Telephone Alternatives
Telephone is described as 'allows you to make phone calls over the Internet or your company network. If your phone line supports SIP protocol, you can use it on your Mac instead of a physical phone anywhere you have a decent network connection' and is an app in the social & communications category. There are more than 25 alternatives to Telephone for a variety of platforms, including iPhone, Windows, Android, Mac and iPad. The best alternative is Signal, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Telephone are Jami, Wire, Zulip and Linphone.
Telephone alternatives are mainly Video Calling Apps but may also be Instant Messengers or Group Chat Apps. Filter by these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Telephone.
- Free • Open Source
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
Signal is a messaging app with an unexpected focus on privacy, combined with all the features expected from a modern IM app. Signal has received a lot of praise from all around the world for its security and privacy-respecting technologies.
Signal vs Telephone opinions
It can't connect to your pbx, the whole point of a softphone.
SethSignal is not a SIP client
- Free • Open Source
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
Jami (formerly GNU Ring, SFLphone) positions itself as a potential free Skype replacement
- Free Personal • Open Source
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
- Self-Hosted
- F-Droid
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
Wire is the most secure collaboration platform featuring messenger, voice, video, conference calls, file-sharing, and external collaboration –all protected by the most secure end-to-end-encryption.
- Free Personal • Open Source
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- BSD
- iPad
- Self-Hosted
Zulip is a group chat app in which messages are threaded by topic, helping you have long-running, organized conversations.
- Free • Open Source
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
- Xfce
Linphone is one of the most famous open source softphones in the world. It is fully SIP-based, for all calling, presence and IM features.
- Freemium • Proprietary
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
Video conversations with up to 8 people in your browser - no downloads, no login. Just name your channel and you are on. Works in all modern browsers, even mobile.
Empathy is a messaging program which supports text, voice, video chat, and file transfers over many different protocols. You can tell it about your accounts on all those services and do all your chatting within one application.
Discontinued
Empathy is currently unmaintained. Last version, 3.25, released in August 2017, can be still downloaded from the official website.
- Free • Open Source
- Windows
- PortableApps.com
MicroSIP is a free portable SIP softphone for Windows based on PJSIP stack.
Desktop client for Google Hangouts.
- Free Personal • Proprietary
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Online
- Android
- iPhone
- Windows Phone
Zoiper IAX & SIP multilanguage and multiplatform (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X) softphone is a VoIP soft client, meant to work with any IP-based communications systems and infrastructure.
