Auto Attendant vs Google Voice

First, Google Voice is two different products

Almost every comparison of Google Voice gets this wrong, and it matters more than any feature. Google Voice is not one product with three tiers. It is two separate product families that happen to share the tier names Starter, Standard and Premier, plus a free consumer plan.

• Standalone Voice is bought with a personal Google account, needs no Google Workspace subscription, and supports a maximum of one user. It is US only.3
• Voice as a Workspace add-on requires a paid Google Workspace subscription first — "Your organization needs Google Workspace before you can buy a Voice add-on subscription"5 — and is the only way to have multiple users. Google states it plainly on the product page: "Workspace is required to enable Voice for multiple users in your organization."1
• The free plan is described by Google as "for personal, consumer use".2

What it actually costs a team

Google's list prices, from Google's own pages: Starter $10, Standard $20, Premier $30, each per user per month.1 Billing is explicitly per licence — "You're charged monthly for the number of Voice licenses you assign to users"4 — and the currency is USD.4

For a team, Workspace is an additional and separate subscription. Google Workspace list prices are Business Starter $7.00, Business Standard $14.00 and Business Plus $22.00 per user per month, and that page notes "Price is per user/month and does not include tax".6

There is a second wrinkle. Voice Starter has no auto attendant and no ring groups — both are documented as "available with the Voice Standard and Premier subscriptions".78 So a team that wants the thing this site is named after is comparing against Workspace plus Voice Standard, not Starter.

Scroll the table sideways to see every column.

Prices are Google's list prices retrieved on the date at the top of this page. Both Google pages carried time-limited promotional discounts when we checked; we quote list, because a promotion is not a price you can plan around. Verify before you buy.

The auto attendant question

Google's own term is "automated attendant (auto attendant)".7 Here is what is true, stated carefully, because this is where stale blog claims do the most damage.

Google Voice does have a real multi-level auto attendant. It is not a single-level toy. The documentation describes sending a caller to a submenu — "Continue to a submenu — Direct callers to another menu" — and transferring between attendants.7 Anyone telling you Google Voice cannot nest menus is working from out-of-date information.

It is gated to Standard and Premier. "This feature is available with the Voice Standard and Premier subscriptions."7 Starter does not have it, and neither does the free plan.

Ring groups are also Standard and Premier, and Google calls them "Ring groups, also called hunt groups", supporting up to 50 members.8 Because a ring group means several people, it requires the Workspace add-on rather than the one-user standalone plan.2

So the honest summary is not "Google Voice has no auto attendant". It is: Google Voice has a capable auto attendant, and reaching it costs $20 per user per month on top of a Workspace subscription.

About the free plan, precisely

Google describes the free consumer plan as being "for personal, consumer use"2 and it remains a current, listed subscription type. We found no Google announcement that it is being discontinued, and this page will not imply otherwise.

One more trap worth naming: "Google Voice Personal" is a paid product, not the free one, and its terms state "These services and features are for business use."16 Anyone conflating the two is describing something that does not exist.

Where each one works

Google Voice business tiers offer numbers in 14 countries and regions: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US.10 American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are excluded.10

Standalone plans and the free plan are US only.3

In fairness to Google, "not available in country X" is often too blunt. SIP Link and Carrier Link let you bring numbers from your own carrier in a much longer list of countries — including Australia, Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa and others — because "SIP/Carrier Link is also available in countries where first-party calling is not available."10

Getting your number in, and out again

This section is mostly favourable to Google, and it should be.

Porting out is supported, documented and cheap. Unlocking a Google Voice number costs $3, and "if your number was originally ported in from another carrier, there's no charge."11 Google Voice is not a number-hostage situation, which is more than can be said for parts of this industry.

Porting a consumer mobile number in costs $20, takes up to 48 hours for calls, and Google warns that "Not all mobile numbers can be ported into Google Voice."11

Two constraints are worth knowing before you commit, because they are discovered painfully at migration time:

• Toll-free numbers cannot be ported in. Google lists them first among numbers you cannot port.12 A business advertising an 800 number cannot bring it.
• In European countries, mobile, VoIP and nomadic numbers cannot be ported in either12 — effectively leaving geographic landline numbers only.

Business ports run through an administrator, need a signed letter of authorization uploaded "within 7 days of creating the port order", and are limited to one wireless number per order.13 Published timelines vary sharply by country: Canada 4 business days, Germany, Belgium and Denmark 13, France 18, Italy and Sweden 20.13

Google's advice on both directions is the same as ours and is the single most important rule in number porting: "Don't cancel your existing service or Voice until Voice notifies you that the number port is complete."12 We cover the mechanics generally on porting your existing number.

Where Google Voice is genuinely better

A comparison that finds nothing good about the alternative is an advertisement, not a comparison.

• Desk phone support on every tier. Google documents "Desk phone & ATA support" across its plans.315 If your business wants physical handsets on desks, we simply do not do that, and Google does it at the entry tier where several competitors reserve it for higher ones.
• Unlimited users from Standard upward.1
• Call recording. Manual recording is "available for all paid Voice services" and automatic recording comes with Premier.14 We have no call recording at all.
• Compliance and reporting depth. Google Vault and BigQuery reporting on Premier151 are in a different category from anything we offer.
• It is already in your Google account. If you run on Workspace, the administration, billing and identity are somewhere your team already goes.

When you should stay on Google Voice

Genuinely, these are the cases where switching to us would be a mistake:

• You work alone in the US and do not need a menu. Standalone Starter at $10 a month3 is cheaper than we are and does the job. Buy that.
• You already pay for Google Workspace and need simple routing. The marginal cost of adding Voice is smaller than a new vendor, and the administration lives where your team already works.
• You need desk phones, call recording, or eDiscovery. We do not have them and are not planning to.
• You need users in many countries, or want to bring carrier numbers via SIP Link.10

This page compares Google Voice with one alternative: ours. For the wider field, our long-form Google Voice alternatives article sorts the market by the constraint you actually hit, with current per-user and flat pricing and country coverage for each.

Where we are the better answer is narrower and specific: a small team, everyone already carrying a mobile they are happy with, who need a caller to be asked a question and routed to the right person, and who do not want to buy a per-user licence for each person who might answer a phone. That is the whole thesis, and outside it we will tell you to buy something else.