Switchvox is an IP PBX supporting business phone systems, allowing users to simplify communications down to one solution delivered on-premise or hosted in the Cloud. Switchvox Cloud is a fully-featured Unified Communications (UC) solution designed for SMBs, featuring presence, instant messaging, conferencing, and mobility, for a monthly rate starting at $19.99.
Switchvox was developed by Digium and now owned and supported by Sangoma since the 2018 acquisition.
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Vonage Business Communications
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Vonage Business Cloud is a communication solution aimed at small-midsize companies. It integrates with third party applications, and includes IP-PBX capabilities, video conferencing, and collaboration tools. Pricing starts at $19.99 per month and increases with the amount of phone lines needed.
Really Digium Switchvox is a great product, it's more of an overall service and it's great. Starting at the phones, I think they're well engineered, from button placement to make call handling a breeze, bright status indicators and programmable keys that keep things simple, and a clear back-lite screen, to light up those late night support calls. I've watched the web management interface grow into a gorgeous, friendly, informational tool that gives me a system that can do 95% of the things my customers request. The only times I've seen it as less appropriate is when it comes to the more budget restricted. I've always believed you get what you pay for, and Digium Switch provides a lovely packaged, turnkey product, that doesn't require an expert to maintain once installed. On top of that, you're paying for the service. I can speak from experience, and countless support calls, that Digium Switchvox's support is second to none. They're efficient, intelligent, friendly, and professional, I've never had a bad experience, keep up the great work!
Vonage Business Cloud is well suited if you have small or limited IT staff and/or you have many remote workers and little or no on-prem hardware. I would recommend Vonage to small to medium-sized businesses. It would not be well suited to a large organization where everyone works in the same building and the IT staff has servers and staff to manage a VoIP system.
I've installed quite a few of these systems for a number of customers, and I've found a number of times having access to the second Ethernet port on some of the larger systems, and the ability to do some sort of static routing, and firewall functionality. I would love to have the ability to connect one port to the carrier's cpe router, and the other port to the customer's network.
I've worked with Voip products for a number of years, and various asterisk iterations. I'd like to see more access to the asterisk cli for troubleshooting, and/or potentially some sort of shell access.
I'd like to see the Digum Switchvox phones have vpn functionality. It would be great to deploy a field office with a pre-provisioned phone that automatically connects back to the corporate network via a secure vpn tunnel from most internet connections. Currently we either use a softphone, manually program a Cisco phone that does have the capability, or deploy an semi expensive router that support a secure tunnel. It would be much easier to sell a customer on a remote office and a fancy Digium phone, if they didn't need the extra hardware.
They do not take billing support calls. Online chat only. That can be dicey.
Desktop app can have some hiccups and there are frequent updates. Sometimes it switches from my headset to webcam for no reason I can tell. Miss the call be for I figure it out.
Text messaging does not handle images. Frustrates my clients when they think they can send me a pic of a signed doc or vin# and I don't get it.
I thought it had very practical and useful usability. It has a clean and simple interface with large fonts that make it easy to read. It isn't particularly difficult, although figuring out some operations may be a bit challenging. For the most part though, it isn't very difficult to use
We hardly have any issues with it to where we need to call them. There was a point where our connections across the board were terrible and it held us up in production quite a bit but since then things have been pretty simple and streamlined.
I've installed, and maintained a number of different phone systems over the last few years, including nationwide level Voip service providers relying entirely on custom built Asterisk systems, to SOHO systems connected to cloud level services. So far Digium Switchvox has been one of my favorites when it comes to ease of use, customer service, and over all reliability. While there are a few things I'd like to see done a little differently, updates are released frequently with fixes, and new features.
We believe Vonage Business Cloud is best for our organization over the AT&T and the Verizon platforms for several reasons including price, ease of use, connectivity, and other options. Since we have implemented this solution along with newer Polycom phones, we have had very few issues with our phones or our phone platform.
