9 Best Business VoIP Providers – 2021

The best VoIP phone provider on the market is Ooma. It stands out from the crowd with its unlimited calls, easy DIY setup, and very fair pricing.

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. In fact, we've developed a comparison questionnaire that can give you a side-by-side look at bespoke pricing quotes from the leading VoIP providers on the market.

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 9 VoIP Providers
• How to Choose the Best VoIP Provider
• How We Rate VoIP Providers
• How to Get Started
• FAQs

Top 9 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 on: March 23, 2021.

The best VoIP providers are:

1. Ooma – the best choice for small businesses
2. RingCentral – the best enterprise solution
3. Vonage Business Solutions – a popular, user-friendly solution
4. Nextiva – great for growing businesses
5. GoToConnect – a slick, video-first choice
6. 8×8 – best for call-heavy businesses
7. Mitel – best for customer service reps
8. Net2Phone – a strong, cloud-based service
9. 3CX – a low-cost option for startups

Ooma

Ooma is the best VoIP solution for small to medium-sized businesses. It has very competitive pricing, and an excellent range of features that will make your employees' lives easier.

It 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, for example, including Call Flip, which lets you easily move calls between devices. Call Park, on the other hand, lets users put a call on hold before picking the call back up on a different device, or with a different handler.

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 stuck at home without a full desk phone.

Ooma Support

Ooma offers 24/7 customer support over the phone or via live chat. It also offers an online forum, where experienced users can help you diagnose and fix problems yourself. Ooma also offers email support.

Ooma Pricing

Ooma offers four pricing plans: Office, Office Pro, Enterprise, and Enterprise Call Center.

The Office plan costs $19.95 per user, per month. Your teams will get access to the mobile app, 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, 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 doesn't have a fixed price. It offers a call flow builder, position-in-queue tracking, estimated wait time for callers, and advanced reporting tools.

Should you choose Ooma?

If you're a small-to-medium-sized business looking to improve your VoIP setup, Ooma is the way to go.

Its range of features, including its apps, make it perfectly suited to the remote working world we live in. Plus, its affordable pricing means that it won't break the bank, either. It also offers flat costs, and unlimited coverage of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, and the US.

RingCentral

While Ooma is great for smaller businesses, RingCentral excels at enterprise VoIP solutions. It serves more than 300,000 businesses for a reason.

RingCentral features

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

What's more, RingCentral lets you consolidate voice and fax messages in Microsoft Outlook by forwarding them via email. Its RingOut feature also lets you click to call a phone number from an Outlook contact, web page, or document.

Check out our guide to the best VoIP desk phones.

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. You'll get call management and phone administration, including call forwarding and transferring, intercom, and paging capabilities.

The Standard plan costs $24.99 per user, per month. This adds an auto-attendant, internet fax, and call log reports. You also get additional free minutes, on-demand call-recording, and access to 24/7 customer support.

The $34.99 per user, per month Premium plan adds automatic call-recording, Salesforce integration, and single sign-on functionality.

Finally, the Enterprise plan costs $49.99 per user, per month and grants up to 10,000 toll-free minutes, as well as unlimited storage for files, contacts, videos, and meeting recordings.

Should you choose RingCentral?

If you have a large sales or support team, RingCentral would likely be a good fit for your business. Its generous toll-free minute and user allowances mean that you won't be left high and dry.

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.

Vonage Business Solutions

Vonage is a great choice for a lot of businesses but, while it's strong in a number of areas, it isn't quite as good as Ooma or RingCentral. Like RingCentral, Vonage is also better suited for larger businesses than smaller ones.

Vonage features

Vonage packs a virtual receptionist, admin portals, and call logs into its cheapest plan.

What's more, Vonage would be a perfect solution for a business moving to remote working as it works through mobile devices and desktops, eschewing the need for dedicated desk phones.

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 also offers 24/7 phone support in case something goes wrong. Plus, it has 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.

It could be a good fit if you have a lot of employees – check out our VoIP quotes comparison tool to get bespoke quotes for your business today.

For example, if you only have one user, Vonage's most popular Premium plan will cost $29.99 per month, per user. However, suppose you have 50 users, that price will drop to $24.99 per month, per user – 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, unlimited SMS messages, access to the Vonage app center, and unlimited team messaging.

The Premium plan offers unlimited video for up to 100 users, a multi-level virtual receptionist, CRM integration with Google Workspace, HubSpot, Office 365, Salesforce, and more. 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?

As is often the case with business tech buying decisions, there are few bad choices. Vonage would doubtless be a great platform for your VoIP calls. However, compared to Ooma and RingCentral, Vonage is a bit light on features.

Check out how Vonage compares to the best providers on the market with our price comparison tool.

Nextiva

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.

Nextiva features

Nextiva's all-in-one 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 those analytics we mentioned above.

Its purpose-built VoIP phone works seamlessly with the desktop app, helping to bring some extra smarts to the phone. It even 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.

Nextiva support

Nextiva offers 24/7 unlimited customer support via phone or live chat. It also has a large help center to help you fix problems yourself.

Nextiva pricing

Nextiva has four pricing plans and, like Vonage's, the prices change 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, 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.

Next up is 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.

The Ultimate plan costs a whopping $67.95 per user, per month. It gives you sales productivity and pipeline management, service productivity and ticket management, automated surveys, and customer journey analytics.

Should you choose Nextiva?

Nextiva offers a great all-in-one service that can give your business all the internal and external VoIP features you need. However, we do think that Nextiva does run a bit pricey compared to its rivals. Plus, we don't like that you get some third-party integrations on the Professional plan, but not on the Enterprise plan.

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

GoToConnect

If your company relies on video calls, GoToConnect might be the right fit for you.

GoToConnect features

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

It has strong call management features, including call routing, caller ID, do not disturb, and 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, GoToConnect has excellent video conferencing tools. You can video conference with up to 250 people, though HD video is limited 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.

GoToConnect recently got a bunch of new features, including native Microsoft Teams integration and a refreshed mobile app.

GoToConnect Support

As expected, GoToConnect offers 24/7 support via phone, email, and a support ticket system. Again, it has 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.

GoToConnect Pricing

GoToConnect doesn't have pricing plans like the other providers on this list. Instead of limiting the features you get based on how much you pay, GoToConnect bases its pricing purely on the number of users you need.

It offers four tiers:

• Tier 1 is for between one and four users, and charges $29.95 per user, per month.
• Tier 2 is for between five and nine users, and charges $25.95 per user, per month.
• Tier 3 is for between 10 and 24 users, and charges $23.95 per user, per month.
• Tier 4 is for between 25 and 49 users, and charges $21.95 per user, per month.

Finally, there's also a fifth tier for 50 to 100 users, which costs $19.95 per user, per month. If you have more than 100 users, you'll need to get a custom quote from GoToConnect.

Should you choose GoToConnect?

We're big fans of GoToConnect's pricing system, as it makes scaling your business easier.  However, we think that RingCentral and Ooma offer better, more extensive feature sets.

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.

8×8

If your business makes a lot of calls, 8×8 is probably the best choice for you. It can support any size of business but, with its ability to create virtual call centers and list of esteemed clients such as McDonald's, you can tell that 8×8 is meant for high volume call centers.

8×8 features

8×8 offers a wide range 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, Skype for Business, 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. Rivals such as RingCentral and Ooma will charge extra for these calls.

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 two different offerings with three pricing plans each. There's the Virtual Office series of plans, which gives businesses a complete cloud phone system. However, there's also the Virtual Contact Center plans, which consolidate staff across different locations into one 8×8 contact center to ensure a seamless experience for your customers.

The Virtual Office X2 plan costs $25 per user, per month. You'll get access to desktop and mobile apps, as well as analytical software. Plus, it offers instant and team messaging, voicemail, single sign-on, 100 participant audio and video conference calls, and integrations with CRM platforms including Salesforce, Zendesk, and Netsuite.

Virtual Office X5 costs $35 per user, per month. The big news here is that you can call 32 countries completely free – up from 14 on the X2 plan. You also get call recording and Switchboard Pro to help make customer journeys smoother.

Virtual Office X8 costs $55 per user, per month. It adds improved analytics and what 8×8 calls “Interactive Voice Response”, which ensures calls are routed to your business's best agents automatically.

The Virtual Contact Center plans are slightly different. Standard gives you voice calls only, but includes native and third-party CRM integrations. It'll cost you $87 per user, per month. The Omnichannel plan costs $107 per user, per month and gives you social media, live chat, email, and SMS functions. Finally, there's the $146 per user, per month Advanced plan, which brings screen-recording, real-time multi-screen monitoring, quality management, and speech analytics.

Should you choose 8×8?

If you have a big call center that makes lots of calls – especially to international numbers – then 8×8 would be a great fit for your business.

Of course, if you already have a big call center, you might already have a VoIP system. If so, you might find that you could snag a better deal with 8×8, Ooma, or RingCentral. Get some obligation-free quotes today and find out how much you could save.

Mitel

Mitel offers a variety of products to help meet business's communications needs. It shines serving large businesses with lots of customer service reps. Of course, we'd still rather choose Ooma or RingCentral, but Mitel has some neat features.

Mitel features

Mitel's MiCloud Connect cloud phone integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and ACT, bringing your customer call histories into one place.

MiCloud Flex, on the other hand, is aimed at larger businesses in need of a full unified communications suite. Again, it integrates with loads of CRM and productivity tools, including Skype for Business, Salesforce, and Google Workspace. You'll be able to speak to customers and colleagues using voice or video calls, as well as live chat.

MiVoice Business, meanwhile, is a massively scalable solution. It can help service companies with more than five users, or as many as 130,000, across multiple sites. You'll get a desk phone, attendant consoles, and softphones. What's more, the dynamic extension feature can easily help you route calls through employees' mobile phones – which might be essential if you have lots of people working at home.

This range of different products does make Mitel stand out a bit from the other platforms. It offers businesses the flexibility to respond to any business changes they might encounter.

Mitel support

Mitel offers email and phone support, as well as a ticketing system to help get technical fixes made to your software.

What's more, Mitel will also sell you desk phones with built-in help and audio guides, to help your staff make sense of all the buttons. It also has a range of online videos and manuals to help staff get acquainted with the system.

Mitel pricing

Mitel, understandably, offers different prices for its different products. What's more, it won't publicly reveal its prices – instead, you'll need to get in touch with its sales teams.

However, before you go shooting off an email to Mitel, make sure you check out our price comparison tool – after all, you don't want to pay over the odds for a service that might not suit your business as well as Ooma or RingCentral.

Should you choose Mitel?

Like 8×8, Mitel excels when it comes to servicing big call centers. However, Mitel's range of products makes it a more scalable solution.

However, given that the company won't reveal its prices, it's hard to recommend it against more transparent rivals. Fortunately, our VoIP pricing comparison questionnaire will help get you bespoke prices for the leading providers in minutes — try it out here.

Net2Phone

Net2Phone offers a cloud PBX (Private Branch Exchange) service that can help your company get hooked up to the internet. It also provides a great selection of free desk phones, and unlimited international calling to more than 40 countries.

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 timeframe, 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

Sadly, Net2Phone doesn't make its cloud PBX pricing public. Instead, you should use our quotes comparison tool to check out bespoke quotes from each of the leading VoIP providers on the market.

Should you choose Net2Phone?

Net2Phone would be a decent fit for businesses that make a lot of international calls. Its free desk phones could be a great fit for a company that is just starting out with its call center operations.

However, while international calls are free, Net2Phone doesn't make its prices publically available, and you might end up paying over-the-odds just to emerge with some free international calls. Instead, you can check out our pricing comparison tool to get bespoke quotes for your business.

3CX

3CX is a cheaper solution than most, making it ideally suited to startups or small companies. In fact, it even has a free plan.

3CX features

Like Net2Phone, 3CX offers a cloud-based PBX service that allows employees to share a set number of external phone lines while all using the phone at once.

3CX will give you call recording and call queuing features, as well as support for hot desking with specific user profiles. It can also generate reports based on call data.

What's more, 3CX has some unified communications functions. For example, you can send calls to different colleagues and communicate with them via instant messaging. Plus, 3CX offers integrations with Zendesk, Salesforce, Freshdesk, Office 365, and Microsoft Dynamics.

3CX support

Support is only offered online via a support portal. Here, you'll find community forums where you can help other users fix their problems. It's not the best solution, but it's better than nothing – although only just.

3CX does offer training videos to help you get set up, as well.

3CX pricing

There are three plans on offer: Standard, Pro, and Enterprise. However, unlike the other providers on the list, 3CX's pricing plans change according to the number of concurrent phone calls you need to make.

If you only ever need to make eight phone calls at the same time, then you can use 3CX for free on the Standard plan. However, if you need 16 simultaneous calls, it'll cost you $395 per year. 24 calls costs $595 per year, 32 costs $895 per year, 64 costs $1,795 per year, while 96 costs $2,695 per year.

The Pro plan gives you Office 365 and CRM integrations, as well as call recording, reports, hot desking, and call queues. The lowest Pro plan tier allows four simultaneous calls, costs $250 per year, and is recommended for an operation with up to 12 employees. Eight simultaneous calls costs $325 per year, 16 of them costs $652 per year, 24 costs $982 per year, 32 costs $1,477 per year, 64 costs $2,962 per year, while 96 costs $4,447 per year.

Finally, there's the Enterprise plan. It brings granular call recording restrictions, a built-in failover to protect the phone system, skill-based routing, and customizable logos.

Enterprise pricing allows four simultaneous calls at $303 per year, 8 of them at $394 per year, 16 at $790 per year, 24 at $982 per year, 32 at $1,790 per year, 64 at $2,962 per year, 96 at $5,390 per year, and so on up until the maximum of 1,024 simultaneous calls, which costs $39,990 per year.

Should you choose 3CX?

3CX certainly makes sense for smaller companies. However, if you're already established, the limits on the number of simultaneous calls will likely pose big problems.

But is 3CX's free plan all it's cracked up to be? Take a look at our VoIP price comparison tool to get bespoke quotes for your business in minutes.

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 Ooma and RingCentral, 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

However, GoToConnect offers four different pricing tiers, which offer the same features but cater to different amounts of staff. This means that it might be significantly cheaper for your business to choose GoToConnect, rather than RingCentral. You might, for example, have a small team who need to man the phones, but need a lot of features.

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.

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. Its four pricing plans offer great extra features. Net2Phone, meanwhile, can easily service between nine and 100 users – so it pays to think about how your business will be growing before committing to a VoIP system.

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. Some, such as Ooma or RingCentral, offer phone or live chat support as well as an online forum. However, 3CX only offers support through its online support portal and community forums.

We would always recommend choosing a provider which offered 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. We compare feature sets, support options, pricing details, ease of use, and other factors. Finally, we use this information to create independent rankings, which we hope will make it easy to understand and digest exactly why we think that some 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 any longer.

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 online training videos and webinars, this should be a piece of cake, too.

However, you still need to choose a provider. You might already have a feel for which is the best fit for your business's needs, but it's always worth filling in our quotes comparison tool. 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.

FAQs