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.

When you should buy one of these instead

Genuinely, and this is not a token section. A full platform is the right purchase when you need any of the following, because we do not have them and are not building them:

• Desk phones. We support none. Most of these vendors do.
• Call recording. Zoom Phone lists call recording at its entry tier;5 RingCentral includes on-demand recording at Core, with automatic recording starting at Advanced.1
• Call queues with waiting callers. RingCentral Core includes a basic call queue that "distributes incoming calls to available employees", with advanced routing higher up.1
• Agent dashboards, wallboards, CRM integration or compliance retention. Different category entirely.
• Unlimited calling bundles. Ooma Essentials includes unlimited calling in the US, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico plus a free toll-free number.4

If you need a queue of interchangeable agents, you want an ACD, and that is what these platforms are built around. Our explainer covers why that is a different machine from an auto attendant.

Of the set, RingCentral Core and Ooma Essentials are the fair picks for a buyer who needs those things, because both include an auto attendant at the entry tier rather than gating it upward.14

Where we fit

The case for us is narrow and arithmetic. Every product above except Grasshopper charges per user, so the bill scales with how many people could answer a phone. We charge one flat fee for the company.

At one user we are more expensive than most of this table. At three users, at the entry-tier annual rates above, we are cheaper than all of them. At ten, it is not close. The pricing page sets out that arithmetic.

The trade is real and worth restating: you get a number, a menu, ring groups, schedules and voicemail transcripts, and you do not get desk phones, recording, queues, dashboards or integrations. If that trade is wrong for you, buy from the table above — and buy on the month-to-month price unless you are certain you want a year of it.