11 Best Business VoIP Providers

The best VoIP phone provider on the market is RingCentral. It stands out from the crowd thanks to its strong set of features, customer support, scalability, and functionality when working with existing infrastructure.

Here at Tech.co, our dedicated team of researchers live and breathe VoIP phone systems, and help us to help businesses like yours make the right decision. Our impartial reviews and ratings are based on independent analysis.

We've also developed a comparison questionnaire that can deliver you bespoke pricing quotes for your exact needs, from the leading VoIP providers on the market, and help you make the right decision.

Of course, you might be worrying that now is not the time to be investing in business-specific hardware and software. However, with much of the workforce staying at home, a distributed, cloud-based VoIP system is one of the best ways of ensuring your team will be able to work as effectively from home as in the office, whether they're in sales or support.

In this guide:

• Top 10 VoIP Providers
• How to Choose the Best VoIP Provider
• How We Rate VoIP Providers
• How to Get Started
• Advantages of VoIP
• FAQs

Top 10 VoIP Providers

Our in-house experts have conducted extensive research into the VoIP industry and have examined the top VoIP providers based on their service, value, customer support, and features offered. The reviews below are based on this independent analysis, and were last updated in: December, 2022.

The best VoIP providers are:

1. RingCentral – best overall VoIP provider
2. 8×8 – best for small businesses
3. Zoom Phone– best value for money
4. Vonage Business Solutions – best training features
5. GoTo Connect – great for scaling
6. Ooma – great for customer experience
7. Nextiva – great for professional services
8. Net2Phone – great for international businesses
9. NUACOM – best for customer satisfaction
10. Dialpad – a low-cost option for startups
11. Google Voice – most secure choice for small teams

RingCentral

Best overall VoIP provider

RingCentral serves more than 300,000 businesses for a reason: It excels at VoIP solutions, from small businesses to enterprises. It's a great fit for the hospitality, retail, healthcare and customer service industries in particular, thanks to great customer support and a range of features designed to field inbound callers.

Our researchers found three big benefits in particular to the service. It has a great selection of features (scoring 4.4/5 in our testing), top-tier customer support (5/5), and an interface that's easy to pick up or adapt to your needs. Growing businesses will also benefit from RingCentral’s excellent ability to scale (4.9/5).

RingCentral features

RingCentral offers unlimited calls in the US, as well as unlimited business SMS messages.

All plans offer these core features: Number porting, custom greetings and voicemail, a virtual receptionist, spam prevention, voicemail to text, custom hold music, caller ID, call transcripts, and custom call routing. All plans also have management features including team messaging, document sharing, and task management.

Video conferencing is available for up to 100 or 200 participants, depending on your plan. All plans include the mobile app, and will support third-party hardware from the Poly, Cisco, Yealink, and Unify brands. Compared to other providers like Zoom, however, RingCentral's web conferencing features are quite limited. To learn more about how these leading services compare, read our RingCentral vs Zoom guide.

RingCentral can also be integrated with Salesforce, which can help boost your CRM efficiency. In fact, you can also match incoming calls with existing client contact information within Salesforce thanks to RingCentral's call management feature.

RingCentral also offers what it calls the “collaborative contact center.” It allows your employees to easily share files with customers, consult experts within the business, and keep in constant contact using instant messaging to ensure that customers get the best experience.

RingCentral support

RingCentral offers 24/7 phone and live chat support. Plus, it has an extensive FAQs section which can help you fix your own problems.

What's more, RingCentral offers an extensive suite of training videos, forums, and webinars to help you learn the platform.

RingCentral pricing

RingCentral offers four pricing plans: Essentials, Standard, Premium, and Ultimate.

The Essentials plan costs $19.99 per user, per month (paid annually). You'll get all the features listed above. Inbound and outbound minutes are unlimited, but users are capped at 20 (users are unlimited for all other plans).

The Standard plan costs $27.99 per user, per month (this is up three dollars since March 2021). This plan adds an auto-attendant, call conferencing, internet fax, integrations for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and call log reports. You also get on-demand call-recording and access to 24/7 customer support. Video calls support up to 100 participants.

The $34.99 per user, per month Premium plan adds automatic call-recording, Salesforce integration, single sign-on functionality, call queuing, ring groups (which lets multiple phone numbers all ring when one extension is called), call monitoring, call barge, call whisper, and analytics. You'll also get access to many more integrations for CRM, email, helpdesk, web conferencing, and both internal and external live chat services. Video calls support up to 200 participants.

Finally, the Enterprise plan costs $49.99 per user, per month and grants unlimited storage for files, contacts, videos, and meeting recordings.

Should you choose RingCentral?

RingCentral is our top VoIP system pick, across the board. It offers the features, scale, and customer aid any business with a large sales or support team needs, with generous toll-free minute and user allowances mean that you won't be left high and dry. The tools for inbound calls, combined with top-rated customer service, makes it a great fit for industries including hospitality, retail, and healthcare.

Of course, the best way to ensure you're getting a good VoIP deal is by taking a look at our price comparison tool. We've developed the tool to give your business bespoke quotes from the leading suppliers come take a look.

Read about the top 10 softphone VoIP apps.

8×8

Best VoIP provider for small businesses

8×8 can support any size of business, but it's a perfect fit for small businesses due to its unbeatable pricing and customer support, in addition to a wide range of the features you'll be likely to need.

Not a small business? You're still in luck: Given its ability to create virtual call centers and its list of esteemed clients such as McDonald's, you can tell that 8×8 is meant for high volume usage, too.

In fact, due to 8×8's perfect or near-perfect scores across four categories that are essential to high-quality high-volume service — features (4.9/5), customer support (5/5), security (5/5), and scalability (4.9/5) — we rate 8×8 as the best choice for sales teams as well.

8×8 features

8×8 offers plenty of features, including ring groups, mobile and desktop apps, voicemail-to-email, team messaging and file-sharing, a virtual receptionist, extension dialing, and directory assistance.

It also integrates fully with Salesforce, Zendesk, Netsuite, Outlook, Google Workspace, Microsoft Dynamics, and Slack.

8×8 has a video conferencing system, too, which offers HD video and audio for up to 50 people with no time restrictions. Conferences can also be recorded and saved in the cloud.

Better still (and this might be a key feature for your business), international calls are included in 8×8's pricing, although the number of countries depends on the plan you choose. Rivals such as RingCentral and Vonage will charge extra for these calls. There's no spam prevention on any plans, however.

Find out more in our full 8×8 review.

8×8 support

8×8 offers 24/7 phone support, as well as live chat and email support.

8×8 also has 24/7 online training for new employees. It can be completed at their own pace and covers everything they'll need to know. If that wasn't enough, you can also take part in virtual, trainer-led courses with blended learning modules for new systems administrators.

8×8 pricing

8×8 has six different pricing plans, with costs ranging from $25 to $110: 8×8 Express, X2, X4, X6, X7, and X8.

First is the 8×8 Express plan, a starter option with a cap of ten users and limited features beyond voice and video calls, call routing, an auto attendant, hold music, voicemail, a virtual receptionist, number porting, and unlimited calls in the US and Canada.

The X2 plan costs $24 per user, per month. With it, the unlimited calls expand to 14 countries total, video meetings can have up to 500 participants, and new features include team messaging, voicemail-to-text, business SMS, and a 99.99% uptime guarantee.

X4 costs $44 per user, per month. The big news here is that you can call 48 countries completely free, up from 14 on the X2 plan. You also get call monitoring, call barge (lets a user join another user's call), and call whisper (lets a user stay muted when joining another's call), as well as supervisor analytics.

The next three plans are designed especially for contact centers. X6 costs $85 per user, per month. It has new reporting and analytics, skills-based routing, IVR, call recording, and CRM. X7 costs $110 per user, per month, and adds chat, email, SMS, social media, and co-browsing. Finally, X8 costs $140 per user, per month, and includes quality management tools, speech analytics, and screen recording.

Should you choose 8×8?

8×8 offers small businesses the secure lines, helpful customer support, and piles of features they need to remain competitive. Get some obligation-free quotes today and find out how much you could save. Alternatively, read our summary of the most reliable softphones and IP hardphones to discover other fail-safe solutions.

Zoom Phone

Best value for money

We've all heard of Zoom, the video chat app that took the world by storm as the pandemic had everyone stuck at home. However, Zoom is more than just a video conferencing tool for facilitating personal calls, as the company also offers a business VoIP solution — called Zoom Phone — that is quite competitive in the industry.

Our research found Zoom Phone to be the third-best overall VoIP solution available, scoring a 4.2/5 in our testing. This is largely due to the impressively affordable plans, while still providing plenty of features and external connections, even at the low starting price.

Security and customer support are the only downsides of Zoom Phone, considering you have to pay extra to get in touch with someone and there is a complete lack of advanced security features such as multi-factor authentication or password rules. Still, these might not be dealbreakers for small businesses in need of a robust VoIP solution that won't break the bank.

For more information, check out our Zoom Phone review right now

Zoom Phone features

When it comes to features, Zoom Phone's low price does not impact how vast the catalog is. In fact, Zoom Phone scored a solid 4.2/5 in our research, representing the fourth best score we awarded.

As for which features are available, Zoom Phone covers lots of bases, including unlimited internal calling, HD call quality, and native apps for desktop and mobile across virtually all operating systems. You'll also find some more advanced features in all pricing plans, including call recording, voicemail with transcription, unlimited auto-attendants, and even holiday and business hours routing.

Zoom Phone integrates with Slack, Salesforce, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace.

Zoom Phone support

Zoom Phone doesn't have the best customer support in the bunch, scoring only a 3.3/5 in our research. Yes, the provider offers a knowledge base and user forums to solve problems, but when it comes to actual support, it can get a bit pricey.

Users can reach out to Zoom via phone, email, or live chat, but this level of support will cost extra on top of the monthly price for your VoIP service. In addition, no onboarding support is available on any plan. It's not ideal, but the comprehensive interface shouldn't cause you enough problems to require customer support too often.

Zoom Phone pricing

Zoom Phone offers three different pricing plans: Metered, Unlimited, and Pro Global Select.

The Meter plan costs only $10 per user, per month, making it one of the more affordable starting plans on the list. It offers unlimited domestic minutes and well as a pay as you go payment system, so you won't have to pay more than you need.

The Unmetered plan costs $15 per user, per month, and as you can likely guess from the name, provides inclusive outbound calling, so you won't have to pay too much for making a call.

Finally, the Global Pro Select plan costs $20 per user, per month, and unlock some solid international features, like unlimited minutes to over 40 countries around the world, along with all the features from the previous two plans.

You can also purchase Zoom Phone as part of Zoom One, which rolls the provider's Meetings, Team Chat, Whiteboard and Zoom Phone products into one single package. You will need to purchase the Business Plus tier ($25 per license, per month) or the Enterprise tier (no public pricing – contact sales for a quote) if you'd like Zoom Phone, however, and it's significantly more expensive than just buying Zoom Phone as a standalone product.

Should you choose Zoom Phone?

If you're in the market for a low-cost VoIP solution that still provides a lot of features, Zoom Phone may be your best bet. Starting at only $10 per user, per month is a steal, and its other plans are competitively priced as well, so you can really keep your monthly outgoings down. On top of that, it has a bevy of other communication tools to integrate with, which is always helpful for a growing business. Plus, hey, it's Zoom, so you might be familiar with it already.

Grab a customized Zoom Phone VoIP quote now with our handy tool

Vonage Business Solutions

Best training features

Vonage is best suited to retail and customer service businesses, since they benefit the most from easy onboarding, and our researchers found Vonage’s training tools to be the best in the industry.

The service works great through mobile devices and desktops as well as through third-party desk phones, making it a flexible option.

Check out our guide to the best VoIP desk phones.

Vonage features

Our testers gave Vonage a score of 4.4/5 for VoIP features, the same score as our top-rated provider, RingCentral. Vonage packs admin portals, voice mail, spam prevention, voicemail to text, call queue, caller ID, external video calling, SMS support, custom call lists, internet fax, call conferencing, call forwarding, call flip, analytics, team messaging, document sharing, and call logs into its cheapest plan.

Vonage also offers unlimited calls to the US and Canada, as well as integrations with a huge range of providers including (but far from limited to):

• Microsoft Dynamics
• Microsoft Teams
• Google Workspace
• Office 365
• Zoho CRM
• Slack
• HubSpot
• Zendesk

Vonage support

Vonage didn’t score too well in our testing for customer support, with 3.4/5 stars compared to 5/5 from both RingCentral and 8×8 — phone and email support is available, but live chat is not and none of it is 24/7. Onboarding support is an additional cost.

The service does include a range of online training documents and videos to help your team become accustomed to the software.

Vonage pricing

Vonage offers three pricing plans: Mobile, Premium, Advanced. However, while the plans start from $19.99, $29.99, and $39.99 per user, per month respectively, Vonage will give you some discounts depending on how many users you have.

Check out our VoIP quotes comparison tool to get bespoke quotes for your business today.

Like many VoIp providers, the price per user gets better value the more users you add. For example, if you only have one user, Vonage's most popular Premium plan will cost $29.99 per month, per user. However, if you have 20 users, that price will drop to $24.99 per month, per user, for a saving of almost $60 per user over the course of a year. If you have more than 99 users, though, you'll need to get a custom quote from Vonage.

The cheapest plan, Mobile, gives you unlimited calls and SMS messages, plus all the features listed above and access to the Vonage app center.

The Premium plan offers unlimited video for up to 100 users, custom greetings, ring groups, a multi-level virtual receptionist, and CRM integration with Google Workspace, HubSpot, Office 365, and Salesforce. Plus, it works with desk phones, unlike the mobile plan.

Finally, the Advanced plan gives you on-demand call recording, call grouping, visual voicemail, and full installation.

Should you choose Vonage?

If training employees quickly and effectively is a priority, Vonage is for you. The service's a great pick for retail as well, due to its inbound features and multiple ways to contact potential customers, including call conferencing, video calls, and (for an additional cost) SMS. Check out how Vonage compares to the best providers on the market with our VoIP price comparison tool.

GoTo Connect

Great VoIP for scaling

If your company is looking for plenty of internal video call meetings, GoTo Connect might be the right fit for you. It's also a great fit for a company that handles more inbound calls than outbound ones, due to the features it offers.

Our researchers found it to be a particularly great telephone system option for scaling, scoring it 4.4 stars out of 5. In comparison to other VoIP providers, GoTo Connect is also very affordable. It came second in our value for money category, scoring 4.3 stars out of 5, and proved to popular among the public, with a strong 4.4-star customer approval score.

GoTo Connect features

GoTo Connect works across desktop, tablet, and mobile, which can help support your remote workers, or support hot desking.

It has strong call management features, including custom greeting, voicemail, spam prevention, voicemail to text, custom hold music, call queue, ring groups, and the ability to set company hours, as well as a find me/follow me feature which allows for calls to be routed through several devices, including mobiles.

You can also forward, hold, or queue, and even send calls to a virtual receptionist to keep customers on the line.

As we mentioned, GoTo Connect has excellent video conferencing tools (though only for internal use). You can video conference with up to 250 people, with HD video for up to 25 people. You'll also find that sharing documents and files is a piece of cake, as is screen sharing. It even supports breakout rooms.

GoTo Connect has continued to add new features over the last few years, like introducing the functionality needed for a native Microsoft Teams integration and refreshing its mobile app.

GoTo Connect support

GoTo Connect scored the same as Vonage in our 2022 VoIP testing, earning 3.4/5 stars. It offers support via phone, email, and a support ticket system, although there's no option for live chat support and it doesn't offer live support on a 24/7 basis.

It does at least have its own dedicated online customer center, where you can find videos, factsheets, forums, and even ebooks to help find the cure for your VoIP maladies.

GoTo Connect pricing

GoToConnect used to have a confusing pricing system that charged a different amount per user based on how many users a business had. Since 2021, it has changed to an industry-standard pricing system, and offers three plans: Basic, at $22 per user, per month; Standard, at $26 per user, per month; and Pro, at $39 per user, per month.

Basic is capped at 20 users and 4 video meeting participants, Standard expands this to unlimited users and 150 meeting participants, and Pro boost the participants cap to 250.

Should you choose GoToConnect?

We're big fans of GoToConnect's pricing system, given the 4.3 stars our researchers gave it out of 5. Add in a high customer approval rating, and you have a great value option: The service won't break the bank, but it'll still keep everyone happy.

To get a good look at each provider side-by-side, take a look at our VoIP comparison page, which will give you bespoke quotes from the leading suppliers.

Ooma

Great for customer experience

Our researchers noted that Ooma offers a particularly good customer experience, due to high customer satisfaction from existing users, as well as good-quality customer support and features that enable you to provide a good experience for your own customers. Ooma is a strong choice, therefore, for small-medium sized businesses in customer service industries, like retail, or any business with a high volume of inbound calls from customers.

The service also offers a level of pricing transparency that isn't always found in the VoIP industry. As such, it might be worth your time taking a look at our price comparison questionnaire to see how good a deal you can get.

Ooma features

Ooma has excellent call management features including Call Flip, which lets you easily move calls between devices, and Call Park, which lets users put a call on hold before picking the call back up on a different device, or with a different handler.

Your customers will also appreciate the clarity and ease of having a virtual receptionist, effective call queuing and local numbers to call, which are all available to set up with Ooma.

In addition, Ooma offers integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, Microsoft 365, G-Suite, and ServiceNow. This, of course, will make managing sales and support calls significantly easier for your teams.

It also offers a mobile app for Android and iOS, which can be helpful if your teams are working from home without a full desk phone.

Despite its selling points, the service does lack some features that other VoIp providers on this list offer, however. For example, no Ooma plans include custom call lists, auto or predictive dialing, call transcripts, call monitoring, or task management. We could only score Ooma a 1 out of 5 for security features in our testing, too, as the service offers no multifactor authentication or single sign-on.

Ooma support

Ooma offers 24/7 customer support over the phone or via live chat, although not over email. It also offers an online forum, where experienced users can help you diagnose and fix problems yourself.

Ooma pricing

Ooma offers four pricing plans: Office, Office Pro, Enterprise, and Enterprise Call Center. It offers flat costs, and unlimited coverage of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, and the US.

The Office plan costs $19.95 per user, per month. Your teams will get access to the mobile app, custom greeting, ring groups, company hours, caller ID, call routing, call forwarding, call flip, hold music, and call transfers.  You also get a virtual receptionist, something Google Voice's Starter tier can't match.

Office Pro costs $24.95 per user, per month, but gives you call recording, the desktop app, enhanced call-blocking, analytics, video conferencing, spam prevention, and voicemail transcripts. What's more, it ups the usage limits for audio conferencing and extension monitoring.

The Enterprise and Enterprise Call Center plans are designed for larger businesses.

The Enterprise plan costs $27.99 per user, per month but adds custom CRM and productivity tool integrations, as well as support for hot-desking and video conferencing. The Enterprise Call Center plan is $49.99 per user, per month. It offers a call flow builder, position-in-queue tracking, estimated wait time for callers, and advanced reporting tools.

Should you choose Ooma?

If your business depends on high-quality customer experiences, Ooma is for you. It's among our top VoIP setups for customer support, rating a 4.5/5 stars with our testers, and it's also one of the best for customer satisfaction scores, rating 4.4/5.

Nextiva

Great for professional services

Nextiva is a well-regarded name in the VoIP world that offers some strong analytics tools to help your business make the most of its contact center or sales team.

Its customer support and security tools are both good, making it a great choice for professional service businesses that need deliver confidential or unique information — Consultants, accountants, contractors, or creative agencies would all be a fit for Nextiva.

Nextiva features

Nextiva's suite of features promises to give you all the tools your business needs to hit the ground running. Its desktop app supports voice and video calls, emails, messaging, and sales and service tools, as well as analytics.

Its purpose-built VoIP phone works seamlessly with the desktop app, helping to bring some extra smarts to the phone. It has a mobile app to support remote workers.

Nextiva also reckons its suite of AI and automation tools can help improve repetitive tasks such as data collection. It can even offer real-time predictions, and offer suggestions based on the situation you're currently facing.

The provider isn't easy to scale up, however. It ranked a 2.9 out of 5 stars for that category, putting it only the eighth best VoIP provider for scalability, well behind RingCentral and 8×8, which both tied for first with 4.9/5 scalability. Nextiva is held back by its lack of features to aid group calls: It doesn't offer call monitoring or transcripts, and call recording features are limited to the plan you choose.

Nextiva support

Nextiva offers 24/7 unlimited customer support via phone or live chat. Email support is available, although it is not 24/7. The service also has a large help center to help you fix problems yourself.

Nextiva pricing

Nextiva has three pricing plans, and it also varies its plan prices, depending on the number of users you have.

The Essential plan costs $23.95 per user, per month with annual billing if you have between one and four users. If you have between five and 19 users, that price drops to $21.95 per user, per month. Between 20 and 99 users will see the price drop to $18.95 per user, per month, while if you have more than 100 users, it'll cost you $17.95 per user, per month.

The Essential plan gives you unlimited voice and video calls, a virtual receptionist, toll-free numbers, voicemail-to-email notifications, spam prevention, caller ID, video calling, and unlimited internet fax. It also offers integrations with Outlook and Google Contacts.

The Professional plan, which starts from $27.95 per user, per month, offers unlimited conference calls for up to 40 participants. It also gives you unlimited video conferencing for up to 250 participants, Call Pop (which helps your employees know who's calling and about what before they pick up the phone), unlimited business SMS, and further integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk. Nextiva will also set the system up for you.

Then there's the Enterprise plan, which starts from $37.95 per user, per month. In return, you get unlimited participants on voice and video conferencing, unlimited video conference and call recording, unlimited Call Pop, voice analytics and voicemail transcription, and integration with Microsoft Teams, Oracle Sales Cloud, and ServiceNow. Plus, you get single sign-on.

Should you choose Nextiva?

Nextiva is a great fit for a business in a professional industry like consultancy or accounting, since it offers great security and customer service, but limited features for the large amounts of calls that a contact center might need to field.

We'd recommend taking a look at our pricing comparison tool to find out whether Nextiva is the right service for your business.

Net2Phone

Great for international businesses

Net2Phone is a great option for international businesses interested in low VoIP system starting costs and international calling. With plan starting at just $19.99, unlimited international calling to more than 40 countries, and the costs of installation, Net2Phone proved to be one of the the best VoIP for value for money. 

In our testing, Net2Phone’s scores were in the middle of the pack in every area. It doesn’t offer the most impressive feature set (3.6/5) or compatibility with existing infrastructure, but its customer support is okay (3.9/5) and existing customers are fairly happy (4.4/5).

Net2Phone features

Net2Phone's cloud PBX solution offers apps for Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS to help your staff communicate with customers and clients effectively.

It has SMS, MMS, and live chat messaging, as well as live chat to SMS hand-off. You can use it for internal comms, with user-to-user, department, or company-wide messaging. It also has extension-to-extension calling, hold music and messaging, time-based greetings, three-way conferencing calling, group conference calls, and easy call transfer.

Net2Phone will also allow for voicemail transcription and voicemail to email functions. Plus, it has find me/follow me call routing, call queuing, and call forwarding, and can support multiple virtual receptionists.

Finally, Net2Phone has strong analytics, with sortable reports by time frame, department, office, and agents. Plus, it has dashboards that let you see all this information at-a-glance.

Net2Phone support

Net2Phone offers 24/7 support on all its plans, as well as an extensive online knowledge base.

Net2Phone pricing

Net2Phone's cloud PBX pricing falls into four plans: Virtual, Essentials, Professional, and Ultimate.

Virtual costs $19.99 per user, per month. It offers unlimited domestic calls and free international calling to over 40 countries. Features include number porting, custom greeting, voicemail, spam prevention, SMS, caller ID, ring groups, call conferencing, and call forwarding.

Essentials costs $23.99 per user, per month, and adds support for third-party desktop phones and efax, but little more. Professional costs $27.99 per user, per month, and adds call queuing, voicemail-to-text, live chat and web conferencing integrations, and single sign-on. Ultimate costs $31.99 per user, per month, and adds call recording, but not much else.

Should you choose Net2Phone?

In comparison to other VoIP providers Net2Phone offers one of the best value for money — the downside is a limited (3.4/5) rating for features offered. Even so, Net2Phone would be a great fit for businesses that need to keep costs low, particularly if they want to easily contact anyone in the 40 countries within the service's coverage, making it great for international businesses.

If that doesn't describe your operation, you can check out our pricing comparison tool to get bespoke quotes for your business.

NUACOM

Best for customer satisfaction

NUACOM stands out for its high customer satisfaction (4.6/5), as evidenced by customer reviews we collated. It also offers a great set of inbound call tools and a reasonable number of tools for outgoing calls as well.

NUACOM features

A few of the streamlining tools that make NUACOM so easy to use include customizable call routing functionality, as well as a call-flow designer, both of which are available across all plans.

The service also includes a range of the inbound call tools that any VoIP expert will know and love: number porting, custom greetings, voicemail, a virtual receptionist, voicemail to text, customizable hold music, call queuing, ring groups, and the ability to set company hours.

Outbound features are a little more limited. In addition to not offering video calls, NUACOM doesn't have an auto dialer or predictive dialing, and SMS messages will cost extra. Call conferencing is supported, as are custom call lists.

Security features (3/5) include end-to-end encryption and user permissions, but no password rules to nudge users towards safer types of passwords.

NUACOM support

Support formats including email, phone, and live chat, although none are available 24/7. A knowledge base is available, but no community forum. Onboarding support is offered in the form of a 15-minute session to guide users through the process.

NUACOM pricing

NUACOM has three pricing plans: Unlimited, Call Center, and Enterprise. Unlimited costs $24.99 per user, per month; Call Center costs $39.99 per user, per month; and you'll need to contact the company with your specific needs for a custom quote on an Enterprise plan. There's a two-user limit across all plans.

The Unlimited plan includes unlimited domestic minutes, a HubSpot CRM integration, and all the inbound and outbound tools, security, and support features mentioned above. The Call Center plan adds more features: Call flip (lets a user seamlessly switch devices during a call), call barge, and call whisper. Call Center also opens up more integrations: Zendesk, Salesforce, and Pipedrive all join HubSpot.

Enterprise adds an open API, optional single sign-on, and multi-factor authentication.

Should you choose NUACOM?

NUACOM is definitely a great pick for keeping all your employees happy, offering easy-to-use features and automation that can reduce a workload.

It isn't designed for aiding in collaboration with a team, however, offering no tools for video conferencing, task management, document sharing, or team messaging. However, if your business just needs an easy service that keeps your team members happy while receiving customer or client calls, go for NUACOM. Our quick price comparison tool is another option to help guide you to the best option—whether it's NUACOM or not.

Dialpad

A low-cost option for startups

Dialpad's pricing plans make it stand out. In an industry where a good VoIP service averages about $35 per user per month, Dialpad's plans start at a mere $15 per user per month.

Those savings do mean you'll miss a few features, though not as many as you might think. A lack of call queuing is the one big downside of the cheapest Dialpad plan, though it also cuts out phone and email support. The other essential tools for inbound and outbound calling are all present, however, as we'll detail below. Startups with a smaller audience and needs will benefit from the low prices without minding the feature limitations.

Dialpad features

Dialpad scored just 3.2/5 in our VoIP testing, the lowest score besides Google Voice. Even so, every Dialpad plan covers plenty of calling features, such as custom greetings, voicemail, a virtual receptionist, voicemail to text, customizable hold music, ring groups, and company hours. Users will get one localized, toll-free number each, with no options for adding more. Like all reputable VoIP providers, Dialpad has a mobile app on all plans.

Outbound features for Dialpad include caller IDs, SMS, custom call lists, and call conferencing. Unlike NUACOM, Dialpad includes both spam prevention and video calling, although both services lack auto or predictive dialing.

All Dialpad plans have encryption and user permissions, but there are no password rules or multifactor authenticationsettings, giving it a 3/5 for Security in Tech.co’s tests.

Dialpad support

Customer support encompasses a user forum, an online knowledge base, and live chat for all plans, with 24/7 support hours and phone support available on all but the cheapest plan, giving it a score of 4.5/5 in Tech.co's tests.  No email support options are available for any plans.

Dialpad pricing

Dialpad has three pricing plans: Standard costs $15 per user, per month; Pro costs $25 per user per month (with a minimum of three users); and Enterprise is available for a custom quote, although it comes with a hefty 100-user minimum.

Standard includes the features mentioned above, plus integrations for Slack, G Suite, and Office 365.

Pro adds a call queue, as well as an open API, phone support, and integrations for Salesforce, Zendesk, and Hubspot. Enterprise adds a 100% uptime guarantee and single sign-on for better security.

Should you choose Dialpad?

In addition to being a money-saver, Dialpad is well-loved by its customers: Our researchers gave it 4.5 stars for its customer support options and a 4.4 star scores for customer satisfaction (which puts it second only to NUACOM). It should be noted that average customer satisfaction scores tend to be higher for smaller providers like Dialpad and NUACOM, but that shouldn’t take away from the fact that customers are pretty happy.

Trying our price comparison tool can give you a clearer idea of what cost to expect for your specific needs, but on the whole, Dialpad offers a good selection of functions for its cost, which is why it's made our list of the best VoIP providers.

Google Voice

Most secure choice for small teams

Google's VoIP service stands out for one big reason — great security. This is due to compliance certifications, multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, password rules, encryption, and user permissions across each and every plan.

Google Voice's limitations are worth mentioning, however. First, it's only available for those with a Google Workspace subscription, meaning that this service is really only for businesses that are locked into Google's suite of (admittedly pretty good) business software offerings. Second, Voice has a slim range of features, lacking many of the tools that the rest of the VoIP offerings in this guide have.

Google Voice features

Compared to the rest of the VoIP providers Tech.co tested, Google Voice came out at the bottom for features, earning just 2.6 out of 5 stars. However, all Google Voice plans offer voicemail support, voicemail to text, spam prevention, video calling (via Google Meet), SMS for those in the US, analytics, and custom call lists (via Google Contacts).

As for features that are not available across any plans? Those include call queues, custom hold music, caller ID, auto or predictive dialing, call conferencing, call forwarding, call flip, call barge, or call whisper. Calls won't be recorded, transcribed, or monitored, and there's no call-flow designer.

If those features sound useful, you'd be better off picking an alternative provider for your VoIP solution, such as one of the ones above, or if you're a team that's already using Google Workspace, perhaps one of these Google Voice alternatives.

Google Voice's security tools are its real selling point, as it covers every category that our researchers tested for. This rarity makes Google Voice the most secure VoIP service out of all of the top VoIP providers. All plans have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, too.

Google Voice support

Google Voice also ranked lowest for customer support out of all the providers we analyzed, scoring 3.1/5.

All plans have a user forum, knowledge base, and 24/7 phone support, but no email or live chat.

Google Voice pricing

Google Voice offers three pricing plans: Starter costs $10 per user, per month; Standardcosts $20 per user, per month; and Premiercosts $30 per user, per month.

Starter includes every feature listed above, as well as a range of integrations for Zoho CRM, Copper, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Freshsales, Agile CRM, Hubspot, MiniCRM, and Apptivo.

Standard adds a number of common calling features: Custom greetings, a virtual receptionist, ring groups, company hours, custom call routing, and the option to integrate one hardware desktop phone brand, Polycom.

Premier may not be worth the cost. It mostly just adds the option to integrate toll-free numbers, but only for businesses with a real presence in that location, a restriction no other provider in this guide has.

Should you choose Google Voice?

Very small, security-conscious businesses are the best customer for Google Voice, as the price will be right, and the limited features and poor scalability are unlikely to be as large an issue as they would be for established operations.

Any companies worried about the chance of a ransomware attack or other type of cyberattack will be reassured by Google Voice's 5-star security options as well — although we'd still recommend an employee course on how to avoid phishing attacks.

Of course, our quick price comparison tool can help guide your decisions about which VoIP provider is best for your budget and needs as well.

How to Choose the Best VoIP Provider

Choosing the right VoIP provider depends on a number of factors.

Overall costs

While many VoIP providers seem to offer similar pricing structures, each provider has little quirks in its pricing system which you might miss at first glance.

For example, most providers, including our top-rated picks RingCentral and 8×8, offer prices on a per user, per month basis. You also won't get as many features on the cheapest plans as you do with the more expensive plans

It's also worth pricing up the systems you're looking at in full before choosing. There might be hidden costs with international call fees, for example. The easiest way to get a complete price is by using our comparison tool, which will give you bespoke quotes from the leading companies.

You can also check out our guide to the cheapest VoIP phone services to discover the best cost-effective solutions available to your business.

Upgrade and growth costs

Your business isn't standing still, and you'll (hopefully) need to start adding new team members as it grows. Again, you need to think here about which platforms will scale the best with your existing business. What's more, you'll likely need to add more complex features.

RingCentral is a good fit for businesses that will need to expand their feature set as they grow, as its four pricing plans each offer many core features in comparison to similar competitor plans. Our researchers termed this “scalability,” and ranked RingCentral and 8×8 in a tie for the most scalable, with Vonage close on their heels.

Customer support

If your business relies on its phones, any problem could be catastrophic to your bottom line.

Fortunately, most of the providers we've listed offer 24/7 support. RingCentral and 8×8 scored highest for support options overall (5/5) across all the VoIP providers we tested, while three more services tied for second place (4.5/5): Dialpad, Ooma, and Nextiva.

We would always recommend choosing a provider which offers 24/7 support where possible.

Devices

It is definitely worth considering what sort of hardware your business currently uses for its phone calls. If you rely on desk phones, you might find that your service isn't as flexible as it might need to be following the pandemic.

Softphones, or even VoIP services that work through laptops or tablets, are a great way to help your staff remain mobile while working.

You might also have existing analogue desk phones and might be worried about whether they'll work with your new VoIP system. You can get adapters that will let them connect with your new system, but it's unlikely to be perfect. Instead, you can take a look at some new VoIP phones, or your provider might even lease you some.

How We Rate VoIP Providers

Here at Tech.co, we invest a lot of time in researching the providers and products we recommend.

When it comes to VoIP providers, we sink hours into identifying the top players in the market, as well as understanding the pain points for businesses when it comes to finding the right solution. We always take into account the relative prices of each provider and get properly under the hood when it comes to the features they provide and the level of support that you can expect.

Once we've compiled this research, we start to analyze the results. For the VoIP category, we compared and tested the following area:

• Cost – we know that pricing is the bottom line for many business decisions, so we take this into account as a major factor when considering who the best VoIP providers are
• Features – we consider the quantity and quality of features on offer from each VoIP provider
• Connectivity – we know it’s important that new software integrates with your existing processes and tools, so we investigate which VoIP providers are the most compatible with other infrastructure, systems and software
• Customer support – we review the level of set-up and ongoing support offered by each provider, including what channels are available and nhow accessible they are throughout the week
• Security – we assess what measures VoIP providers have taken to ensure systems are safe from malicious actors
• Scalability – we take into account how each VoIP provider will fare your business throughout its future growth
• Customer satisfaction – finally, we consider the opinions and experiences detailed by existing users of each VoIP provider analyzed

We use this information to create independent rankings. Each area was scored on a 5-star scale, and each of those rankings was averaged out into one overall 5-star score for each service, with areas that matter more to users, such as pricing, given slightly more weighting. We hope these scores will make it easy to understand and digest exactly why we think that some VoIP providers are more worthy than others.

How to Get Started

Getting started with a cloud-based VoIP provider is easier than you think. As everything is done online, there's no need for a manual setup, and it can take under 15 minutes in many cases.

Once you're all set up, it's worth getting your staff trained on the new system. Fortunately, with all the companies we've listed offering dedicated knowledge bases explaining how to use their software, this should be a piece of cake, too.

However, you still need to choose a provider. You might now have a feel for which is the best fit for your business's needs, but it's always worth filling in our quote form to compare prices. It's completely free, and you'll be under absolutely no obligation to choose any of the providers. Best of all, it takes less than five minutes, but could potentially save you thousands.

Advantages of VoIP

Whatever your business model, switching to VoIP is one of the best ways for employees to stay connected on the corporate phone system while working remotely, thanks to features VoIP features like conference calling, call waiting, auto-attendant, instant video and other tools not provided by traditional landlines. In this video we outline the key benefits of a VoIP to help you decide if it's right for you.

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