The 10 Best VoIP Services Compared for 2024

The best VoIP services are quickly making landlines obsolete thanks to their cost-effectiveness, ease of use, scalability, and advanced features — making them a no-brainer for both residential and business phone needs.

Finding a VoIP phone system that meets your needs and budget isn’t easy, though. To help, we’ve ranked, compared, and reviewed the market’s best VoIP providers based on their overall reputation, value for money, and ease of use and setup.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. Top 10 Best VoIP Phone Services Ranked
2. The 10 Best VoIP Systems Compared
3. The Best VoIP Solutions Reviewed
4. What is VoIP?
5. How Does VoIP Work?
6. Why Do I Need a VoIP Solution?
7. How to Choose the Best VoIP Phone System
8. Conclusion
9. FAQs
10. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. Top 10 Best VoIP Phone Services Ranked
2. The 10 Best VoIP Systems Compared
3. The Best VoIP Solutions Reviewed
Show Full Guide
4. What is VoIP?
5. How Does VoIP Work?
6. Why Do I Need a VoIP Solution?
7. How to Choose the Best VoIP Phone System
8. Conclusion
9. FAQs
10. References

Top 10 Best VoIP Phone Services Ranked

The market is filled with ample VoIP solutions with varying price tags and features, making it increasingly difficult to choose one. Here’s a quick overview of the market’s best VoIP providers in 2024 with an outline of who or what they’re best suited for:

The 10 Best VoIP Systems Compared

This table will help you compare VoIP providers — their features, pricing, and sign-up offers to find the ideal solution for your needs:

The Best VoIP Solutions Reviewed

Here, we’ll cover all the best virtual phone number providers in more detail — including their key features, who they’re best for, and their pros and cons.

1. Ooma — Popular Small Business VoIP System

Ooma stands out with an array of features at an unbeatable price point. It’s suitable for both home and business users, offering stable connections and excellent voice quality.

If you need to connect with your organization, Ooma has great video conferencing features, which include screen sharing – not a feature that all top VoIP providers offer.

The platform also offers an incredibly useful Receptionist feature that automates incoming call management. With this, calls can be routed to the correct department or person with ease.

Finally, Ooma’s Hot Desking allows unassigned phones to be transformed into your business phone for the day, ensuring that no matter who’s using a phone, they can access their own VoIP line.

In short, Ooma is easily among the best VoIP phone services for residential use and even more so for businesses. What’s even better is that the basic service is free if you get an Ooma Telo device.

You can also try it risk-free for a full month.

Read More: A Full Ooma Review for 2024

2. Vonage — Best Business Phone System for Automation

Vonage lets you accelerate internal and external business communications, helping your team make the most of their working hours. That said, it stands out with its customizable Admin Portal.

The portal lets you manage your entire business phone system from one dashboard on desktop and mobile devices. Here, you’ll get detailed analytics of the calls categorized by extension.

You can check the number of calls made, answered, and missed, which will help you identify your best performers. This business VoIP service also has great automation and call management features.

For example, to simplify team management and work distribution, Vonage offers a unique Busy Lamp feature that displays the current status of each extension in real-time.

It supports up to 50 lines at a time, which will also simplify call routing. The chatbot will help with customer queries, too, including sending automated notifications to follow up with customers.

Given all this — along with its flexible pricing and 99.99% uptime — it’s no wonder Vonage is the chosen business phone service for over 100,000 companies worldwide.

Read More: Our Full Vonage Review

3. Nextiva — The Best Business VoIP for Small Businesses

Nextiva integrates multiple communication mediums in one easy-to-use platform. Even on its most basic plan, you get access to unlimited calling and video calling—a huge benefit for businesses.

It lets you set up conference calls with unlimited users. For employee training or onboarding, the audio-conferencing will come in very handy, too. The same applies to video conferencing.

Depending on the plan, you can add as many users on the call as you want. To simplify getting started, Nextiva also lets you import your contacts from Outlook or Google Contacts.

The platform also has extremely useful integrations with products like Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Hubspot, so you can streamline your business communication and processes.

That said, another big USP of Nextiva is that its plans are highly customizable, adding to its popularity as a business VoIP provider.

Read More: An In-Depth Nextiva Review

4. Phone.com — The Best VoIP Phone Service for Those on a Budget

Phone.com serves over 50,000 brands around the world, including big names like Zoho and LiftMaster. That said, our favorite thing about Phone.com is its flexible pricing.

It has pay-per-user pricing, under which you only pay for the exact number of team members you bring on board, making it much more cost-effective than many other VoIP systems.

As one of the best small business VoIP services, it offers excellent tools for setting call-handling rules, including call screening, blocking, and queues. Another benefit is that every account comes with a free business phone number.

Suppose you go for its Pro Plan, even better. Here, you’ll also get call recording, which is a great way to assess customer satisfaction and employee performance.

Phone.com also provides detailed call analytics, enabling you to make better business decisions about task distribution, resource allocation, and promotions.

Phone.com is one of the cheapest VoIP service providers, too, offering great value for money by allowing 10 participants for video conferencing, 500 pooled minutes, and 1,000 pooled text segments.

Read More: A Full Phone.com Review

5. OpenPhone — Best VoIP Phone Service for Teams

OpenPhone is highly rated and used by many, including big names like Deel. Its interface reminded us of Slack—every conversation is centralized, and your team’s statuses make it easy to ensure you transfer calls to an available team member.

Each phone number gets a shared inbox, which we found incredibly helpful for keeping conversations organized by location. You can also see call logs alongside text messages for a unified view of all communications.

Your entire team will have one shared address book, ensuring everyone is on the same page about the lead’s status, for example. But what really stood out to us was OpenPhone’s ease of use and customization.

You can also port your existing numbers for free, which is rare. The workflow setup for things like the phone menu, call transfers, and the order, duration, and agents for ring groups is incredibly easy – with simple drop-down menus.

In terms of customization, you’ll be able to specify whether you want calls to be recorded automatically, add a custom caller ID or greeting, and specify business hours for when a number will be active.

OpenPhone lets you integrate with some of the best CRM tools, too, including mammoths like Salesforce, to keep all your customer data centralized. Slack is another, as is Zapier, which gives you loads more.

As you’d expect, OpenPhone also offers a valuable dashboard for analyzing your team’s performance — the number of calls attended to, all text communications, and call recordings — all in one place.

Read More: Full OpenPhone review

6. MightyCall — Popular VoIP Phone System for Call Management

MightyCall offers over 30 VoIP features and is one of the few to offer a free trial. Unlike many VoIP service providers, it offers two business phone numbers, regardless of the plan you choose.

MightyCall also offers Presence Status for each employee, just like Vonage. It tells you if a certain employee is available, away from the desk, or busy on another call.

Furthermore, MightyCall lets you add extra users to your plan at a nominal fee. On its Enterprise plan, you can add unlimited users. This is a godsend for growing businesses.

That said, beyond all this, handling calls is also a breeze with MightyCall’s Call Flow feature. It lets you create custom rules for how you want calls to be handled.

For example, you can automatically route all blacklisted calls to go to voicemail. Similarly, the white-listed callers or VIPs can be directly sent to a priority support number.

This not only gives your business a more professional look but also ensures that no employee wastes their time on unnecessary calls. You can also set up custom customer greetings.

7. RingCentral — Popular VoIP Provider for Mid-Sized Businesses

RingCentral is a name worthy of our list of the best VoIP providers. Although it’s not a provider we’d recommend for residential VoIP needs, it’s easily one of the best business phone services.

Over 400,000 businesses worldwide know this, including the likes of big names like Toyota and Office Depot. To start with, it offers 99.999% uptime.

Beyond this, RingCentral takes VoIP security seriously and has over 11 certificates to prove it, including HIPAA and GDPR compliance. This makes it popular in the healthcare and retail sectors.

One interesting feature we found was the walkie-talkie capability called “Push to Talk”, allowing employees to use their work cell phones for effortless communication.

It also offers fantastic team collaboration features. This includes file sharing and even task scheduling, with video conferencing and screen sharing being the cherry on top for an all-in-one business communication solution.

You also get standard features, including the ability to switch from one device to another, call monitoring, and call recording, which is great for training and customer-focused businesses.

Overall, RingCentral boasts an incredibly solid reputation, and you’ll struggle to find any major downsides. For some, the pricing is high, and features like Push to Talk come at an additional cost.

Read More: Our Full RingCentral Review

8. Voiply — The Best Residential Virtual Phone System

Voiply has become a dominating service among businesses and homeowners, largely thanks to its unlimited international calling and excellent call quality.

While many VoIP services offer unlimited calling as well, most limit it to the USA and Canada. But with Voiply, you can make countless phone calls to these two countries, plus 50+ others.

Another feature that most businesses will find useful is Ring Groups. All devices linked to an extension will ring simultaneously or in chronological order so that you never miss out on any important call.

This can be exceptionally beneficial for small businesses that are short on employees. What’s more, it offers stellar customer support that’ll be there for you round-the-clock over call, email, and chat.

We rate it among the best home VoIP system options, too, as its residential plan is dirt cheap. With it, you’ll get customized call routing, unlimited calling to 50+ countries, and more.

Put Voiply to the test today with the 30-day money-back guarantee. If you don’t like it, you can get a full refund.

9. DialPad — Best Phone System for Global Businesses

DialPad is an AI-powered VoIP service provider that centralizes customer and business communications, helping you streamline your day-to-day team activities.

From the cheapest plan, you get access to unlimited calling, SMS, and MMS. Another benefit of DialPad is that you can get local business phone numbers for over 70 countries.

This will help businesses expand into new markets. If you’re approaching an international market, you’ll have better luck connecting with the locals if you have a local business number.

In addition, DialPad is one of the few phone system platforms to guarantee 100% uptime. Furthermore, DialPad lets you have multiple phone numbers on each account.

This lets you better categorize calls. For example, if you have a separate number for new leads and resolving customer queries, it’ll reduce the traffic on individual lines and help you direct the callers to the best-suited employee.

Read More: A Full DialPad Review for 2024

10. 8×8 — Best for Call Centers

8×8 is recognized as one of the best business communications solutions for calls, video chat, and contact centers. Currently, over 2 million people use its internet phone services.

Its secure HD audio calling will give your customers a seamless calling experience. That said, our favorite thing about 8×8 is its multiple call-handling features.

For instance, its Hunt Group feature lets you automatically route calls to the correct department. This is basically the job of a receptionist, but only 8×8 will do it more efficiently.

Similarly, you can also create Ring Groups where several devices receive phone calls simultaneously. This way, whoever’s free can pick up the call first, reducing your chances of missing calls.

Beyond this, for internal communication, 8×8 provides audio and video conferencing with up to 500 participants simultaneously. Both the audio and the video are of HD quality.

Read More: A full 8×8 review

What is VoIP?

Voice over Internet Protocol solutions don’t actually require any physical hardware, unlike conventional POTS phones. VoIP providers only require that you have a high-speed Internet connection.

How Does VoIP Work?

A VoIP service is sometimes referred to as a virtual telephony service, cloud-based phone system, virtual calling tool, or online phone system.

VoIP uses the real-time protocol (RTP) to ensure the timely delivery of data packets and can be accessed through an Ethernet cable or high-speed Wi-Fi internet connection. The technology uses the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a communication protocol for VoIP calls and other multimedia sessions.

Depending on whether you are using Software or hardware installation, you may need certain equipment to use VoIP, such as a VoIP PBX, VoIP or IP phones, and network-ready devices with VoIP apps installed.

Types of Internet Phone Services

There are different types of VoIP services, here are the core ones explained:

The Difference Between VoIP and Landline

Landlines are fixed services that run independently of the internet, and although this does have its advantages, VoIP solutions are quickly making landline connections obsolete.

While some landlines can have features like caller ID and call forwarding, overall, the functionality of many VoIP service providers far surpasses what’s possible with a landline.

This includes advanced features spanning reporting, IVR options, and call queue management, to name a few, not to mention that VoIP systems let you streamline your business with integrations and mobile and desktop apps.

Beyond features, a traditional landline offers little flexibility, whereas a cloud phone system like those reviewed here can be used on any device with an internet connection and is easily scalable.

When you choose a VoIP system, you don’t need to worry about installing a new line when your business scales (or the hefty initial and ongoing investments)—simply upgrade your subscription.

Read More: VoIP vs Landline

Why Do I Need a VoIP Solution?

Whether you’re after the best residential or business phone system, you’re not just buying features. Here are the key benefits to know in the VoIP advantages and disadvantages debate:

Preparing for ISDN Switch-Off

The Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is currently used to send voice, data, and video transmissions on the public telephone network.

However, it’s going to be switched off in 2025 – largely because it’s too outdated to effectively serve modern business communications.

Switching to a VoIP system now will allow your business to get ahead of this and future-proof your services—or, if you’re just getting started, you can avoid this headache entirely.

As VoIP statistics show, VoIP solutions are the modern communication standard, and they can provide an enduring, scalable platform to serve all your organizational needs.

How to Choose the Best VoIP Phone System

With the vast array of VoIP providers, choosing the best VoIP service, whether for personal or business needs, can be challenging. Here are the key factors that you need to consider when deciding:

Conclusion

Our list of the best VoIP services has it all — whether you need a feature-rich VoIP provider that can cater to your large business needs or an easy-to-use platform for personal use with your family, you’ll find the best VoIP service for your needs here.

When Microsoft Teams and Google Voice simply aren’t enough, investment in a fully-fledged business phone system is the way to go.

FAQs