RingCentral alternatives: The best business options for 2024

What is RingCentral?

RingCentral is a legacy business communications provider that's been around since the days of PBX phone systems. It's slowly evolved its product offerings from landlines and hardware-focused systems to cloud-based communications software. Today, its solutions cover software for making VoIP calls, video conferencing, and business messaging.

RingCentral’s strengths and drawbacks: A quick note

Here’s the thing. RingCentral has been around for decades, so they must be doing something right. You might even decide, after reading this post, that you want to choose them—and that’s cool. But there are certain areas where, in our humble opinion, other providers score better.

For example, RingCentral does offer some feature-rich plans, with things like team messaging, call management, and video conferencing. But companies on smaller budgets may find it a little pricey, especially as not all users get functionality like call recording, real-time transcription, or Salesforce integration as standard.¹ (These do come included with some other providers—more on that below.) The best small business phone systems speak for themselves.

Another consideration is that if you have a customer support or sales team that needs inbound or outbound contact center software, RingCentral's contact center solution is not its own and it's reselling another company's software—more on that below.

(Regardless, we'd highly recommend checking out customer reviews or third party sites like G2 for any RingCentral alternative below—don't just take our word for it.)

Here’s how we decided on the best alternative to RingCentral

To put this list together, we considered the aspects that matter most to business owners and employees (based on real reviews from G2), and used this criteria to assess each solution:

Features

Aside from price, this is probably the first thing you’ll want to hear about. All the providers we researched offer a range of features, but in most cases, the level of phone services and functionality you get will depend on the pricing band you choose.

(Extra points for having business must-haves like auto-attendant, proprietary AI real-time sales support, text messaging, and voicemail included in the basic plan. Which Dialpad does have, by the way.)

Customer support

Let’s face it, some unified communications platforms are better at customer support than others. If your business operates internationally, you’ll probably need 24/5 or even 24/7 support globally—some providers only have US-based support or limited hours, so make sure to check the fine print here for the pricing tier you’re considering.

It's also not uncommon for companies with a heavy focus on enterprise customers to "tier" their customer support. (Which means that if your business represents only a few hundred or thousand dollars a month in revenue, or unless you're Bank of America or Delta Airlines, you might not get the best support possible.) So make sure you read the customer support reviews for all of these alternatives to RingCentral.

Cost-efficiency

We won’t tell you that pricing is an important consideration or “you get what you pay for” since that’s a given, but we will say that it’s best to consider the total cost of ownership, no matter which RingCentral alternative you’re looking at.

In other words, don’t just look at the initial price tag! Beyond the overall price per plan, we evaluated these options based on things like whether you have to pay extra for add-on features, per-minute calling rates locally and internationally, and setup or onboarding fees (which you might not hear about until you’re deep in the sales process).

Call quality

Whether it’s for professionalism or just being able to talk to your teammates on a daily basis, call quality is huge for businesses that are looking for a phone system. It’s no use getting a cheap business phone system that charges you a couple bucks a month if the call quality is so bad that you can’t get through a conversation properly—and there’s no faster way to ruin your NPS score or customer satisfaction.

Ease of use

These solutions are meant to make hybrid and remote work easier for your employees, not harder. And yes, they should pick up the slack for your IT team and be easy to administer. So, we took into consideration the time it takes to get up and running, the intuitiveness of the mobile and desktop apps, and how easy it is to do things like porting your number.

We also considered how scalable the platform is—a crucial but underrated factor for growing businesses.

Integration

Unified communications are all about, well, keeping your communication channels in one place and consolidating data as much as you can. One interesting thing about RingCentral is that even though it bills itself as an integrated UC (unified communications) + CC (contact center / call center) platform, it’s actually reselling another company’s contact center platform.² (Specifically, NICE CXone—while these two companies comarket, they operate as two completely separate entities.)

Just something to consider, as this usually means different account logins and user interfaces or experiences between your contact center and unified communications platform.

What makes it a great RingCentral alternative?

And finally, as well as the overall functionality of each solution, we’ll also look at how it compares directly with RingCentral.

The 8 best RingCentral alternatives for small businesses and enterprises

1. Dialpad Connect: A truly unified platform with powerful AI technology