Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Eliminates physical phone consoles that can be pricey and unnecessary for staff. Has a companion app that allows you to use your personal cell phone to check messages or make calls. The desktop application is easy to use and has a number of customizable settings so that the app can be minimized but alert you of incoming calls. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I think it will be renewed as overall it is a midrange product that mostly does what we need it to
Read full review Usability The admin functions are kind of confusing in the old interface which was my most recent experience on the admin side.
Read full review 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
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review We were able to remove expensive and out of date phones, and replace them with the user's choice of a new phone or Bluetooth, so we saved money. There was training time that needed to be committed for a 50+ person office which reduced productivity for a while. Read full review ScreenShots