The Best VoIP Services in 2023 | Top 8 VoIP Providers Compared and Reviewed

The best VoIP services can help homes and businesses save on phone bills and enjoy smooth, live conversations. With that being said, countless VoIP service providers are competing for your attention, so it can be hard to choose one, which is why we’re here today.

Here, we’ll be looking at the best VoIP services of 2023 to help you find the perfect fit for you. We’ve put the cream of the crop in the VoIP world against one another, reviewing them and comparing their pros, cons, and features. Read on to find out how services like Ooma, RingCentral, and Nextiva can help streamline your business communications.

The Best VoIP Services 2023 | Quick Answer

There are countless VoIP providers out there; however, there are a few that stand out above the rest. In our testing, Ooma has proven to be the best VoIP service in 2024. Here’s a quick breakdown of the competition:

1. Ooma — The Best VoIP Service in 2023 | Pay $99.95 Once.
2. RingCentral — The Most Professional VoIP Service | Put it to the Test for Free With 50 Free Minutes of Domestic Calls.
3. Nextiva — Best VoIP for Small Business Scalability | Try it With the 30-Day Free Trial and Unlimited Minutes.
4. Phone.com — Best VoIP Service for Home | Try it Risk-Free With its 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee.
5. 8×8 — Phenomenal VoIP Service for Global Businesses | Take Advantage of the Month-Long Free Trial.
6. Mighty Call — Best VoIP Service for Small Businesses in Terms of Simplicity | Try it With the 7-Day Free Trial.
7. VoIPLy — Great Cheap VoIP Phone System | Give it a Try With the 30-Day Free Trial
8. DialPad — Leading VoIP Solution for International Calling | Offers Free Calls to Over 60 Countries.

Get a Quote from Leading VoIP Services

Wondering which provider would suit you best? Use the form below to get a tailored VoIP quote.

The Best VoIP Services in 2023 | In-Depth Reviews

In this section, we’ll dive into what the best VoIP providers in 2023 have to offer. We’ll be looking over their features, pros, cons, and pricing to help you pick the perfect one for you. Let’s get to it.

1. Ooma — The Best VoIP Service in 2023

Ooma is an excellent VoIP phone system for homes or small businesses without a dedicated IT department.

Ooma is the best residential VoIP services in 2023 due to having an entirely free plan. If you’re a home user looking for the best free VoIP service to make calls, then Ooma is the perfect choice for you.

Ooma uses autoconfiguration to set itself up. This means that this user-friendly VoIP service only takes about 15 minutes to go from setup to using the tool to its full potential, which is great for first-time users in the VoIP market.

Outside of this, if you’re a small business or home user without much money to spare on a VoIP service or are simply opposed to subscriptions, Ooma is the one for you. It’s only $100 for a Ooma router (with free shipping), after which there are no fees on the basic plan.

With Ooma, you can get many features for a one-time fee and have them stay with you forever. This can result in massive savings across a few years in a business, so it’s worth keeping it in mind. When you need to scale your business, Ooma has a variety of business plans and products available.

Ooma’s paid plans offer features like call blocking, 911 alerts, Amazon Alexa integration and a mobile app that lets you use your home phone number on the go. What’s more, if you’ve got an existing number it’s a very easy process to transfer it over to Ooma’s VoIP system.

Outside of these exclusive features, Ooma has a ton of other business use features. There’s the usual combo of call transfers, analytics, and automation features. This makes it a good choice for businesses looking to streamline their operations.

However, these advanced features require higher-priced plans and a subscription. This is in line with other high-end VoIP programs, and Ooma’s plans are pretty affordable.

Unsure? Try Ooma for free by taking advantage of its free plan or 30-day money-back guarantee for the paid services.

Pricing

Ooma has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, with their essential features being free, and some others behind a one-time paywall. However, some of the more advanced features suited to business use are still locked behind a subscription. These include the ability to register up to nine additional numbers in a single area code, as well as Google Voice and Alexa integration.

To give Ooma a try risk-free you can either take advantage of its free service or use its 30-day money-back guarantee.

2. RingCentral — The Most Professional VoIP Service in 2023

RingCentral is an incredibly advanced, scalable VoIP solution perfect for homes and businesses alike. With over 35 million satisfied customers, this cloud-based solution is one of the most prominent players in the market.

As the hands-down best VoIP for small businesses, it’s no surprise that RingCentral works with all internet-enabled devices, including PCs, VMs, phones, and laptops. It’ll even work with analog devices — as long as you have an ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter.)

This flexibility makes it perfect for business use, as you don’t have to rely on everyone having the same technology available at all times. You can just as easily call from your home office PC as from your phone at an airport.

The cloud-based nature of RingCentral further lends to this flexibility, as it doesn’t need an on-premises setup. This lets homeowners skip the hassle of setting up tedious hardware and get to the software faster.

At the same time, it helps businesses scale — plus it excels at supporting fully online or remote-heavy businesses — as your employees won’t need hardware set up.

RingCentral brings various advanced features to businesses, not the least of which is its AI-based closed captioning. This feature generates a transcript of everything said within a meeting and even records voicemails.

This is perfect for large calls RingCentral facilitates. Plus, even if someone’s audio quality is bad, you’ll still be able to see what they’re saying with RingCentral’s transcripts.

RingCentral further simplifies communication by providing businesses with features like:

• • Unlimited faxes
  • Document sharing
  • A team messaging service
  • Unlimited calls to the US and Canada
  • Toll-free numbers

All these features are essential in providing a constructive and efficient work environment by eliminating the need to send documents via email or scattering your communications through a dozen different platforms.

Pricing

RingCentral starts at $19.99/user for up to 20 users. This makes the Essentials plan an excellent choice for small businesses.

Each of the other 3 plans gives you access to more features, with Premium and up giving you access to Open API to streamline integrations with 3rd party software.

Put RingCentral to the test today risk-free by using its free video plan for endless video meetings and team messaging, or take advantage of the 14-day free trial for any of the paid plans.

3. Nextiva — Best VoIP For Small Business Scalability

Nextiva is the best VoIP service for your business if you want scalable, easy-to-use software to streamline your client-customer relations.

In a small business setting, it’s crucial all internal communications flow well and can be referenced at a later date. Nextiva enables this through unlimited:

• • File sharing
  • Video conferencing
  • Unlimited calls
  • Video meeting recording

This ensures all team members are always in the loop, even if they’re out of the office at the time of the meeting. Besides this, one of the service’s biggest benefits is its Business Insights feature.

It can be difficult to track each team member’s performance and the businesses’ success rate with different approaches. Through the power of in-depth graphs and reports, Nextiva helps streamline this.

It’ll show you all outgoing and incoming calls, how long they lasted, as well as in-depth statistics on the performance of each team member. This enables you to track:

1. 1. How well customer-facing positions are performing by looking at how many calls they’re answering
   2. How long they’re lasting
   3. Plus, the busiest call times, so you can prioritize manpower accordingly

This helps streamline sales, showing you with deadly accuracy how your team is performing at generating new leads and clients. It’ll even allow you to record up to 3 different professional greetings varying based on the audience you’re talking to.

As one of the best business VoIP phone systems, it’s no surprise that Nextiva provides a multi-level auto-attendant that’ll cater to all your customer’s questions and provide automated solutions. This lets your service agents focus on tasks that require human care rather than answering the same questions repeatedly.

On top of all this, Nextiva has a highly intuitive, easy-to-use UI to help with onboarding and ensure small businesses can get the most out of it.

Pricing:

Nextiva features 3 different plans. At its cheapest is Nextiva’s Essential plan for over 100 users at $17.95/user/month, smaller teams will have to pay up to $21.95/user/month for the same service.

It’s worth noting that Nextiva’s transcription and recording services are reserved for the Enterprise plan at $31.95/user/month. You can give Nextiva a try risk-free with the 7-day free trial and 14-day money-back guarantee.

4. Phone.com — Best VoIP Service for Home

Phone.com is the best VoIP phone service for home users and small businesses that aren’t looking to break the bank but still want ample features to support them.

For the most part, Phone.com is a cloud-based software with only a few features requiring any hardware. It has an extremely streamlined, easy-to-use interface, which is important for home users who don’t want a complex tool.

Providing 500 minutes and 1,000 SMS messages for less than half the average phone bill — hence why Phone.com is one of the best UK virtual phone number providers. This is more than enough for most home users, letting you call for almost 10 hours before racking up any more on your subscription.

On top of this, if you’re always getting bogged down by cold callers, scammers, or robocalls, you’ll be excited to know that Phone.com’s call screening and blocking capabilities will ensure these numbers don’t both you further — a great addition to businesses too.

On the business side of things, Phone.com offers multiple plans, including video conferencing, call routing, and call transfer features to ensure that the right agent is reached when a customer calls — this is superb for streamlining your business-customer relations.

Whether you’re a business or an individual, missing a call and listening to the voicemail can be a chore. Thankfully, Phone.com provides AI-assisted voicemail and call transcription.

This deals with voicemails and ensures you remember everything someone said on a call. Whether you’re at the mall looking up what your spouse asked for lunch or a business official looking through their last meeting, this feature can be a lifesaver.

Try the best VoIP service for home users, free with the 30-day money-back guarantee.

Pricing

Phone.com is an affordable service, with its Basic plan starting out at just $11.99/user/month.

However, if you need a little more oomph, such as unlimited SMS and call minutes, you might want to go for the Plus or Pro plan instead. Should Phone.com sound like the best VoIP app for you, you can try it risk-free using its 30-day money-back guarantee.

5. 8×8 — Best VoIP Service for Global Businesses

8×8 is the perfect choice for large, global businesses looking to ensure crisp, HD call quality, a high-quality mobile app experience, and the availability of enterprise-focused advanced features.

As one of the best internet phone services, 8×8 has over 2 million customers worldwide, supporting over 50 countries — perfect for global businesses and remote-first companies.

Privacy and adherence to compliance standards are essential for large businesses. With fees reaching into the millions and cybercrime at an all-time high, it’s important to stay compliant and keep team communications secure.

8×8 features end-to-end encryption, ensuring all messages are hacking-proof and secure, and they offer automated assistance for adhering to even the most rigid standards.

Besides this, streamlining operations and avoiding inefficiencies are crucial to the success of any large business. 8×8’s ‘Presence Detection’ features ensure that teams are notified if a member isn’t available, which is perfect for keeping everyone in the loop and monitoring the productivity of remote employees.

A big downside of many VoIP providers at large enterprises is their lack of support for the plethora of third-party integrations used daily. Thankfully, 8×8 integrates extremely well with software like HubSpot, Zendesk, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and others.

As a business grows, their needs for customer service grow with them. Auto Attendant is 8×8’s attempt to alleviate this, providing automatic solutions for calling customers’ problems.

However, if human care is necessary, its ‘Call Queueing’ feature will immediately route the call to an available agent. This ensures your customer service spends less time dealing with repetitive issues and can answer more daily tickets.

If you’d like to try 8×8 but aren’t quite sure if it’s worth the subscription, you can use its 30-day free trial to try it completely risk-free.

Pricing

8×8’s pricing starts at $15/user/month with its Express plan. This plan provides unlimited calls to the US and Canada and is good for up to 5 team members.

With that being said, 8×8’s most powerful features belong in its X2 and X4 packages. If you’d like to try 8×8 but aren’t quite sure if it’s worth the subscription, you can use the 30-day free trial to try it for free.

6. MightyCall — Best VoIP Service for Small Businesses in Terms of Simplicity

MightyCall is the perfect VoIP service for small businesses looking for simple and reliable VoIP software to streamline their work environment.

The tool has an incredible UI, having one of, if not the best VoIP apps for iPhone and Android. It supports all popular platforms, including virtual phones and VMs.

Being fully cloud-based, MightyCall ticks all the boxes to help your business streamline communication. Furthermore, it integrates with 3rd party software like WhatsApp to make existing communication channels more efficient for your team.

Besides this, MightyCall is incredible for making customer service more efficient. With its Multi-level IVR, the tool will automatically ask callers an array of questions, looking to resolve their issue using its preexisting database of replies.

If it’s unable to do that, the ‘Auto Receptionist’ feature will automatically direct the caller toward the agent best suited for their issue. This streamlines ticket assignments and helps your personnel spend more time on complex issues that can’t be automated.

For B2B-focused and small businesses, scoring and maintaining VIP clients is incredibly important.

MightyCall ensures you never miss a call from an important client by using ‘Business Hour’ call routing to route their calls to the number of your choice (such as your personal) after hours; plus, you can record default greetings for clients to ensure a phenomenal customer experience 24/7.

Try MightyCall for free using its 7-day free trial today.

Pricing

MightyCall’s Small Team edition starts at $15/user/month — albeit it’s limited in terms of features — you still get 500 call minutes and 100 SMS messages for 2 users.

Its Business plan gives you access to some more advanced features, as well as unlimited VoIP calls, and texts for up to 3 users. The Enterprise plan, on the other hand, gives you unlimited users, minutes, and texts alongside all of its advanced features.

If MightyCall sounds like the VoIP software for you, you can give it a try using the 7-day free trial.

7. VoIPLy — Best VoIP Phone System For Pricing

VoIPLy is a well-rounded VoIP made affordable for home users and small businesses alike. Although it doesn’t do much to break the mold, it does a great job of providing well-known features.

VoIPLy prides itself on its accessibility, being one of the best VoIP for home due to its friendly per-month pricing and simple UI. This makes it great for home users and small businesses not looking to shell out on VoIP software.

Naturally, it supports all popular platforms and even allows you to upgrade to a cordless WiFi mobile phone. In a business setting, having a robust mobile phone app alongside this makes VoIPLy a straightforward software to set up and maintain, letting you allocate your manpower elsewhere.

If your family and business partners are already used to calling you on a specific number, you’ll be happy to know VoIPLy lets you easily port your old number into the system.

Furthermore, you’ll get unlimited calls and SMS messages when you acquire the service. This ensures a seamless transition from traditional phone services to VoIPLy.

Available in over 50 countries, VoIPLy provides many of the features of its top competitors. This includes call forwarding, IVR, spam-blocker tools, and more. This is critical in a business environment, as you’ll want your VoIP service to streamline things as much as possible.

On a final note, many businesses prioritize uptime when it comes to VoIP software. After all, your VoIP tool going down may lead to missing that crucial call. Thankfully, VoIPLy has over 99.9% uptime to protect you against this.

If VoIPLy sounds like your cup of tea, you can try it for free using its 30-day money-back guarantee.

Pricing

VoIPLy has two plans. Notably, there are no differences between the plans feature-wise, only in the number of users supported. If VoIPLy sounds appealing to you, give it a shot risk-free by taking advantage of its 30-day money-back guarantee.

8. DialPad — Best VoIP Solution for International Calling

DialPad is an excellent, feature-packed VoIP solution for making international calls. Being available in over 60 countries and providing unlimited calls on all of its plans, DialPad is an excellent solution for businesses regularly making international calls.

For many businesses, this capability is critical for reaching international clients and properly communicating with remote employees. Plus, DialPad has a boatload of features geared towards automating and streamlining as much of the communications process as possible.

Its call forwarding and custom routing ensure that all customer service calls are immediately redirected to the correct agent. This ensures that your employees can spend most of their time on tasks that require their attention.

Furthermore, DialPad will automatically block all spam messages and cold callers, not letting you get bogged down with bogus calls — and DialPad’s Visual Voicemail feature allows you to pause, forward, or rewind voicemails at will.

This, alongside its transcription, ensures you can get to the crux of a voicemail without listening to the entire thing. With that being said, DialPad restricts many core features, such as high-quality 24/7 customer support, behind its more expensive plans.

Due to this, small businesses not willing to go for the higher-priced plans should consider whether that’s something they’ll need. You can try DialPad risk-free today using its 14-day free trial.

Pricing

DialPad’s Standard plan costs $15/user/month and provides you with unlimited SMS messages, VoIP calls, and video meetings.

However, many of its high-quality features, including 24/7 customer support are locked behind the Pro and Enterprise plans. Because of this, it might be worth considering whether your business needs these features.

If DialPad seems appealing, you can try it for free using the 14-day free trial today.

How to Choose a Good VoIP Provider in 2024 | VoIP Testing Methodology

There’s a lot that goes into analyzing the best VoIP providers. We’ve looked at the best business VoIP service and residential VoIP providers in 2023 to try to give a balanced answer. The main criteria we used when setting up this list are:

Video Conferencing Applications

The best VoIP service needs to be able to handle large workloads. This means conference calls of upwards of 100 people — the more, the merrier. Large company meetings can often meet or even exceed this number, and it can be critical to have everyone present.

We need the best VoIP solutions to not only be able to handle these large calls but provide high-quality video and audio support — ideally with live AI transcription.

CRM Integrations

CRM software is the lifeblood of many modern businesses. Because of this, any software that can streamline or make the CRM process more effective is a welcome addition to any company.

Because of this, we’ve prioritized VoIP providers with automation features that allow them to cut the workload of your customer service professionals or simply route tickets to the best agent.

Not only do high-quality CRM integrations streamline your customer service, but they also allow you to employ fewer people, as they eliminate the need for actual humans to cover issues that are easily solvable through your database.

Reliability and Uptime

One of the biggest factors we had to consider was reliability. For a business or even a home user, it’s critical that the VoIP service runs well and runs consistently.

This means no sudden outages, lag issues, or the like. While these might not seem like a big deal at first, being unreachable for a couple of hours can throw a massive wrench into company plans — any high-quality software should avoid this.

While this is difficult to test, we put each software through a stress test to see if they would start lagging. Outside of that, we’ve investigated each company’s track record and user reviews to determine if they had any reliability issues.

Ease of Use

VoIP services can get quite complex, requiring specialized routers and complicated installations. However, most individuals and many SMBs will struggle to find someone savvy enough to handle this complexity.

If a VoIP is easy to use, it’s much better for onboarding employees and makes the transition from traditional phones much smoother. Because of this, we’ve prioritized VoIP solutions that don’t require complex setups and are intuitive to use.

Peripheral Features

While VoIP software doesn’t have to do anything other than the above to be good, it takes something more to be the best. This means further workflow improvements like integrations with non-CRM applications, automatic AI-driven transcriptions, and similar features.

Although they may seem small and insignificant at first glance, these features can make a massive difference in the effectiveness of your business processes.

For example, automatic transcription allows everyone that requires information from a meeting to press CTRL+F and look for it. This avoids people having to ask others what was said in the meeting and ensures everyone is kept up to speed — even those who couldn’t attend.

How Does VoIP Work?

VoIP or voice-over-internet protocol works by taking your voice in as a digital signal, compressing it, and transmitting it over the internet. On the receiving side, the data is uncompressed, and you get the original sound back.

In essence, the way VoIP works is extremely similar to how traditional phone services work, except it’s a lot faster, as you don’t need telephone companies. The signal is carried through a superior medium (optic fibre rather than copper.)

The Best VoIP Services in 2023 | Compared

We’ve compiled the table below to give you a quick overview of all the key details — including pricing and free trial lengths — to make narrowing down your options easier:

How to Set Up a VoIP Service

In this section, we’ll be going over how to set up your VoIP service. We’ll be using our number 1 best VoIP provider, Ooma, for this example.

Step 1 — Purchase an Ooma VoIP Router

Visit the Ooma website by clicking the link down below. From there, you’ll want to choose a Business or Residential plan based on your needs. For the sake of this review, we’re going to choose Residential but the Business process is similar.

From the home page, head on over to the Shop tab at the top of the page and select “Home Phones”. Ooma’s “Telo” service is free to use, plus you can upgrade to “Telo Air” for Wi-Fi connectivity. The LTE package does require a subscription fee, but it’ll work even through power outages thanks to a battery backup system.

From there, you can pick the Ooma devices that suit your needs but you’ll need to buy at least one Ooma router to use the service. We recommend you take advantage of their bundled Handset deal so you have devices to test the service with. Remember, Ooma comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee!

Purchasing a handset through Ooma is a painless process, all you need to do is choose where you want your Ooma Telo sent to and enter in some basic payment details. Best of all, it’s free shipping! You can also send the devices back to Ooma if you decide you want to use their 30-day money-back guarantee.

Shipping can take several days depending on your location, but once you have the Ooma device in your hands the rest of the process takes minutes to complete.

Step 2 — Register your Ooma device

Before you can use your Ooma device, you’ll need to register it to activate the subscription plan. Ooma is free by default, but you’ll have to enter some basic details about your usage before you can get started.

To register your Ooma device, go to “Login” on the homepage and then select “My Ooma Telo”. You’ll be taken to a login page, from there you’ll have to click “Activate my new account” to get to the registration page.

The activation code is located on the bottom of your Ooma router, which is helpfully pointed out during the activation process.

After this step, you’ll be asked to enter some basic details about your location and billing if you’re going with one of Ooma’s paid plans, but it’s all pretty straightforward.

Step 3 — Figure Out Your Needs and Follow Their Guide

Finally, you’ll want to decide on everything you need to set up based on your plan and business needs. There’s hundreds of different options, which would be hard to cover in a single guide.

Since there’s a plethora of different options and systems, you can use Ooma’s comprehensive support section to guide your use of the software. If any part of it confuses you, don’t worry! Ooma has a 24/7 support team on hand who are always ready to help you.

VoIP Services FAQs