8×8 vs RingCentral: Price and Features Comparison 2023

Our latest round of testing showed that RingCentral is a better VoIP provider than 8×8– but only just, scoring 4.7 vs 4.6 overall. RingCentral and 8×8 are the two most scalable VoIP systems we've tested (both 4.9/5), but RingCentral has slightly better external connections and is better value for money. 8×8 has slightly better security features than RingCentral, though both would be suitable for healthcare or retail businesses handling customer data. Both score 5/5 for customer support.

Starting at $15, 8×8's first plan is cheaper than RingCentral‘s ($4.99 cheaper per user, per month). 8×8 is also best for Sales teams (4.7/5), with key features like call transcripts and call whisper to help with training staff. 8×8 is also a better fit for small businesses with under 50 employees thanks to inclusive domestic minutes and free international calling to a number of countries on its cheaper tier plans.

We've taken an in-depth look at plan pricing, integrations with popular software you're likely already using, and customer support options, to find out which VoIP service is the best fit for your business. If you're ready to sign up with a VoIP provider now, use our quote comparison tool to find the best deal for your business needs.

On this page:

• 8×8 vs RingCentral: Key Differences
• Best Value: RingCentral
• Best for Business Features: 8×8
• Best for Customer Support & Satisfaction: Tie
• Best for External Connections: RingCentral
• Best for Scalability: Tie
• Alternative VoIP Providers
• Our Verdict
• Frequently Asked Questions

8×8 vs RingCentral: Key Differences

When 8×8 and RingCentral step into the ring, it's going to be a close one — no one-round knockouts here. Both providers offer brilliant services, are competitively priced, and are regarded, rightly so, as premium VoIP solutions.

RingCentral offers unlimited domestic inbound and outbound minutes in the US and Canada on all its plans, whilst 8×8 offers unlimited inbound and outbound minutes to 14 countries on its Express and x2 plans, and 48 countries on the X4 plan upwards. 8×8 is the provider to go for if you're planning to make lots of international calls, and RingCentral if you're not.

8×8 doesn't offer spam prevention, while RingCentral does. However, 8×8 does offer custom call lists as standard, whereas RingCentral doesn't offer this on its plans outright, you'll need RingCentral Engage (an engagement platform offered by the provider). Conversely, 8×8 doesn't offer any analytics integrations, whilst with RingCentral, you'll have a choice of 57 analytics apps.

Of course, 8×8 and RingCentral are just two of the VoIP providers available to your business — for custom quotes from a wider selection of VoIP platforms, use our free price comparison tool.

Best for Value: RingCentral

RingCentral is, in short, better value for money (3.5 vs 2.5/5 for 8×8). Although 8×8 has a lower starting price of $15, a lot of the features that make it the better plan for sales teams and smaller businesses are on the more expensive plans, which go up quite steeply. 8×8's third plan, the X4 plan, is $44 per user per month – $10 more expensive than RingCentral's comparable Premium plan.

In fact, that Premium plan is available for just $34.99/user/month, which is only $2.99 more expensive than 8×8's X2 plan – and you'll have customizable SLAs for tracking individual performance, the ability to set up teams and departments, call monitoring, call whisper and call barge and various other features which aren't available on the X2 from 8×8.

Overall, there are just more features available on cheaper plans offered by RingCentral than 8×8, which is why it's better value for money.

Check out our RingCentral pricing guide or our 8×8 pricing guide, if you'd like a bit more information on either provider's plans, and remember, if you want to compare beyond  just RingCentral and 8×8 you can use our VoIP comparison tool to get quotes from across the industry.

Best for Business Features: 8×8

8×8 scores 4.9/5 for features, whilst RingCentral scores 4.4/5. Although they're pretty hard to separate for outbound comms, collaboration, and management features, 8×8 edges ahead of RingCentral when it comes to inbound comms features.

Outbound communication features: Tie

RingCentral has spam prevention, which 8×8 doesn't offer on any plans. However, both providers offer a great range of inbound comms features, including voicemail, customizable greetings, localized and toll-free numbers, company hours, and a virtual receptionist on all of their plans.

There are a couple of limitations on both provider's first couple of plans – RingCentral doesn't offer a Call queue or Ring groups on either the Essentials or Standard plan, whereas 8×8's Express plan doesn't have voicemail to text, call queues, or ring groups.

Inbound communication features: 8×8

8×8's first plan, the Express plan, offers custom call lists, call conferencing and E-fax, as well as external video calling – RingCentral's Essentials plan has none of these.

Also, with any of RingCentral's four plans, you need the “RingCentral Engage” platform, as mentioned before, for certain features, including predictive dialing, custom call lists, and an autodialer. There are also limits on features like external video calling, which 8×8 doesn't set – and this all lost RingCentral some marks.

8×8's more expensive plans have the full suite of outbound communications you'll need, but many of these, like a power dialer and predictive dialing, come at an additional cost.

Management and collaboration features: Tie

Neither 8×8 nor RingCentral offer many management features on their first plans, although RingCentral does have call transcripts and will let you set up teams and departments, whereas 8×8 won't.

8×8 has a call flow designer and analytics/reporting tools on its second paid plan, which RingCentral doesn't. Both add call recording and call transcripts to their second paid plans (Standard and X2).

For training features like call monitoring and call whisper, you'll need RingCentral's premium plan or 8×8's X4 plan – but RingCentral's is a lot cheaper, so it's worth finding out if its the best fit for you business.

Both providers have decent sets of collaboration features and offer team messaging and document sharing on all of their plans. However, RingCentral has no video conferencing option on its first paid plan, the Essentials plan, whereas 8×8 doesn't have a task management feature on its cheapest plans, and RingCentral has that on all its plans.

Best for Customer Support and Customer Satisfaction: Tie

Our research team found gave both providers a perfect score of 5/5 for customer support. This is because both providers have user forums and knowledge bases you can refer to if you're met with a problem, and offer live chat, email, and a phone line, as well as a 99.999% uptime guarantee SLA (service level agreement).

The only point of difference is there's no onboarding assistance on RingCentral's essentials plan. 8×8 provides “Customer Success Managers” to help with onboarding, but doesn't explicitly state whether these are rolled into the overall cost or require an additional charge to have assigned to your business.

Best for External Connections: RingCentral

For external connections, RingCentral scores 4.3/5 to 8×8's 4.2/5. Although 8×8 integrates with Salesforce, Pipedrive, Freshdesk, RingCentral has 96 CRM-related integrations. RingCentral integrates with Gmail and Outlook, whereas 8×8 only integrates with Outlook.

The external live chat integrations RingCentral offers are better than 8×8, and include WhatsApp, Facebook, Apple business chat, whereas 8×8 focuses on smaller apps like Fleep, Gitter, and Yammer. Internal live chat integrations on RingCentral are better as well, and include Google Hangouts and Slack. 8×8 focuses on Telegram and Webex.

Both providers integrate with the helpdesk providers (Salesforce, Zendesk etc.) and workspace apps (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365), and both offer single sign-on as a feature and a Microsoft Teams integration. Both RingCentral and 8×8 offer a mobile app (see 8×8's app below) on all of their plans.

Both providers also integrate with third-party desktop phones from Polycom, Cisco, Panasonic, and Yealink (see example images below). Neither provider offers first-party desktop phones.

Also, it's worth knowing that both providers have almost no software integrations on their first paid plans. RingCentral offers none at all and 8×8 only Outlook, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365.

Best for Scalability: Tie

Our research team awarded both providers a perfect score of 5/5 for customer support and found them equally scalable too. These VoIP providers were the two most scalable products we tested, both scoring 4.9/5 thanks to ample collaboration and management features, as well as software integrations galore and good security scores.

However, 8×8 is better for security, scoring 5/5, while RingCentral scores a (still solid) 4/5. On the other hand, RingCentral has a slightly better range of integrations (4.3/5), whilst 8×8 came closely behind with a score of 4.2/5.

Alternative VoIP Providers

If you're wondering how RingCentral compares to other providers, then we have the answer, as we've researched plenty of alternative VoIP providers, here at Tech.co. Vonage is the best for training features, and GoTo Connect is great for scaling. Ooma had a fantastic customer service experience too, so it's worth checking out the other major players on the market:

How Do We Compare VoIP Providers?

Here at Tech.co, our research team tests all the software, services, and systems we write about, based on a set of different criteria derived from market research and conversations with businesses using the products. If we don't have the data, we don't write about it. Categories we score the VoIP providers we test on include:

• Features available, and what plans they're offered on
• Security mechanisms built into the product
• Customer support options, and how useful they are
• External connections and available integrations (quantity and quality)
• Price of plans and subsequent value for money
• Customer score average derived from real user reviews
• Scalability of the product

Although we have commercial partnerships with some of the companies we talk about, this never affects our editorial independence or research team's scores, which are based entirely on our experiences with the product.