Best Session Border Controllers (SBC) of 2025

Use the comparison tool below to compare the top Session Border Controllers (SBC) on the market. You can filter results by user reviews, pricing, features, platform, region, support options, integrations, and more.

Overview of Session Border Controllers

Session Border Controllers, or SBCs, are like traffic cops for voice and video calls over the internet. They sit at the edge of networks, making sure that calls get where they’re supposed to go while keeping out anything suspicious. If you're using VoIP or connecting different networks with different rules, the SBC makes sure those systems can talk to each other without issues. It also hides internal network details so outsiders can’t see how things are set up behind the scenes.

What really sets SBCs apart is how they protect and manage voice traffic. They block shady activity like spam calls or hackers trying to sneak in, and they keep conversations private with encryption. On top of that, they help smooth out call quality by managing bandwidth and fixing common issues like lag or dropped audio. For companies moving to cloud phones or SIP trunking, having an SBC is pretty much a must—it keeps calls flowing smoothly and securely, even when juggling multiple services and platforms.

Features of Session Border Controllers

1. Hiding Internal Network Details: SBCs act like a mask for your VoIP setup. When a call goes through, they make sure outsiders can’t see your internal IP addresses or the structure of your system. This "network camouflage" keeps hackers guessing and helps prevent them from figuring out how your system is built.
2. Making Different Systems Work Together: Not all VoIP devices or platforms speak the same dialect of SIP or use the same media formats. SBCs translate between these variations on the fly. They adjust headers, tweak codecs, and even bridge SIP and other protocols like H.323. This ensures that everyone—from legacy systems to the latest cloud-based apps—can talk to each other without missing a beat.
3. Regulating Who Gets In: Think of the SBC as the bouncer at your VoIP club. It checks credentials, blocks unauthorized users, and limits access to only trusted sources. Whether it's authenticating devices or working with backend systems to validate users, the SBC keeps bad actors out.
4. Helping VoIP Traffic Cross NAT and Firewalls: Without help, SIP and RTP traffic can get stuck behind firewalls or NAT (Network Address Translation) devices. SBCs act like guides, helping this traffic navigate those barriers by rewriting IP addresses and ports where needed. That’s key for remote users and mobile workers who aren’t inside the company’s local network.
5. Blocking Spam Calls and Floods: SBCs can spot suspicious behavior like call flooding or repeated failed connection attempts. Once something shady is detected, the SBC can shut it down—dropping packets, banning IPs, or rate-limiting the traffic to protect the service.
6. Ensuring Voice Quality Stays Solid: Voice quality can take a hit from jitter, packet loss, or latency. SBCs keep tabs on those metrics and can reroute calls or limit how many are active at once to prevent overload. Some can even adjust buffer sizes or mark traffic for priority handling, helping the most time-sensitive data get through without delay.
7. Routing Calls Based on Real-Time Conditions: Modern SBCs do more than just pass along calls—they make smart choices about where to send them. Whether it’s choosing the cheapest provider, avoiding an overloaded route, or steering around a down system, they dynamically pick the best path for each session.
8. Encrypting Conversations: If privacy is a concern (and it should be), SBCs support encryption for both signaling (via TLS) and media (using SRTP). That means eavesdroppers can’t tap into calls or change messages as they pass through public or unsecured networks.
9. Creating Logs and Reports for Each Call: Every call that passes through an SBC can be logged in detail—who called who, when, how long it lasted, whether the call quality was good, and more. This is essential for troubleshooting, billing, audits, and meeting compliance standards.
10. Converting Media on the Fly: Sometimes two sides of a call use different codecs. Instead of dropping the call or forcing the endpoints to support every format, the SBC can step in and convert the audio (and sometimes video) in real time. It’s like having an interpreter who can translate between languages instantly.
11. Failover and Disaster Recovery Support: When something breaks—like a router, server, or entire data center—SBCs with high availability setups can switch over to backups without dropping calls. Some even support session replication so calls in progress aren’t interrupted.
12. Custom Rules and Policies: Want to block international calls after hours? Need to restrict access by region or device type? SBCs let you define policies that control how, when, and where calls are allowed to go. You can tailor rules to fit your business logic or regulatory requirements.
13. Balancing the Load: Too much traffic on one server? No problem. SBCs can spread calls across multiple servers or data centers so nothing gets overwhelmed. This helps maintain call quality and service reliability even during peak times.
14. Helping with Compliance and Legal Requests: For service providers and larger enterprises, there may be legal obligations to support lawful intercept or call tracing. Many SBCs come equipped with interfaces that can securely hand over call data or mirror streams when legally required.

Why Are Session Border Controllers Important?

Session border controllers play a crucial role in keeping voice and video calls over IP networks running smoothly and securely. Without them, businesses could run into serious problems—like call quality issues, dropped connections, or worse, security breaches. SBCs act like a security guard and traffic cop rolled into one, sitting at the edge of a network to monitor, filter, and manage every call that passes through. They make sure the systems on both sides of a call can talk to each other properly, even if they’re using different protocols or formats. On top of that, they help prevent unwanted interruptions from hackers, spammers, or poorly configured systems.

Beyond security and compatibility, SBCs also give IT teams control over how calls are routed and handled. They can prioritize certain types of traffic, manage bandwidth, and make real-time decisions based on rules that fit the needs of the business. Whether it’s making sure remote workers can connect reliably, enabling secure links to cloud communication platforms, or keeping sensitive conversations private, SBCs are the unsung heroes behind modern VoIP setups. In a world where communication is mission-critical, having a reliable SBC in place isn’t just nice to have—it’s a must.

Why Use Session Border Controllers?

1. Defending Your Network Like a Bodyguard: SBCs are like the bouncers at the door of your communications system. They check every incoming and outgoing SIP request and block anything sketchy—think of call spoofing, brute force attacks, or people trying to snoop on calls. Without an SBC, your VoIP infrastructure is pretty much exposed to the open internet.
2. Making Different Systems Speak the Same Language: One of the most frustrating things in VoIP is trying to get systems from different vendors to work together. SBCs are like interpreters—they help mismatched systems understand each other by tweaking SIP messages, adjusting codecs, and smoothing out signaling differences.
3. Keeping Conversations Flowing When NAT and Firewalls Get in the Way: Most corporate networks have NAT devices and firewalls that weren’t built with real-time communication in mind. SBCs handle the behind-the-scenes magic that lets voice and video traffic move through those barriers without breaking the call.
4. Handling Unexpected Call Surges Like a Pro: Whether it’s a marketing campaign, a seasonal rush, or just peak hours, SBCs help manage high volumes of calls without overwhelming your infrastructure. They apply smart rules to throttle, prioritize, or reroute traffic so that important calls don’t get dropped.
5. Saving You Money Without Sacrificing Performance: By compressing media streams or using smarter routing, SBCs can actually cut down on bandwidth costs. They also let you do more with fewer SIP trunks through load balancing and trunk aggregation, which means you’re not paying for unused capacity.
6. Separating What’s Yours from What’s Theirs: SBCs draw a clean line between your internal systems and external providers or customers. This helps with network segmentation, makes it easier to manage your environment, and prevents outside traffic from poking around where it doesn’t belong.
7. Creating Rules to Control How Calls Are Handled: If you want certain calls to always go through a specific provider, or limit international dialing after business hours, the SBC has your back. It lets you define and enforce detailed call policies based on caller ID, location, time, or other custom rules.
8. Letting You Record Calls or Route Them Through Monitoring Tools: Need to record customer service calls or audit internal communications? SBCs can fork or redirect media streams so that calls go through the appropriate monitoring or compliance systems without disrupting the original session.
9. Helping You Stay on the Right Side of the Law: Whether it's GDPR in Europe, HIPAA in the U.S., or other regional regulations, SBCs help you stay compliant by encrypting traffic, logging sessions, and providing tools to support lawful intercept requirements if needed.
10. Fixing Voice Quality Before Users Even Notice: If you’ve ever had a garbled or choppy call, you know how frustrating it can be. SBCs work in real-time to correct jitter, packet loss, and latency. They’re not miracle workers—but they do improve the quality enough to keep your team and customers from pulling their hair out.
11. Acting as a Safety Net During Failures: No one likes downtime, especially when it affects phone calls. SBCs can reroute traffic if a trunk goes down, or fail over to backup systems automatically. It’s like having a contingency plan baked right into your call flow.
12. Making Cloud Migration Less Painful: Transitioning to cloud-based communication platforms? SBCs can serve as a gateway between your on-prem systems and cloud services. They help you roll out hybrid setups at your own pace, without forcing an all-or-nothing switch.

What Types of Users Can Benefit From Session Border Controllers?

• Mid-Sized Companies Expanding Globally: These are the businesses growing beyond a single location and trying to link up remote teams, overseas branches, or new offices. SBCs help them keep voice and video traffic secure, clear, and uninterrupted — even when jumping between different networks or dealing with carriers across borders.
• Cloud-Based Communications Platforms: If you're running a platform that delivers communication services over the cloud (think VoIP, messaging, or virtual meetings), SBCs help you handle a ton of different devices and networks talking to each other. They smooth out protocol differences and keep calls protected from outside interference.
• Hospitals & Medical Networks: In healthcare, privacy and uptime aren’t optional. Clinics, hospitals, and multi-site medical systems benefit from SBCs because they lock down sensitive calls, support encrypted patient communications, and connect legacy phone systems to newer tech like telemedicine platforms.
• Remote-Heavy Workforces: Companies with tons of remote or hybrid workers need a secure way to manage voice and video calls across home networks, mobile apps, and office systems. SBCs handle firewall and NAT issues, make sure remote connections are stable, and block sketchy traffic before it causes trouble.
• Universities and School Districts: Schools and higher education institutions that offer distance learning or use VoIP for administration can use SBCs to keep things running smoothly. They help control bandwidth, prevent call disruptions, and provide a safe communication line between campuses, students, and staff.
• Call Centers That Handle High Volume: Whether it’s sales or support, call centers deal with floods of calls every day. SBCs give them control over how those calls flow, protect them from SIP-based attacks, and help keep call quality consistent even when things get hectic. They’re also useful for integrating voice with CRM or analytics tools.
• Government and Defense Agencies: These users often have tight security rules and lots of legacy infrastructure. SBCs help bridge old and new systems, enforce encryption, and meet compliance requirements without risking performance or uptime. They're crucial for secure internal and external communication.
• Tech Startups in the Communications Space: Small but fast-growing tech companies building communications tools (like messaging apps, SIP-based services, or conferencing tools) benefit from using SBCs early. They allow for secure scaling, better call quality, and quick compatibility with different devices and platforms.
• Retail Brands with Dozens (or Hundreds) of Locations: Chains with lots of stores — grocery brands, fashion outlets, convenience franchises — use SBCs to bring voice systems under one roof. It’s cheaper, more secure, and allows for call routing between locations without using the public internet as the backbone.
• Hotels, Resorts, and Casinos: Hospitality venues that offer in-room calling, concierge services, and reservations via phone systems need stable, secure connections. SBCs help filter and control traffic, protect against toll fraud, and bridge the gap between traditional PBXs and newer VoIP solutions.
• VoIP Resellers and Hosted PBX Providers: These players deliver phone services to small businesses or end-users, and SBCs help ensure reliable service. They clean up jitter, packet loss, and call setup issues while shielding the backend from SIP attacks or overuse.

How Much Do Session Border Controllers Cost?

Figuring out the price of a session border controller really comes down to what your business needs. If you’re running a small operation and just need something basic to manage VoIP traffic and keep calls secure, you could get away with spending a few hundred bucks for a software-based option. But as soon as you start dealing with more call volume, multiple locations, or need extra bells and whistles like encryption, protocol conversion, or call routing, the price tag climbs. Bigger setups, especially those meant for enterprises or telecom providers, can hit the five-figure range without much trouble.

What’s easy to overlook is that the sticker price isn’t the whole story. You’ve also got to factor in licensing costs, ongoing support, and potential hardware if you’re not going the virtual route. Some companies choose cloud-hosted SBCs, which means monthly fees instead of one big upfront charge—but that can add up too. At the end of the day, it’s about balancing what you need today with how much room you’ll need to grow tomorrow. The key is not to overpay for features you won’t use, but also not to cut corners and end up replacing the whole thing in a year.

Session Border Controllers Integrations

Session border controllers can work alongside a variety of software systems that handle voice and video communication. They often team up with SIP trunking services, cloud phone systems, and enterprise telephony platforms to manage how voice calls travel between networks. This setup helps keep calls secure, makes sure they’re routed correctly, and smooths out any differences between protocols or codecs. Software that handles call routing, voicemail, conferencing, or even virtual meeting rooms can tie into an SBC to ensure everything flows efficiently and securely between internal networks and the outside world.

SBCs also fit into broader IT ecosystems by connecting with security tools, analytics platforms, and network management software. For example, they can send call quality data to monitoring tools or flag suspicious traffic to threat detection systems. Integration with identity management or authentication software adds another layer of control, especially in environments where call access needs to be locked down. Even billing systems or customer service platforms in contact centers may link up with an SBC to log call records or support regulatory compliance. In short, any software that touches voice traffic or network security can usually find a way to plug into an SBC to enhance performance and control.

Risks To Consider With Session Border Controllers

• Performance Bottlenecks Under Load: SBCs aren’t invincible. If they're not sized or configured correctly, they can become the choke point during high call volumes or during a traffic spike. That means calls could get dropped, fail to connect, or suffer from major quality issues like jitter or latency. It’s a tech version of trying to shove everyone through one exit at a concert — chaos.
• Misconfigured Security Settings: It’s surprisingly common for SBCs to have ports left open or access controls left too loose. A poorly set up SBC can act like an open door for attackers, exposing the voice infrastructure to everything from call hijacking to SIP message tampering.
• Overdependence on a Single Vendor: If your SBC setup relies entirely on one vendor, you’re at their mercy for licensing, support, pricing, and roadmap decisions. If that vendor changes course or runs into issues, you’re stuck. It also limits your options when integrating new platforms or tools.
• Failure to Keep Up with Protocol Changes: SIP and VoIP protocols evolve — and fast. If your SBC doesn't stay in sync with updates or standards, compatibility problems show up. That can cause dropped calls, failed interoperability with newer gear, or weird bugs that take ages to troubleshoot.
• Lack of Visibility Into Encrypted Traffic: While encryption is critical for protecting conversations, it can also become a blind spot. SBCs that can’t inspect encrypted SIP signaling or RTP streams may fail to detect suspicious patterns or voice threats hiding inside what looks like legitimate traffic.
• Licensing Constraints: Some SBCs charge per session, per feature, or based on throughput. If your business scales up quickly or hits a traffic burst, you might find yourself either overpaying or hitting hard caps that block calls. That's a financial and operational pain.
• Poor Integration with Legacy Systems: Older PBX systems or custom-built platforms don’t always play nicely with newer SBCs. If your network is a patchwork of old and new, an SBC can actually complicate things rather than smooth them out — especially if protocol translation isn’t handled well.
• Delayed Patch Management: Security updates for SBCs can lag behind or be ignored in busy IT environments. That’s dangerous. VoIP vulnerabilities are routinely exploited by bad actors looking for backdoors, and a missed patch could leave your voice systems wide open.
• Overhead in Management and Monitoring: Some SBCs require a steep learning curve or overly manual processes for updates, policy changes, and troubleshooting. This drains time and resources, especially for smaller IT teams that already have too much on their plate.
• False Sense of Security: Just because an SBC is in place doesn’t mean the network is locked down. Teams sometimes assume the SBC handles “all security,” leading them to neglect other important layers like firewalls, intrusion detection, or endpoint protection.
• Inconsistent Quality Across Distributed Deployments: For companies with a global footprint, rolling out SBCs across different sites or cloud regions can lead to inconsistent performance. Network conditions, routing logic, or local SIP variations can all affect quality — and users notice.
• Failure to Support Regulatory Requirements: Whether it’s e911 location services in the U.S. or GDPR-related logging in Europe, some SBCs aren’t equipped (or aren’t configured) to comply. That could result in legal exposure or penalties, especially for industries like finance or healthcare.

Questions To Ask Related To Session Border Controllers

1. Can the SBC scale with my future growth plans without overhauling the whole setup? You want to know if the solution you're looking at will grow with you. Maybe you're a midsize business now, but you're eyeing expansion. You don’t want to rip everything out and start over just because your call volume doubled. Ask about licensing flexibility, hardware vs. virtual scaling options, and how easy it is to increase capacity when the time comes.
2. What does this SBC actually do to protect my communications from outside threats? SBCs are on the front lines, and if they’re weak, so is your whole voice network. Don’t settle for “it’s secure.” Ask exactly how it handles denial-of-service attacks, fraud attempts, or unwanted traffic. Does it block malformed SIP packets? Does it prevent toll fraud? Can it hide your internal topology? These details matter.
3. How well does it play with my existing gear and services? Not every SBC works smoothly with every PBX, unified communications platform, or SIP trunk provider. Ask if it supports the platforms you already use. Get specific. Do they have documented interoperability with your VoIP system? Will you need additional gear or workarounds to make it all function properly?
4. What kind of visibility and troubleshooting tools come with it? Things break. Calls drop. Audio gets weird. You’ll want solid tools to help you figure out what’s going on when things go south. Ask about real-time monitoring, logs, diagnostics, and alerts. Will your network team be staring at cryptic logs or can they get actionable insights fast?
5. How is voice quality handled when the network gets stressed? Sure, it sounds fine on a good day—but what about during peak traffic, or when there’s packet loss? Ask how the SBC handles jitter, latency, or congestion. Does it prioritize voice traffic? Can it detect and adjust for quality issues on the fly?
6. Is it better as a physical appliance or as software I can virtualize? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. Some setups benefit from hardware-based SBCs, especially if you're dealing with very high throughput or strict compliance rules. Others might prefer virtual SBCs for the flexibility and ease of deployment. Ask about both options, and consider where you’re headed—not just where you are.
7. Does the vendor offer fast, knowledgeable support when things go wrong? Tech hiccups are inevitable. You need to know whether support will be there when you need it. Are they 24/7? Do they actually know SBCs inside and out, or will you be stuck explaining your setup every time you call? Ask for SLA details and customer references if you can get them.
8. What kind of encryption standards does it support—and is it configurable? It’s not just about whether the SBC supports encryption, but how. Can you choose what protocols it uses, like TLS for signaling or SRTP for media? Does it support mutual TLS for enhanced security between peers? This is especially critical in regulated industries where compliance is a big deal.
9. Can it handle media transcoding, and what’s the performance impact? Different devices and providers may use different codecs. Your SBC needs to be able to translate those without choking the system. Ask which codecs it supports and how many concurrent transcodings it can handle before performance tanks. You don’t want to find out the hard way that it buckles under load.
10. What’s involved in deploying and managing it day-to-day? Is setup straightforward or going to take weeks of engineering time? What about maintenance—can your team handle it, or will it need special expertise? Ask about the UI, API availability, automation support, and whether firmware updates are smooth or disruptive. Daily management should be practical, not a burden.