial adoption.

I’ll be watching Metrigy’s future editions closely. The inaugural ranking established a baseline; the interesting story will be how the standings shift as the market continues to consolidate and new channels gain traction.