Our reviewers evaluate products and services based on unbiased research. Top Consumer Reviews may earn money when you click on a link. Learn more about our process.
If you're the owner of a startup or small business and are looking for a low-cost phone service that includes a toll-free number and voicemail messages via email, you should consider setting up a business phone system.
Perhaps you want to expand your business and now you need to route and manage your phone calls and faxes? Or maybe your business is a well-established enterprise, looking to save costs and simplify hardware and software requirements? No matter what you're trying to do, a wide variety of online services are available to help you put together a business phone system to scale your operations.
Wednesday, January 20th
RingCentral is a big disrupter in the business phone market. With next-generation features, sleek app design, and advanced technology, they are ahead of the curve and able to deliver business-class phone systems with quality and at an affordable price. RingCentral earns our top rating among business phone systems.
Phone is a business VoIP company that provides a variety of features for your phone service at a price that won't empty your bank account. Phone's always-available support ensures your business activities can resume quickly in case of a problem.
The private branch exchange (PBX) is the foundation of successful business communications. Virtual PBX takes the old PBX, based on lots of local hardware and wires, and makes it virtual or cloud-based. VirtualPBX has great customer service and keeps your communications working smoothly.
eVoice has a quick setup and the ability to forward calls, issue custom greetings, port your current number, and a ton of inbound call management features. However, their price is just a bit on the high end, so make sure to compare the features and value with other companies before jumping in with both feet.
Nextiva is a cloud-based PBX system with a reasonable cost and a good feature set that will help keep your employees able to communicate with customers and with each other. Some of their customers have had complaints about contract and technical support problems related to misunderstandings about the business' environment. Be sure to investigate other possibilities before making plans to go ahead with Nextiva.
Grasshopper is a capable although expensive way to go when establishing a business phone system. While they have a 30-day money-back guarantee to determine if the features are worth the higher price, you may want to consider other options once you see Grasshopper's BBB rating.
Freedom Voice competes on the level of the cost of a standard phone connection with its private branch exchange technology. They have lots of features as well as a variety of phones to choose from. Although they don't have a BBB accreditation, or even an entry on the BBB website, we still found ample customer reviews about their service.
8x8 seems like a capable cloud PBX system. However, the company has not made any progress in improving the transparency with which a potential customer can identify their systems price points. Hidden pricing in this day and age can send the message that the options are too expensive to publish. And in fact, 8x8 costs do run on the high side.
MegaPath as a company seems well-established with multiple product lines across a wide geography. This also opens them up to a large number of critics. Our research into the customer satisfaction level with MegaPath revealed that none of its product lines are doing particularly stellar at customer service, and that includes its business VoIP systems. There's just not a lot of consumer confidence in this company to make a good recommendation for it.
Companies like Kall 8 that are trying to compete at a higher level will want to make their pricing and feature information as easy to grasp as possible. Kall 8's complicated pricing tables made it hard to understand the full cost of their services and whether they'd be an overall savings or drain on the budgets of their potential customers. According to their customers, Kall 8 also seems to stumble quite a bit when it comes to keeping their system from getting out of control.
Ooma's list of features, support for analog phones, and their low international rates will only get them so far. Having a lot of problem reports with the Better Business Bureau and several bad reviews cancels out any perception of value in our minds. While you may be tempted, we'd suggest you consider a higher rated company first.
Our surprise that Vonage ended up ranked lower as a business phone system is only tempered by the fact that they've been one of the longest-running players in this space. There always seems to be one legacy company that tends to rest on its laurels and Vonage appears to be in that category. It was hard to find very many good customer experiences when validating the impressive list of features Vonage has. We think you should look further up the list for a company that can deliver great customer service as well as business phone features.
The business phone services we review provide local and toll-free phone numbers, route calls to multiple phone numbers at once, or send them in a predetermined order. Also, if you use a web-centric phone and fax system, all of your communications tasks can happen while you're mobile. You can block calls, monitor call activity, and retrieve messages and faxes wherever you are.
Business phone system companies like these offer online controls to boost productivity and streamline operations. They include tools such as one-touch dialing, fax-to-email and voicemail-to-email services, call recording, message archives, detailed call logs, and internet faxing. Should your team members be situated across the city, the state, the country, or internationally, cloud-based phone and fax systems can connect your entire workforce.
In the event that you don't have a large business presence in need of a phone system to match it, you can still find services that will help you on a smaller scale. You may only need a single toll-free number with call-forwarding capability where your calls are routed to existing phone numbers of your choice, wherever you are in the world. You can use the caller ID function to figure out whether a forwarded call is for business or personal reasons.
Here are some factors to look at when considering which business phone system to purchase:
TopConsumerReviews.com has ranked and reviewed the best business phone systems available today. We hope this information helps you find the right business phone system for your needs!
Select any 2 Business Phone Systems to compare them head to head