Commercial SMS Gateways

Commercial gateways may be better suited for your project if you have higher volume messaging. Below are two options to do this.

Existing Gateways in CommCare

CommCare has a set number of existing custom gateways in its system that are only available in certain countries.

To see a full list of available gateways, go to Messaging -> SMS Connectivity in your CommCareHQ project space. Within the available gateways, we recommend:

• Leveraging some of the bigger gateways due to their customer support. A good example is Twilio.

• The MOBILE_BACKEND_TEST is also a good gateway option for testing.

Please note that Dimagi does not create new custom gateways upon request, and we cannot guarantee the reliability of gateways as they operate independently of CommCare.

Open

Set up a Custom Gateway

Alternatively, you can establish a relationship with a commercial SMS gateway service provider that provides the local regional coverage that you require. These include both international service providers that offer services in many regions, as well as local service providers who specialize in a single region.

Please note that this approach requires more technical expertise.

Depending on the chosen service provider, these may require adding a new SMS Backend to the CommCare HQ open source codebase.

For information on how a developer can contribute to this codebase, see https://github.com/dimagi/commcare-hq/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.rst .

Here is more information about CommCare Messaging APIs: SMS APIs