Nextiva Review – Features, Pros and Cons and Pricing

Our research team has tested 12 leading business phone systems and found Nextiva to be the 7th best overall (4.1/5). While it can’t boast the feature set some competing business telephone systems like RingCentral and 8×8 can, it’s also slightly less expensive. Nextiva impressively provides phone, email, and 24/7 live support, enforces no user limit on any of its plans and will let you make unlimited domestic calls to the US and Canada.

Nextiva is the third-best option for businesses of 11-50 employees out of VoIP products we tested, behind 8×8 and Zoom Phone, thanks to outbound communication features like SMS and video calling, as well as onboarding support and a wide range of CRM integrations. Plans start from $23.95 per user, per month, but adding more than 20 users makes Nextiva’s cheapest plan just $18.95 per user, per month and even better value for money.

The big downside is that Nextiva is not a very scalable product, with few management tools and missing security features, but if you have a small team that’s not going to change in size any time soon, then it’s definitely an option worth considering, especially with the excellent customer support options. After reading this Nextiva review, if you’d like to see how the provider compares to others we’ve tested, check out our free VoIP comparison tool – we’ll match you with a VoIP provider that will cater most closely to your business’s specific needs. In this guide:

• Nextiva: Quick Fact File
• Is Nextiva Right for Your Business?
• Nextiva Review: Key Features
• How Does Nextiva Compare to Other Providers
• About our VoIP Research
• Verdict: Is Nextiva Worth it?
• Nextiva Review FAQs

Nextiva will be perfect for some businesses, but it won’t suit others. Before we get into more detail about that in this Nextiva review, here’s a quick summary of the pros and cons of using the provider:

Nextiva Quick Fact File

If you don’t have enough time on your hands to read a full Nextiva review, check out the fact file we’ve put together just below – it details Nextiva’s key features and which assessment areas they correspond to. But first, here’s a quick summary of how the business phone system performed on Tech.co’s tests:

• Nextiva scores well for customer support (4.5/5) and average customer score (4.2/5)
• Nextiva received a poor scalability score (2.9/5) due to a lack of management features 
• Nextiva got a decent features score (3.8/5 – 5th/12)
• Nextiva is good value for money (3.8/5), and better value than 8×8 (2.5/5)  

Is Nextiva Right for Your Business?

According to one study, a standard VoIP system can save a business an average of 32 minutes a day per team member. But even the best business VoIP providers can’t be the ideal fit for every single business. They all have their merits and pitfalls, some are cheaper than others, and there are plenty of VoIP systems geared toward teams operating in specific industries. Before we delve into what you get with Nextiva compared to other competitors, here’s a quick look at the provider’s plans :

It’s worth noting that Nextiva’s price-per-user drops the more users you add to your package. The Essentials plan’s base price is $23.95 per user, per month – but if you’re going to need five users or more, it becomes $21.95 per user, per month, and if you have 2o or more, it becomes just $18.95 per user, per month.

Here’s a little bit more information on what you get on the three Nextiva plans:

• Essentials ($23.95 per user, per month): This plan has a lot of inbound communication features, plus a team messenger and task management tool. The major features omitted from this plan are SMS/chat for contacting clients/customers, call conferencing, and CRM/helpdesk integrations.
• Professional ($27.95 per user, per month): This plan includes everything on the Essentials plan plus features a multi-level auto attendant, voicemail to SMS notifications, and integrations with Nextiva’s own CRM platform as well as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk.
• Enterprise ($37.95 per user, per month): On this plan, you can host conference calls with unlimited attendees (the Professional plan has a 40-person cap), and there’s integration with more CRM platforms (Bullhorn, Oracle Sales Cloud) available.

Nextiva was rated 3.8/5 for value for money, achieving a better score than pricier provider RingCentral, which has an Essentials plan priced at $24.99 per user, per month.

However, Nextiva lets itself down by not providing multi-factor authentication, which RingCentral and 8×8 both include and is crucial for preventing cyberattacks. It’s also not got quite the range of management features (like call transcripts and monitoring) that Zoom includes in its $10 per user, per month Zoom Phone package.

However, Nextiva has collaboration tools like a task tracker that some other providers don’t offer – NUACOM, for example, has no collaboration tools on any plans, despite being more expensive than Nextiva. Nextiva also has a better range of customer support options than the likes of Vonage, which doesn’t offer 24/7 live support on any of its plans (Nextiva includes this on all plans).

There are also plenty of inbound communication features (such as ring groups and spam prevention) which make Nextiva more than capable of helping with the low-to-medium volume of calls many small businesses will expect to receive. This sets it apart from cheaper providers like Google Voice, which doesn’t even offer localized and toll-free numbers on its first two plans.

You can quickly find out which one of these plans is the best fit for your business – or whether a Nextiva competitor would be a better fit for your company – with our free VoIP comparison tool.

Nextiva Review: Key Features

In this section, we’ll delve into Nextiva’s key features, and see how useful it actually is as a VoIP product for businesses. Before that, here’s a quick summary of the most essential Nextiva features:

• Unlimited domestic calls to US, Canada, and Puerto Rico
• Localized and toll-free numbers can be set up 
• Mobile app available on the iPhone App Store and Google Play store 
• First and third-party hardware (desktop phones) available
• Video conferencing available on Professional and Enterprise plans

Nextiva Review: Customer support options

Nextiva scores 4.5/5 for customer support, which was one of the better scores awarded to VoIP products we tested. All of the customer support options listed below are available on all three of Nextiva’s plans:

• Email, chat, and phone support (all 24/7)
• Real-time system status alerts 
• Multi-site support

Nextiva also offers onboarding support for businesses on all of its plans, which isn’t offered by the likes of Google Voice, or by Ooma Office on the provider’s cheaper plans. Nextiva also provides a knowledge base to refer to if you think you can fix the issue yourself, and the provider has a 99.999% uptime guarantee.

Nextiva review: System security

Nextiva (3/5) didn’t score as well as competitors like RingCentral (5/5) or 8×8 (5/5) for security. As we’ve discussed, It doesn’t offer multi-factor authentication to users, which other VoIP systems like GoTo and Google Voice do, and there aren’t any password rules which will force staff to make long, complex passwords that are hard to crack.

That being said, Nextiva has a number of compliance certifications (HIPAA, SOC II, GDPR, CSA, ISO 270001/27017/27018) and deploys TLS/RTP encryption.

Nextiva review: Management and Collaboration Features

Nextiva has quite a good range of collaboration features, such as a team messenger, a document-sharing function, and even a task management tool for tracking tasks. NUACOM, Zoom Phone, and Google Voice don’t have a task tracker, and it’s not extremely common across the rest of the market either.

That being said, Nextiva doesn’t have many management features compared to other VoIP providers, with no call recording function on its first two plans, no call transcripts, and call monitoring requiring the Call Center add-on.

Zoom Phone, by way of comparison, offers call transcripts and monitoring right out of the box on all of its plans, as well as analytics and reporting functions that also require an add-on if you’re using Nextiva. What’s more, Zoom’s first paid plan, at $10 per user, per month, is also significantly cheaper than Nextiva’s Essentials plan.

Nextiva review: Inbound and outbound communication

Nextiva has plenty of inbound comms features that businesses of all shapes and sizes will find useful – customizable greetings, spam prevention, ring groups, and customizable hold music are available on every plan Nextiva offers.

In terms of outbound communication, you’ll get a customizable caller ID, external video calling, and e-fax on all plans. There’s also a call conferencing and SMS feature available on the Professional and Enterprise plans.

Overall, Nextiva scores 3.8/5 for features – it doesn’t offer voicemail-to-text on all plans, whereas RingCentral does, or custom call lists, which 8×8 does. Both these providers achieved higher feature scores (4.4/5 and 4.9/5 respectively). As we’ve mentioned previously, however, some of these providers’ plans are extremely expensive – 8×8’s X6 plan, which is its third-cheapest plan, is $44 per user, per month.

Nextiva review: Conversation features

Nextiva includes call forwarding, which will let calls be transferred between operators, and call flip, which will allow you to switch from a desk phone to a mobile without the call cutting off. The first one in particular is useful if you have junior staff that may need to defer to a manager during a call.

Nextiva also offers a call barge feature that allows a user to join an existing call between another user and a caller – but you’ll need to buy the Nextiva Call Center add-on. Again, this is useful for training staff because you’ll be able to join calls and support them if necessary. However, Zoom Phone includes this feature on all its plans without an add-on.

Nextiva review: External Connections/Integrations

Nextiva has a number of useful integration with popular software many businesses will already be using. Here’s the full list:

• CRM: Zoho, Salesforce, Hubspot, Oracle Sales Cloud, MS Dynamics, SugarCRM, Bullhorn
• Helpdesk: Zendesk, ServiceNow
• Productivity: Google Workspace, MS Teams, MS Outlook, Lotus Notes

The only downside is that only Microsoft Outlook and Google Workspace integrations are available on the Essentials plan ($23.95 per user, per month), and none of the above integrations will be accessible. Bullhorn, Oracle Sales Cloud, and ServiceNow, on the other hand, are only available on the Enterprise plan.

If you can’t see the software you were looking for and it’s vital that your VoIP system integrates with it, you could always use our VoIP comparison tool to generate a quote for a provider that has a wider range of external connections available.

Nextiva review: a good option for small businesses, but not very scalable

According to our industry-specific testing results, Nextiva is the third-best option for professional services teams, who will need to be easily contactable and available to clients throughout the day.

It has a great range of inbound comms features (e.g. virtual receptionist, voicemail-to-text, ring groups) for dealing with low volumes of inbound calls, plus SMS and video calling capabilities, meaning you’ll have multiple avenues through which to contact clients.

However, an average security score (3/5) means it’s not quite as well-suited to professional services teams as 8×8 is, which scores 5/5 for security, 5/5 for features, and 4.5/5 for external connections.

What’s more, if you’re a larger business of more than 50 employees and you’re expecting to grow, there will be more scalable options out there than Nextiva (more on this in the next section). As we’ve covered, the provider doesn’t have the best range of security features on the market, nor a wide range of features that will be useful to managers who supervise large teams, so Nextiva only achieved a 2.9/5 for scalability.

Not liking the sound of Nextiva? Find out which VoIP system is the best fit for your business here.

How Does Nextiva Compare to Other Providers?

Overall, Nextiva scores a very respectable 4.1/5, and received a better value-for-money score (3.8/5) than 8×8, RingCentral, Ooma Office, and NUACOM. As we’ve mentioned previously in this Nextiva review, the provider also scores particularly well when it comes to customer support (4.5/5), with live chat, email, phone, 24/7 live support, and onboarding support. This is a wider range than the other 11 providers we tested.

However, Nextiva scores poorly for scalability (2.9/5) compared to providers like RingCentral (4.9/5) because it just doesn’t have the management features that expanding businesses will benefit from, such as customizable call routing and call transcripts, which come in handy when training new staff.

As we’ve mentioned before, Nextiva’s middle-of-the-road security score (3/5) is not as good as RingCentral, 8×8, or Google Voice (all 5/5) – there’s no multi-factor authentication, which will be a turn-off to any team managing sensitive data. If security is a priority, however, fill in our free customer questionnaire – which takes less than 60 seconds to complete – and get matched to a provider that’s suited to your business’s needs.

About our VoIP Research

Here at Tech.co, we have an insights team that conducts research into all of the verticals we write about, such as business phone systems or project management software. They then use these frameworks to road-test all of the software and services that appear on our site, ranking the providers based on their performance in a variety of assessment areas.

After that, they collaborate with our team of expert writers, who then produce articles like this Nextiva review. It’s important to note that while we do have commercial partnerships with some of the providers we write about, our content is entirely research-led and the conclusions we draw are driven by data collected by our insights team. This allows us to be editorially independent – and that’s the way it’ll always be.

For our VoIP category, our research team honed in on seven core assessment categories they found to be the most important to our audience: value for money, external connections, features, customer support, security, customer score, and scalability.

Providers we tested were then scored separately on how well they’d suit businesses of different sizes (1-10, 10-50, and 50-250 employees) and businesses operating in different sectors (healthcare, professional services, retail, sales, and customer service).

Nextiva Review FAQs