Nextiva Review – Features, Pros and Cons and Pricing

Out of the 11 leading VoIP providers that our research team was tested, Nextiva is the 7th best overall. Nextiva provides phone, email, and 24/7 live support, has no user limit on any of its plans, and will let you make unlimited domestic calls to the US and Canada. Plans start from $20 per user, per month, going up to $60 per user, per month.

The big downside is that Nextiva is not a very scalable product, with few management tools, 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 At a Glance
• Nextiva Pricing and Plans Explained
• Nextiva Review: Key Features
• How Does Nextiva Compare to Other Providers?
• Is Nextiva Right for Your Business?
• About our VoIP Research
• Verdict: Is Nextiva Worth it?

Nextiva At a Glance

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 has great customer support, with 24/7 live support on all plans, as well as a great customer score (4.2/5), partly down to its usability.
• 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). It has a good range of collaboration features, but fewer management options.
• Nextiva is good value for money (3.8/5), with pricing starting at $20 per user, per month.

Nextiva Pricing and Plans Explained

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:

Nextiva Enterprise plans

Alongside this, Nextiva also offers three plans geared towards larger businesses. Here’s a little bit more information on what you get on the three enterprise-scale Nextiva plans:

• Enterprise Essential ($129 per user, per month): This plan has a lot of inbound communication features, plus list and campaign management, process automation, dynamic scripting, and more.
• Enterprise Professional ($159 per user, per month): This plan includes everything on the Essentials plan plus secure payment agent assist (PCI), remote telephony edge server connect, single screen recording, and more.
• Enterprise Premium ($199 per user, per month): On this plan, you can carry out workforce management, view advanced customer experience (CX) analytics, use optimized workflows for interaction deflection, and conduct multi-screen recording.

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

Below, we’ll delve into some of these specific features in more detail.

Customer support options

Nextiva scores 4.5/5 for customer support, which was one of the better scores awarded to VoIP products we tested. It features 24/7 email, chat, and phone support on all of its plans, as well as real-time system status alerts, multi-site support, and onboarding support. By comparison, Google Voice doesn’t offer onboarding support, and nor does Ooma Office on its cheaper plans. For customers that prefer to try and resolve issues themselves, Nextiva also provides a comprehensive knowledge base, as well as a 99.999% uptime guarantee.

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 MFA to users, which other VoIP systems like GoTo and Google Voice do, and there aren’t any password rules that 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.

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, by contrast, don’t offer a task tracker, and it’s relatively uncommon across the market as a whole.

However, Nextiva doesn’t have many management features, with no call recording function on its first plan, and call transcripts are only available as an add-on on its most expensive plan. Zoom Phone, meanwhile, offers transcripts and monitoring right out of the box on all of its plans.

Inbound and outbound communication

Nextiva has plenty of inbound and outbound comms features that businesses of all shapes and sizes will find useful. For example, digital fax is available on later plans, alongside video conferencing, voice analytics, and more. What’s more, users can forward and flip calls, which allows you to transfer calls between operators, and switch between desk phone and mobile. This is really useful for small business owners that might be on the go.

Overall, Nextiva scores 3.8/5 for features. It doesn’t offer voicemail-to-text, whereas RingCentral does, or custom call lists, which 8×8 does. In fact, both of these providers achieved higher feature scores (4.4/5 and 4.9/5 respectively).

Integrations

Nextiva offers integrations on its later plans, with platforms including Zoho, Salesforce, Hubspot, Oracle Sales Cloud, MS Dynamics, SugarCRM, Bullhorn, and more. It’s a decent range of options, but it pales in comparison with RingCentral, which offers over 200 integrations for businesses that are looking to scale. Due to this and its lack of management features, Nextiva doesn’t score very highly in terms of its scalability.

Is Nextiva Right for Your Business?

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, digital fax, smart call routing) 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. 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.

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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. For a more detailed breakdown of how the platform compares to its competitors on a pricing and features basis, check out the table below.

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).