Grasshopper vs. MiVoice Business

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

As a phone system, MiVoice Business is absolutely fantastic. It's equipment and even virtual appliances are extremely stable. Simple auto attendants and making/receiving calls is where the strength is. Where is needs help is the Windows-based software. Upgrading this can be extremely difficult and it frequently fails for no reason. Services stop running and needs frequent reboots. The client has improved greatly with newer releases but can be buggy. Sadly, the old ways of a traditional desktop phone is dying and I think MiVoice Business isn't as good as some other options that provide more. The end user client just isn't as stable as something like Microsoft Teams or Zoom Voice that can provide a more stable soft phone experience.

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

• Virtual appliances if you have a strong VM infrastructure
• The user client is decent and has improved since earlier versions of MiVoice Business
• Extremely easy to setup new extensions/users
• For the most part, it's an extremely stable system with just making and receiving phone calls.

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

• Softphone working through a VPN/Work-From-Home has always been a struggle
• While I'm told an upgrade is near, the Contact Center is outdated and needs work
• The upgrade process is very flakey and regularly fails on a Window server.

Incentivized

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

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

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

I've used MiVoice Business at multiple employers. Once of them was moving from a very old Avaya PBX, another was with an NEC phone system that was slightly newer. MiVoice was far more easier to setup phones, setup users, manage voicemail, ETC. While we had consultants perform any upgrades with Avaya and NEC, MiVoice we did more collaborative with our support partner but we ran into far more issues with upgrades of MiVoice. My last 2 companies have discussed moving their phone system to Microsoft Teams and my current position they've already done that. All the issues with MiVoice relating to upgrades and issues with the Connect client are not existant with Teams. Teams is the bar, sadly MiVoice Business - while a very good product - falls short. They just haven't yet resolved issues that have long existed and in a pre-covid world it was OK. Now that people are displaced, the office environment has changed and end users are not isolated to a desk with a physical phone. MiVoice Business needs to catch up.

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

• Was able to replace our old dying PBX system
• Softphone, when it's working, allows users to answer phone calls from home
• Can leverage our existing VM infrastructure to use virtual appliances instead of physical appliances

Incentivized