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How to migrate from Telesign to Sinch

A developer's guide to moving your messaging integration from Telesign to Sinch, covering channel coverage, compliance, request-format changes, and a step-by-step migration checklist.

Telesign is a digital identity and programmable communications platform offering SMS, RCS, voice, WhatsApp, Viber and email APIs. Sinch is a cloud communications platform covering messaging, voice and email. On the messaging.dev Score, Telesign rates 70/100 and Sinch 92/100; this guide covers what actually changes at the API level when you move between them.

What you gain and what you lose

Channels. Every channel Telesign offers, Sinch also offers, so you lose nothing: SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, Viber, voice and email all carry over. You additionally gain MMS, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Apple Messages for Business, none of which Telesign exposes.

Compliance. Identical on both: GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2 and HIPAA are all covered by each provider.

Data residency. Both run US and EU servers. Sinch adds explicit data-residency choice plus APAC, Australia and Brazil regions; Telesign offers neither region choice nor additional regions.

Pricing. Telesign uses pay-as-you-go per-message/per-transaction pricing with volume-based enterprise contracts and does not publish per-message rates. Sinch is also pay-as-you-go, with volume and committed-use pricing, and publishes a starting rate of roughly $0.0075 per US SMS segment (plus carrier fees). Both include free developer credit.

SDKs, sandbox and protocols. Both ship Java, Python, C#, Node.js and PHP SDKs and rate “high” on docs quality. Telesign additionally offers Ruby; Sinch does not. Sinch provides a sandbox test environment (Telesign has none) and supports SMPP and SMTP alongside REST, where Telesign is REST-only. Sinch publishes a 99.95% uptime SLA; Telesign publishes none.

How the request format differs

Telesign quickstart:

curl -X POST https://rest-ww.telesign.com/v1/messaging \
  -u "CUSTOMER_ID:API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" \
  -d "phone_number=15551212&message=Your message here.&message_type=ARN"

Sinch quickstart:

curl -X POST 'https://us.sms.api.sinch.com/xms/v1/YOUR_SERVICE_PLAN_ID/batches' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"from":"+15005550006","to":["+15551234567"],"body":"Hello from Sinch"}'

Three things change:

  • Endpoint. Telesign posts to a single fixed URL, https://rest-ww.telesign.com/v1/messaging. Sinch posts to a region-specific host with your service plan baked into the path: https://us.sms.api.sinch.com/xms/v1/{service_plan_id}/batches.
  • Authentication. Telesign uses HTTP Basic auth — Customer ID as username, API key as password (-u "CUSTOMER_ID:API_KEY"). Sinch uses a Bearer token in the Authorization header.
  • Payload. Telesign sends form-urlencoded fields: the recipient is phone_number, the body is message, plus a message_type. Sinch sends JSON: the recipient becomes to (an array, so batches are native), the body becomes body, and you must supply an explicit sender in from. Switch your Content-Type from application/x-www-form-urlencoded to application/json accordingly.

Migration checklist

  1. Create a Sinch account, then copy your API token and service plan ID from the dashboard — see how to start with Sinch.
  2. Map the request fields: phone_number → to[], message → body, and add a from sender; drop message_type.
  3. Re-point your sending code to the Sinch base URL, choosing the us or eu host to match your residency needs, and swap Basic auth for the Bearer token.
  4. Re-test in the Sinch sandbox before sending live traffic.
  5. Update your delivery-status webhooks and callbacks to consume Sinch’s format.
  6. Run both providers in parallel, comparing delivery on real traffic.
  7. Cut over once Sinch delivery matches, then retire the Telesign credentials.

Watch out for

  • Country coverage drops. Telesign lists 230 countries; Sinch lists 150. Verify your destination countries are covered before cutover.
  • No Ruby SDK. If your integration uses Telesign’s Ruby SDK, Sinch offers no Ruby equivalent — you would call REST directly or switch languages.
  • Region lives in the hostname. The default us. host stores data in the US; use the EU host if you need EU residency, since the base URL — not just an account setting — selects the region.
  • Rates carry carrier fees. Sinch’s ~$0.0075 starting price is per US SMS segment and excludes carrier fees; confirm your real per-country pricing.

For a full attribute-by-attribute breakdown, see Sinch vs Telesign.

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