RingCentral’s fast factsStarting price: $20 per user per month billed annually Key features:
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RingCentral is an industry leader in the business communications space. You can depend on its crystal-clear voice, high-quality audio, and exceptional customer support in a powerful platform that’s packed with advanced features.
The biggest drawbacks? The price tag, rigid contracts, and difficult implementation, especially for smaller businesses.
RingCentral offers a range of products and services for business communication. It’s known for VoIP phone systems and contact center solutions.
RingEX is RingCentral’s flagship product, giving growing businesses all the tools they need to communicate with customers and each other.
There are three RingEX plans:
There is a 14-day free trial for up to 20 phone lines so you can test out how RingCentral works for your team before you buy. If you have more than 100 users, you’re eligible for a volume discount on any plan.
RingCentral also has a range of add-ons for items like vanity numbers ($30 set-up fee), international numbers (starting at $5.99 each per month), push to talk ($5 per user per month), and extra local or toll-free numbers ($4.99 per month).
The newest add-on is RingSense AI for RingEX. It offers AI notetaking, translations, text generation, summaries, and conversation insights.
RingSense AI is currently in early access and you can join the waitlist to be notified when it’s available to try.
If your needs require more advanced features, you can upgrade to RingCentral’s call and contact center solution. There are two options, one for smaller call centers and one for enterprise contact centers.
These plans include powerful automations, call routing capabilities, outbound dialers, workforce management, quality monitoring, and agent engagement tools.
The cheapest option starts at $65 per agent per month. The enterprise plan requires a custom quote.
RingCentral is always innovating and adding new business communications tools to its suite of products. Here’s a quick look at at pricing for each of them:
RingCentral’s business phone system comes with a mix of the basic features you’d expect, plus plenty of advanced features you won’t find from similarly-priced tools on the market.
Every RingCentral phone plan comes with unlimited calling in the US and Canada, which is ideal for any business operating in either location. It includes both inbound and outbound dialing capabilities, plus complimentary toll-free minutes based on your plan.
You’ll also get visual voicemail, caller ID, unlimited audio conferencing, and unlimited video conferencing — all of which come with high-definition voice and AI-powered noise cancellation to drown out background sounds.
The best part about this phone system is that you don’t need any hardware to use it. Just download the RingCentral app on your computer or smartphone, and you can make and receive calls from anywhere.
You’ll get a VoIP phone number or toll-free number included with your plan. But if you need more, it’s easy to add on extra lines or users from your admin dashboard.
IVR (interactive voice response) is considered an advanced phone system feature, and usually only offered as a paid add-on or with higher-priced plans. But that’s not the case with RingCentral–it’s included on every plan.
This feature gives inbound callers the ability to control where they’re routed—ensuring they’re quickly connected to the right department or agent the first time.
RingCentral’s IVR may also eliminate the need for a caller to speak to an agent altogether. It can provide basic information about your company hours, billing, account balances, and more via voice recordings.
All callers have to do is select the number on their keypad that corresponds with the menu options they’re looking for. Alternatively, they can use voice commands, and IVR takes care of the rest.
Every RingCentral phone system comes with on-demand call recording. The feature is turned off by default, but it’s incredibly easy to enable. Once turned on, agents can simply click a button when they’re ready to start or stop recording a call.
If you upgrade to the Advanced or Ultra plan, you’ll benefit from automatic call recordings as well. This is a nice perk if you want to record every call.
Video meeting hosts and participants with admin capabilities will also be able to record meetings, with one year of recordings stored in the cloud. This is particularly convenient if a stakeholder is unable to attend a meeting, you want to refer back to a discussion later, or repurpose your meetings for training.
In addition to being an excellent phone system, all RingCentral plans come with team collaboration tools.
This includes team chat, file sharing, unlimited audio conferencing, whiteboards with annotations, collaborative note-taking, and breakout rooms.
You can host video meetings with up to 100 participants on the Core and Advanced plans, and this jumps to 200 at the Ultra tier.
Having all of these features in the same place as your phone system simplifies things for your team. They won’t have to bounce back and forth between multiple platforms, and it’s easy to quickly ping a teammate while you’re on a call with a customer.
The only thing you might miss on the entry-level plan is fax capabilities. However, you’ll get unlimited faxing with RingCentral’s two higher tiers.
This is another advanced feature that’s typically not an option on other phone systems until you reach a higher tier. But RingCentral offers it with every plan–even the cheapest one.
Powered by AI, RingCentral can automatically generate highlight reels from video calls. These come with searchable summaries as well, so you can quickly jump to a key point without having to scroll through or watch an entire video. It can also create keyword-based clips and topic lists, which are great for post-call organization.
On top of that, it can automatically transcribe what’s being said in real time. It’s like reading captions while you’re watching a movie.
This is ideal for accessibility purposes, but it’s also convenient in situations where you can’t have your volume on or need help breaking down language barriers.
The entire live transcript can be downloaded once the call ends.
Although RingCentral has a ton of powerful features and nearly unlimited scalability, it’s not the perfect choice for everyone. See how it compares to its closest competitors.
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Nextiva is a better choice if you don’t need the advanced features RingCentral offers. It also comes with unlimited faxing on every plan. Overall, Nextiva is easier to set up, has superior customer service, and has a smoother learning curve.
For more details, read my review of RingCentral vs Nextiva.
RingCentral works well for any type of work environment, but Ooma specifically targets in-person office spaces. Its pre-configured devices make it easy to outfit the whole office, even if you don’t have dedicated IT resources on staff.
For more details, read the TechRepublic review of RingCentral vs Ooma.
8×8 makes it easy and cost-effective for global teams to manage a high volume of international calls. RingCentral offers solutions in various countries but doesn’t have unlimited international calling options.
Dialpad is continuously adding cutting edge AI capabilities to its phone system and contact center solutions. RingCentral is doing the same, but hasn’t quite caught up. Dialpad’s AI-powered scorecards, real-time agent assist, predictive CSAT scores, and adherence monitoring are some of the most powerful AI applications on the market.
For more details, read the TechRepublic review of RingCentral vs Dialpad.
When reviewing business phone systems and call center solutions, I look closely at seven key factors.
Beyond calling capabilities, I look for video conferencing, voicemail, business text messaging, virtual receptionists, automatic call forwarding, device flipping, call routing, collaboration tools, and faxing along with strong desktop and mobile apps.
My customer service score considers how the provider can be reached, how helpful they are, support hours, and any positive reviews related to customer support.
I assess how many tools that businesses frequently use seamlessly sync with the platform, such as CRM, ERP, SMS, fax, cloud storage, and more.
The platform’s redundancy architecture, encryption, advanced account management, multiple servers in different locations, data center audits, SSO, and MFA are all considered.
I look at any unplanned outages or technical infrastructure issues, and anything else that could interrupt the service, lead to delays, or cause downtime.
I determine if software offers free trials or demos that let businesses test the service before committing to a contract.
All the various fees, plans, discounts, add-ons, monthly versus annual pricing differences, installation costs, and user costs factor into this component.
