Auto Attendant vs the VoIP platforms

The annual-billing trick, first

Before any table is useful you need to know this: five of the six vendors here that publish a price display the discounted annual rate as the price. The month-to-month figure is struck through, hidden behind a toggle, or not shown at all.

The gap is not small. RingCentral's Core tier is $20 per user per month annually and $30 monthly.1 Nextiva's Core is $15 annually and $23 monthly.2 Quo's Starter is $15 annually and $19 monthly.3

Nextiva's annual rate also carries the strictest conditions in this set. Its own footnote limits eligibility to "new small business customers with 1–100 employees signing a paid 12-month or longer minimum term agreement."2 That is a term contract, and it is not available to existing customers.

What each one costs, both ways

Scroll the table sideways to see every column.

Every figure is the vendor's own list price from its own pricing page on the date at the top of this page, with promotional offers excluded. "Unverified" means exactly that: the vendor's page did not state it in a form we could read, and we would rather leave a gap than fill it from a review site.

A naming change worth knowing about

If you are researching OpenPhone, note that openphone.com/pricing now redirects to quo.com/pricing and the company presents itself as Quo, with "OpenPhone Technologies, Inc." retained in the legal text.3 Comparison tables naming OpenPhone are working from an older snapshot of the market.

More importantly for a small business: Quo's entry Starter tier does not include an auto attendant. A phone menu is a Business-tier feature.3 The $15 headline does not buy the thing most people are shopping for when they land on a page like this.

What the platforms bundle in

These are full phone systems, so the per-user price also pays for features outside an inbound menu: desk phones, call recording (Zoom Phone lists it at its entry tier;5 RingCentral includes on-demand recording at Core1), call queues (RingCentral Core includes a basic queue that "distributes incoming calls to available employees"1), unlimited calling bundles (Ooma Essentials includes unlimited calling in the US, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico plus a free toll-free number4), and agent dashboards or CRM integration on higher tiers. Auto Attendant answers incoming calls: each option rings up to three phones in turn, takes a voicemail or plays a message. The explainer covers how an auto attendant differs from a queue of interchangeable agents.

Where Auto Attendant fits

Every product above except Grasshopper charges per user, so the bill scales with how many people could answer a phone. Auto Attendant charges one flat fee per line with no per-person charge, and each of the up to seven menu options rings up to three phones in turn.

At three users, at the entry-tier annual rates above, it is cheaper than all of them, and at seven it is not close. The pricing page sets out that arithmetic.

• No per-seat licences. Adding a person to the menu does not add a licence.
• The team keeps its own mobiles. Calls ring as ordinary incoming calls showing the business number; nobody installs an app or a desk phone.
• Month to month. $29 a month with no annual term, so there is no discounted rate that depends on a contract.
• Set up online. Pick a number, write the menu and choose the phones each option rings in turn, and the menu language (English, French or Spanish), in the app; business hours, a closed message and voicemails by email with transcripts are included.