Aircall vs. Grasshopper vs. RingEX

Aircall is a great fit for any SaaS organization for sales and support groups. Since I come from sales, I cannot talk about support, but for the sales team, it's a great help. It's intuitive and user-friendly. No need for formal training as it's very easy to access all the features you need. I particularly like the option of taking calls on my mobile phone while I am away from my desk or traveling, and also how I can easily manage my working hours and schedule. I also like its ability to interact with different CRMs and other useful tools like Slack, etc.

Incentivized

Grasshopper is well suited for basic needs of texting in and out as well as calling out if you would like to avoid using your personal line. It also eliminates the need to have a dedicated land land in your office or business. You can obtain a vanity number and forward calls through grasshopper.

Incentivized

RingCentral is generally good for business calls, as its mobile features, combined with landline office options, are great for communication on the go. It is also an affordable option to have a mobile cellular device if you have a lot of staff. Setup especially for multilevel authorization can be a hassle but it works well if well set up, you would have to get help in rectifying this if not calls might be redirected to the wrong extensions and changing it is not very straight forward.

Incentivized

• Aircall's integration with HubSpot is fantastic. I can call from anywhere in HubSpot and know that my call is logged automatically. During my call, I have easy access to a contact's record and can pull up any information I need in just the click of a button. The only limit I've found is that it doesn't (yet?) auto-log to tickets. This seems to be pretty common among other integrations so it wasn't seen as a con in our buying decision.
• I really like the Aircall dashboard and being able to customize who has access to what number. We even have the ability to give outbound calling privileges only to certain team members. It's also great that you can set up each individual number's answer tree to ring to the correct person.
• There's a lot of cool features that don't make sense for our particular business, but I think Aircall's metric tracking and coaching abilities would be really useful for a lot of teams. I remember in my first call hearing about a feature where a manager can listen in and "whisper" tips to a rep during a call that only the rep would be able to hear. I can see how this would add value in a coaching situation.

Incentivized

• I like that there are differing voicemails for each extension, to keep up with the image of calling a separate line.
• I love the voicemail text emails. I believe we pay a little extra, but worth every penny for those urgent calls while I am in a meeting.
• The cost is very reasonable for the value added to our company.

Incentivized

• Chat and Messaging - Conversations are easy to search, topics can be pinned or bookmarked, and groups are easy to create and administer.
• Phone - The core functionality works very well allowing voice, txt/sms, and faxing for all users. Administration is generally fairly easy as well.
• Mobile Client - the mobile app offers all of the same functionality as the desktop or web client.
• Video - Video calls make it easy to share screens with other users and includes a lot of tools for planning.

Incentivized

• No schedule for bank holidays
• No feature to update more than one phone line at the same time
• Admins don't have access to the timeline of a call to see with which agent it rang
• Missing agent-specific stats when your phone lines are organized in teams
• If calls are setup to ring to a first group and then a second, if the whole first group is already busy, it does not go to the second group but puts the customer on hold

Incentivized

• It would be nice to have the ability to transfer some calls to another Grasshopper IVR, for those customers who mistakenly dial the wrong number (we have two incoming numbers, one for corporate and one for sales).
• Likewise, it would be nice to have the ability to forward to a toll-free number, which would have allowed us to work around the inability to transfer between IVRs (see above).
• Lastly, it would be great to have an 'emergency' switch setting (default off but could be toggled on) that would let us override all IVR settings and transfer all incoming calls elsewhere (either to a direct dial or toll free number) for those rare times when we cannot take any calls (such as a weather emergency OR the one time each year we take all of our staff on a retreat) - that would allow us to send all calls to a backup answering service rather than just voicemail.

Incentivized

• We can use the RingEx in our Mobile to use for Basic calls and messages, but sometimes the mobile application lags or disconnects while using video calls or screen sharing.
• we can easily configure in our laptops.
• The Meeting recording option is really helpful for our organization

Incentivized

I give this rating as aircall is very easy to use but also lacks a parallel dialing feature which makes it slower to use. aircall has a pretty seamless integration with salesforce which is helpful. For the cost it is definitely very reasonable but it also lacks a live coaching/listening feature which is very valuable as a manager.

Incentivized

We are grandfathered into our unlimited toll-free minutes plan. We are very unlikely to switch because of that. It has been the major factor saving us a lot of money compared to switching to other solutions. I don't know any other company that still offers these unlimited plans.

Incentivized

I provide this rating based on my overall experience using Aircall. I have used it on my previous company as well and that being said, it is a proof that Aircall is a great tool to use in contact centers and with B2B businesses that has direct communication with clients.

The admin functions are kind of confusing in the old interface which was my most recent experience on the admin side.

Incentivized

They were working on updating a few of the modules while we were going live, so this made usability difficult to train on once they did go live with those changes. Now that the changes are in place, we have really enjoyed the usability of the platform

RingEx is reliable I have not had any issues as of yet. I use both plants we have, and the service is fair to good. The service as a whole is solid and a great method to get in contact with anyone. I know the service also involves Wi-Fi and cellular service, or, in other words, how good your signal is.

Incentivized

Occasional bandwith issues. In addition to this, I have one individual whose calls are blocked. We were not able to determine whether this was a RingEX or a carrier issue.

Incentivized

We've enjoyed using Aircall so far and have had no issues with it. The platform is easy to use, looks nice, and makes it easy to keep track of everything.

Incentivized

When I was setting up my account I contacted support a couple of times. They were also very professional, personable, and helpful. Their response is prompt and thorough. I'm confident I can get any question answered as well as help with any issue I might have. That's pretty important to me.

Incentivized

Call-in support is fantastic. I have never called in and had it taken more than 30 minutes to resolve our issue. Email support is terrible. You will likely go 24+ hours until you hear back and the response is likely a canned one. I personally prefer the email or chat support option, but find myself calling instead because the email support experience is so poor.

Incentivized

I really didn't know all the capabilities

Incentivized

If someone has an existing system I tell them to keep that running initially and keep RingEX separate initially until the system is configured and tested to one's satisfaction. After testing and configuration is completed, then roll over the main phone numbers to the new RingEX system. I've seen one person who immediately flipped over to RingEX without properly configuring/testing the software and had many issues with missed customer calls until I helped him sort out his configuration.

Incentivized

We used to answer phone calls on our fix line when at the office. The quality was very bad but we had in mind that a VOIP solution would be too expensive. When lockdown began last year, I had to redirect calls on my own mobile phone which was not efficient. Also I couldn't receive voicemails, have a history of calls or choose working hours.

I have not used any other phone services like Grasshopper. I know that there is another option out there called Ruby, which is more like a virtual receptionist but since I did not try it out I cannot compare the two. When I started my company I found the services that Grasshopper offers to be perfect. It still works for us and we have no need to change to anything else right now.

Incentivized

We switched from GoTo's platform with pieces of Teams. At that time, the complexity and difficulty of integrating all of the features and connecting them to get a simple platform that was stable and easy to train weren't available elsewhere.

Incentivized

not to sign up for it or give them any money for a product that does not work

We have 75 users and 85 phones on the system and have yet to have any noticeable outages. The system just works all of the time without issues. Our old VOIP system on Voyant would go out all the time for multiple hours. RingEX is much more stable and reliable.

Incentivized

• Because of the lack of local partnerships with South African telecoms companies, calls to South Africa is very expensive. This was not originally apparent when opening the Aircall account.
• Not having the option to display a local South African number in the CLIP, means that people are not always eager to pick up the phone when they see an overseas number ringing.
• The only positive impact has been the collaborative experience and being able to maintain a virtual office

Incentivized

• It's allowed us to keep cost down. Other phone systems can seriously get outrageous in implementation and monthly fees!
• It's allowed our team the confidence to work in locations outside of the office and still be seen as professionals.
• It's decreased the amount of time spent on unwanted sales calls via the call screening application.

Incentivized

• Enhanced patient accountability, we can track all calls - incoming and outgoing - patients tend to state that they called and left a message, but they either never called or did not leave a message. With RingEX, we can track whether they really did. It saves us quite a bit of time and aggravation.
• Faxing is more accurate and usually very quick. Because it's accurate, it saves us time with phone calls about faxes we never received and having to refax items. Also, faxing via the system instead of printing and scanning is a time-saver.

Incentivized