Your Cheat Sheet for 7 Leading VoIP Solutions

Today, we’re proud to announce the new Buyer’s Guide to VoIP Providers. It includes product profile summaries for 7 popular VoIP solutions, in-depth comparison charts, and information about how to tell if your company should start out with a voice solution or if it’s ready for a broader solution like a UCaaS platform. 

Why is VoIP Important?

Voice communication, whether using traditional landline phones, mobile phones, or voice over IP (VoIP), has been a standard mode of business communication for decades. Rather than being overcome by other forms of digital communication like video calls or instant messaging, voice calls are still an incredibly popular and effective way to get in touch with people. 

One reason for this is that VoIP offers an affordable way for small and midsize businesses to set up a professional yet secure business phone system. Most VoIP solutions nowadays are also cloud-based, or have cloud deployment options available, and are therefore extremely mobile as well. Users can install VoIP applications on their mobile phones, tablets, or laptops and be able to place a voice call from anywhere that has a strong internet connection. 

This also makes VoIP software an ideal solution for larger businesses with highly mobile teams. For example, sales reps that travel all over the country – or world. Industries where the nature of work itself is very mobile, such as real estate or trade associations, can also benefit from the mobility that cloud-based VoIP products provide. 

VoIP capability is also part of the underlying technology that powers unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platforms. These larger platforms typically include four main capability areas: 

1. Voice/VoIP 
2. Audio and video conferencing
3. Team collaboration (e.g. document sharing, screen sharing) 
4. Instant messaging/chat and presence technology 

But it can be hard to figure out whether your company would be better off starting with a VoIP solution, or implementing a UCaaS platform that has all these capabilities. The market for VoIP software is also crowded, there are 121 different VoIP listings on TrustRadius alone! This can make narrowing down the field of available products and figuring out which one will meet your business needs even harder.

That’s where the VoIP Buyer’s Guide comes in.

What’s in the Guide? 

The guide features 7 popular VoIP products reviewed on TrustRadius. Some of these are better suited for companies looking for a stand-alone mobile VoIP solutions, others are part of larger UCaaS platforms and ideal for companies that may need to scale up to a unified communications solution in the near future. 

The guide provides buyers with an at-a-glance view of each product, including: 

• user demographics (e.g. company size, industry),
• most common pros and cons,
• survey data from over 200 VoIP software users, 
• direct feedback from product reviews,
• and best-fit-for scenarios based on reviewer feedback.

Wondering which VoIP products made the cut? Here’s the list of providers featured in the guide: 

• Fuze 
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager 
• RingCentral 
• Google Voice
• 8×8 X Series (formerly Virtual Office) 
• Jive Hosted VoIP
• Grasshopper

The buyer’s guide also includes a set of product comparison charts with product ratings, number of reviews, reviewer demographics, and feature ratings information.

Download the guide to find more metrics to compare across products and see what other users think of the products you’re considering!

Where to find more resources for your VoIP research

Looking for more resources to use in your product research? The Buyer’s Guide to VoIP Providers is a great place to find more information about specific products, compare products head-to-head, and figure out if a stand-alone voice solution or unified communications platform is the best fit for your business. 

However, there are a lot of other resources available as well. (And our research shows the average buyer consults 5.2 different sources of information during their software purchase process!)

Reading through product reviews helps provide a more detailed view of the end-user experience with a specific product. Reviews can also help you find advice from VoIP software end-users who work in the same industry, or similar company size. You can find more products and product reviews at TrustRadius.com. 

Talking with vendors about their products and services can be another great source of information. And if you consult reviews first, you’ll be ready to read between the lines and ask the hard questions up front. 

Got a tip for your peers based on your own experience with VoIP products, or want to write a review of solution you helped purchase? We’d love to hear from you.