Compare the Best Business Phone Services
Our top recommendation for most people is Nextiva or RingCentral. Both services offer unmatched functionality and a suite of features that almost anyone can use.
Our Favorite Business Phone Services 2022:
Nextiva - Best for most
RingCentral - Best for hybrid or remote work
GoTo Connect - Best for getting a wealth of features in a basic plan
Ooma - Best for small businesses needing an easy setup
How We Narrowed the List of Qualified Business Phone Services
Plenty of these brands didn’t meet our standards and ended up cut from our list. We used six core criteria points to figure out which ones didn’t best serve our readers’ needs for a business phone system.
We eliminated 55% of the 29 brands that didn’t meet these criteria:
- AI assistance: recording and summarizing calls, and setting up ideal workflows.
- Manage calls seamlessly: starred brands that came with all these features and more.
- Location flexibility: well-reviewed desktop and mobile apps made our list.
- Reliability: 99.99% uptime and tools to quickly analyze and fix issues that do arise.
- All-in-one UCaaS solution: conferencing, video, text messaging, team messaging, faxing, file sharing, and phone services is ideal.
Using this process, we cut 16 brands. Here’s a list of the brands that are qualified but not recommended, plus a breakdown of why they didn’t make the list.
1-VoIP: This is a basic, dependable business phone software, but it’s lacking essential features like AI assistance, call flipping, call tracking, training tools, and outbound calling features.
Twilio: A dynamic CPaaS tool, Twilio uses APIs to embed voice into established apps, making it a niche product that requires a developer to install. It’s perfect for certain businesses but doesn’t make sense for our list.
11Sight: This service hands power over to potential customers, allowing them to hop on a video call to get the information they need to convert. While useful in some situations, this function is too niche for our list.
Vonage: While it appears to be a strong choice for VoIP services, Vonage can get expensive quickly - and it has too many negative reviews to make our list.
Zoom: While Zoom excels at hosting webinars and video conferences, its phone services are prohibitively expensive and it doesn’t offer outbound calling.
Microsoft Teams: If you’re already immersed in the Microsoft ecosystem, Teams is a decent choice. But it lacks unlimited minutes and the common features that make a business phone system stand out.
Channels: This niche service lets your target audience connect with you via your website or social media channels. A neat idea, but like 11Sight, it’s too niche for our list.
eVoice: A basic tool that offers virtual phone numbers for existing lines, eVoice is too limited for our top list of complete business phone services.
Phone.com: A decent, middle-of-the-road offering, Phone.com can’t compare to the more feature-rich systems on our top list.
Zoho Voice: Since it only integrates well with other Zoho products, Zoho Voice only makes sense for those fully entrenched in the Zoho ecosystem—and even then, Voice is a bit too clunky and slow for our list.
800.com: While this tool does well at forwarding toll-free calls to existing lines, that’s about all it can do.
OpenPhone: A virtual phone number provider with a few extra features, OpenPhone lacks the full suite of tools that would qualify it for this list.
Mitel: This service does pretty well as an office phone tool, but it lacks the features of a full-service business phone provider
CloudTalk: A solid offering for a cloud-based call center or small-scale phone system, CloudTalk is missing core UCaaS features.
3CX: Even though 3CX offers many of the features we’re looking for, it’s missing something vital: customer support.
CallHippo: A competent choice for basic phone services, CallHippo’s price is too high for a service with no UCaaS features.
The Top 13 Business Phone Services Left Standing
After eliminating 61.7% of all the brands we considered, 13 outstanding business phone services remained. Our top choices for most users are Nextiva and RingCentral.
Nextiva — Best for most
RingCentral — Best for hybrid or remote work
Ooma — Best for small businesses needing an easy setup
8×8 — Best for affordable, high-security calling services
Aircall — Best for brands with a consistently high call volume
Avaya — Best for using toll-free numbers
Dialpad — Best for gathering real-time analytics
Google Voice — Best for brands already using Google products
GoTo Connect — Best for getting a wealth of features in a basic plan
Grasshopper — Best for solopreneurs and microbusinesses
Net2Phone — Best for international business calls
Talkroute — Best for small teams on-the-go
Webex Calling — Best for SMBs who need enterprise features
