GoToConnect, from GoTo, is a cloud-based business phone system with built-in web-based video conferencing solutions. It includes features such as call analytics, call recording, softphone, fax to email, voicemail to email, and desktop integration.
$27
per month per user
OpenPhone
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
OpenPhone, a business phone service from the company of the same name in San Francisco, adds work phone numbers to existing devices. No new hardware required; all that's required is an app. Extended services include a lightweight contact management CRM, and customer service team management (e.g. shared inbox) features.
$15
per month per user
Pricing
GoTo Connect
OpenPhone
Editions & Modules
Basic
Starting at $27
per month per user
Standard
Starting at $32
per month per user
Starter
$15
per month per user
Business
$23
per month per user
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GoTo Connect
OpenPhone
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
No-obligation month-to-month account are available, or a long-term contract is available for better deals on service pricing and hardware. GoToConnect provides all features with unlimited use. Customer & Technical support is available 24/7 to resolve any issue. A dedicated onboarding team will help to the phone system set up for any plan.
Go-To softphones have made my life as an IT manager significantly easier. Being able to take calls and listen to my voicemails on both my computer and mobile phone has been a game-changer. I also cannot recommend the "drag-and-drop" dial plan management system enough. It makes the entire process as easy as programming in Visual Basic and allows you to see exactly what is happening when someone dials into a line.
If you have more than 2 people in your organization, then this will save you so much time. Delegation is the key to starting a business. Even when you're a 1 person show, being able to present to your user base the differentiation of options for client communications is critical. As a founder, feeling compelled to be always on is something I strive not to be. OpenPhone gives you that flexibility. I have found it to be less appropriate in complex HIPPA compliant areas, but that is it. OpenPhone really does seem to suit an open array of use cases.
Call reports: You can see and review calls received from the first receptor until the last who attend this call, also you can review all calls make and received by your teams
Voicemail options: Availability to create some voicemail with multiple receptors
Devices option: with several options to change on your devices
Audio library: Multiple option to create your own audio library with or without ambien music
They are knocking it out of the park on all fronts. I love the service and support I am receiving and have no complaints. If they raised their prices substantially I would reconsider but I don't think that will happen anytime soon. They would have to mess up something consistently moving forward to make me want to move
Overall, it's a decent product for the price. It has the basic features our company needed when it was brand new and was not overly difficult to set up. As we've grown, it's become increasingly difficult to build out the features we want to implement within the PBX, and customer support can be less than helpful. Many of the more advanced features (dial plans, queues, etc.) take a lot of research to understand how to implement. Some of the features we paid for weren't even available when we were attempting to set them up.
In my experience, App features are buggy and confusing, and they often don't match the descriptions and screenshots in their documentation. In fact, many of their help links go to 404 "page not found" errors. In my experience, there are frequent outages and quality issues. My customers prefer to talk to me on a different line, because they find it difficult to understand me on OpenPhone.
I have never experienced or heard of unplanned outages when it comes to GoTo Connect. Most of the time the unplanned outage is always local power at a site or internet service provider having an unplanned outage. GoTo's service has never failed any of our orgs yet that I know of.
There is no lag in phone calls. There is no background noise or static/fuzz. Calls are crystal clear. With other dialers and phone systems, I have experienced delays between dialogue or delays with the caller picking up the phone and then being able to hear you. We do not experience this with Go To Connect.
One of the MOST challenging things in tech support is that some of the offshore agents "don't speak Texan/English", and are really hard to understand. GoTo Connect's support is usually someone who is VERY easy to understand their US/English, and are very helpful. In dozens of interactions for our business & our clients, we've only had a few tickets that couldn't be resolved on the first call
In my experience, their support feels like the opposite of support. They send you in circles, never directly answer questions, provide vague suggestions with unwanted platitudes, and they often take days between responses to provide that. For me, it's a frustrating experience that leaves you with a net loss of time and energy versus before you reached out to them. In my opinion, you definitely don't get "support".
The training videos could be more in-depth. This would help our user base so that they can feel impowered to look up information that they need without having to ask our admins every time they have a question about the system. Online training videos are also inferior to an actual person explaining systems.
One big lesson we learned is that training the team well makes a huge difference. It was easier when we started with the fundamental features, such as the way calls are handled. Getting staff involved early helped us set it up the right way. So I would say my experience with implementation was straightforward.
Avaya IP Office was for us a complicated and inflexible on-prem solution. It could be made to do a great many things similar to GoTo, however it was not flexible and scalable in the same way as GoTo, which is to be expected of a cloud solution. In particular, as we aimed to build out a contact center, IP office could not do it in a work-from-anywhere environment, and the softphone provided almost no information to the agent. GoTo solved all of the problems we were encountering with IP office, with the added benefit of not needing continously upgrading licensing - as GoTo is a one-license solution.
OpenPhone has an easier user interface than Grasshopper. Years ago when I was using Grasshopper, I recall that their user interface looked antiquated and full of complications. They would also update the interface just as everyone was getting used to using it. OpenPhone has many more functions. Grasshopper's app did not offer basic functions such as in-app texting between team members, and its call transfer function was incredibly complicated to use. In my opinion, Grasshopper was an inferior service/product in almost every way.
In my experience, Billing lacks transparency, and they have made billing errors (overcharging me) since I started using them. I think the "trust registration" is an insane ripoff charging around $20 for every attempt. Crazy.
Its not readily apparent to me, other than cost, where you would run into any issues with larger scale deployments. When we went live on the product, the Jive team was always willing to do mass updates for us on our extensions, users, etc. in the system, so we didn't have to do too much manual one-by-one updates.
To combine SMS and call answering by one of many individuals and voicemail recordings with voice to text in their emails has allowed us to give substantially better customer service to our customers.
We used to host our own hardware, but since going with GoTo Connect we no longer dread a piece of equipment going bad or keep a full spare in reserve. This has saved us money and our sanity.
