I will weigh in here a bit. Asterisk has a lot of community support for the simple stuff, and a lot of docs for many of the more advanced stuff. You will run into a paywall if you want to do anything fancy with some things. Scalability isn't there as much. You have good distro support of asterisk too, and you get some lib flexibility, somewhat.
FreeSWITCH has much better performance and scalability, and as far as I can tell they support a lot more platforms if that's your thing. I haven't checked if Asterisk has caught up at all on that front. Where FreeSWITCH gets into trouble is their community is much more "rtfm" and less hand-holdy than Asterisk, though several of the community are more than friendly, and they REALLY know their stuff for the most part. Documentation is largely a wiki (though they have a book that's slightly outdated but very applicable, and I recommend it). They use their own libs for the most part and you will be best to compile your own from scratch (takes a bit), but I never found that to be a problem. You can even stick on the latest git master branch and they keep it quite stable. Some bugs that have crept in tend to affect edge cases, and get fixed very quickly. The biggest difference to me is that Asterisk is a PBX, and FreeSWITCH is a softswitch. You can flexibility to do things more than just a PBX if you want with FreeSWITCH. You can run either on your OpenWRT box, last I checked. They both suck for anything more than your home on that platform, but it's there. FreeSWITCH can easily be extended via modular addons to do all sorts of things with audio streams, and they have a great deal of commercial entities using them for bigger projects, so interop is nice for a lot of SIP Trunk providers. Oh, and you will run into trouble with protocols a bit. Asterisk has really always pushed their IAX protocols, where people in the rest of the industry are standardizing on SIP (as much as they can). Both protocols have their strengths and weaknesses, but it doesn't matter really because SIP is king hands down in usage. If you want to talk to other boxes (you do) you should probably stick with SIP purely. Asterisk can still do that, but it's less encouraged in many places. That may be making it sound like a worse problem than it is, and I'm not trying to, but the problem exists in some small form just the same. Anyway, that's my 2 cents. -Tod Hansmann On 2/22/2013 10:16 AM, S. Dale Morrey wrote: > So no major uptime or security differences? > > On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Steve Alligood <[email protected]> > wrote: >> Your biggest difference is that asterisk has been around a long time, has a >> lot of community support, and a ton of add-on type apps. >> >> Freeswitch is a lessons learned from asterisk type of thing, redesigned from >> the ground up, makes more sense under the hood if you do a lot of custom >> work with it, etc, but a lot less add ons, community knowledge, etc. >> >> -Steve >> >> On Feb 22, 2013, at 10:11 AM, S. Dale Morrey wrote: >> >>> Is there a relatively recent comparison somewhere of these two products? >>> I'd be interested in learning the strengths and weaknesses of each. >>> >>> Thanks! >>> >>> /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
