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NetFortris

NetFortris
Formerly Fonality

Overview

What is NetFortris?

NetFortris provides business phone systems using Polycom and Yealink IP phones. They offer three subscription-based pricing plans, all including unlimited VoIP and desktop phone options. Advanced plans include other features such as video collaboration, softphone, and on-demand recording.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

1. User Interface Complexity: Some users have expressed frustration with the complexity of the HUD web and software user interface, …
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Fonality Review

4 out of 10
September 20, 2019
Incentivized
It is used across the whole organization. It is great for creating different schedules based on different regions of clients.
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Great!

7 out of 10
March 17, 2017
Incentivized
I use Fonality to give customers automated information via telephone and to encourage them to make their purchase online through our …
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Read all reviews

Popular Features

View all 14 features
  • Directory of employee names (78)
    10.0
    100%
  • Call reports (78)
    9.0
    90%
  • Message alerts (78)
    9.0
    90%
  • Answering rules (89)
    7.0
    70%
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Pricing

View all pricing

Hybrid Software Subscription (Required with Hybrid Premise)

$14.99

On Premise
per user, per month

Essentials Edition

$19.99

Cloud
per user, per month

Professional Edition

$24.99

Cloud
per user, per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • $5 per user
    Required
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.fonality.com/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $30 per month
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Product Demos

NetFortris Product Spotlight - Comm-unity HUDWeb Demo

YouTube
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Features

Cloud PBX

A cloud PBX system is based on cloud computing technology where data is stored and transferred over the intenet without any need for on-site PBX equipment

7.8
Avg 8.2

Call Management

Customized phone system settings

7.4
Avg 8.4

VoIP system collaboration

Team collaboration via cloud phone system

7.5
Avg 8.3

Mobile apps

Apps are compatible with mobile devices.

9
Avg 8.3
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Product Details

What is NetFortris?

Rated PCMag's Editors' Choice for Business VoIP 2016, NetFortris (formerly Fonality) is a leading business phone system provider that bundles its unified communications software for a complete business communications solution. NetFortris says it is known for:

  • Innovating with Heads Up Display (HUD) so users can see who's available, chat, audio and video conference, record calls on the fly, and more
  • Building in fundamental call center features like simple queues
  • Offering advanced features that make enterprise-level call center available at the fraction of the price
  • Including a web phone and mobile app at no additional cost
  • Lowering costs with unlimited calling plans between the U.S. and more than a half dozen other countries and territories
  • Providing 24/7 support - even on holidays
  • Transparency: if there is an issue, they'll tell users

NetFortris Features

Cloud PBX Features

  • Supported: Hosted PBX
  • Supported: Multi-level Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
  • Supported: Call reports
  • Supported: Directory of employee names

Call Management Features

  • Supported: Answering rules
  • Supported: Call recording
  • Supported: Call park
  • Supported: Call screening
  • Supported: Message alerts

VoIP system collaboration Features

  • Supported: Video conferencing
  • Supported: Audio conferencing

Mobile apps Features

  • Supported: Mobile app for iOS
  • Supported: Mobile app for Android

Additional Features

  • Supported: Heads Up Display (HUD) UC applications
  • Supported: 100+ Business Phone System Features
  • Supported: Softphone (Included)
  • Supported: Voicemail Transcription
  • Supported: Call Center Software (Built-in)
  • Supported: On Demand Recording / Record All
  • Supported: Paperless Fax / FaxLync
  • Supported: 24/7 Support

NetFortris Screenshots

Screenshot of Fonality's Heads Up Display (HUD) Web dashboard is home base for connecting with colleagues and customers.Screenshot of Chatting is easy in HUD as they are easily launched by hovering over a fellow user's avatar. Chats are also available within Groups and Conferences.Screenshot of Managers with Fonality's Advance Call Center license can Barge, Monitor, or Whisper with one click. Useful for training, customer insights, and quality assurance. Real-time call queue information is shown in the Dock area to the right.Screenshot of Every Fonality system comes with voicemail boxes for all users, but with optional Voicemail Transcription you'll never have to listen to a voicemail again. Transcribed voicemails are delivered in HUD and via email.

NetFortris Video

NetFortris Integrations

NetFortris Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Mac
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android
Supported CountriesGlobal (99 countries and territories)
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Frequently Asked Questions

NetFortris provides business phone systems using Polycom and Yealink IP phones. They offer three subscription-based pricing plans, all including unlimited VoIP and desktop phone options. Advanced plans include other features such as video collaboration, softphone, and on-demand recording.

NetFortris starts at $30.

8x8 Work, RingEX, and Vonage Business Communications are common alternatives for NetFortris.

Reviewers rate Directory of employee names highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of NetFortris are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).

NetFortris Customer Size Distribution

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)40%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)50%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)10%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(162)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(76-100 of 108)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We purchased Fonality to be used throughout our Organization. The intention was that it would helps us organize our sales department by allowing our agents to call from different numbers we have nationally, set up queues for calls and have some integration with our CRM, like click to dial. Some of the features worked periodically while others were more difficult to utilize than we were originally lead to believe.
  • Call queues: ring different departments in different ways, like round robin vs. all ring.
  • Multiple devices: phone, soft phone or cell phone
  • Ability to connect with a CRM: although this really only works with Salesforce, the concept is good.
  • Phones are poor quality: Our poor call quality was being blamed on the batch of phones we received. After waiting almost 4 weeks to receive new ones, the quality did not improve.
  • Set up: This was a disaster from the beginning. Our numbers did not port together and it took me many extra hours to sort out that Fonality made an error on the request which caused this. We were stuck using 2 phone systems at the same time. Our "live date" never happened and no one took responsibility for the grievous error.
  • Support: Numerous things went wrong, for example our queues stopped working and crashed resulting in us getting no phone calls. When we called the support line they would spend a long time confirming that yes, the problem we were reporting could be replicated by them, but they couldn't fix it and it would be passed on to be dealt with. Anytime we would follow up on the ticket it seemed that no one knew what was happening on our account- there was no communication between their departments at all.
  • Dropped Calls: This was never resolved. All of a sudden one of our phones could not receive phone calls, but could dial out. This caused major disruptions in our business, which in turn costs us money.
If you are a mid-sized company who utilizes Salesforce, and are in the US near their offices then this company might be for you.
If you are not the company described above this company is not going to work for you as they are unable to troubleshoot and fix problems that occur. The call quality with the phones is poor, which ultimately seems to be linked to their server.

Randy Carpenter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Fonality as the phone system for our whole company. This includes our administrative [offices], IT Services, and our call center. In general, we like the idea that it is built on open source Asterisk and that it is very configurable. We have fairly complex call routing requirements, which is handled great by the interface (albeit excruciatingly slowly).
  • Ease of configuration
  • Proper handling of software updates (particularly security fixes). In the ~9 years that we had our original servers, there was *never* an update to the underlying Linux system. We were running a very old Linux kernel, with numerous available exploits.
  • Speed of configuration changes. Any configuration changes take a very long time to complete. When you change a single item, the whole page needs to reload, which takes between 10 and 30 seconds. This is quite unusable when you have hundreds of changes to make. This would be fixed by having the configuration be done on the local server rather than have to rely on Fonality's overloaded servers that they refuse to upgrade.
  • Stability. We have had issues in functionality that could never really be explained by Fonality's support. They would poke around in the config for a while and eventually fix the issue, but no one ever would know exactly what the fix was. We have had several issues recur multiple times.
  • Choice of hardware. For the servers, we were given a choice of a woefully underpowered server, or one that was grossly overkill. Nothing in the middle. These are standard Dell servers, so I do not understand why there is no option for something in the middle. We were forced to pay for the high-end server.
If you want easy configuration and fairly complex call routing structure, Fonality is great. Pricing is also fairly good compared to alternatives.

The main issues I see are lackluster support and lack of proper engineering to support updating the software components. The biggest problem with that is that the Fonality employees do not seem to be concerned with these major issues.
Tracy Duren | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Fonality PBXtra across our entire organization. It supports about 85 physical phones at multiple locations. We use the IVR and call routing capabilities of PBXtra.
  • We like the Heads Up Display (HUD) for our receptionist.
  • Advanced call routing for our multiple divisions allows our receptionist to correctly answer the phone based on the number that the caller dialed.
  • Currently, when making change or additions to our onsite PBXtra, you make the actual changes to the Fonality hosted site and then those changes are pushed to the onsite PBXtra. Sometimes those changes don't make it all the way to the onsite server. It doesn't happen that often, but it does happen. A call to Fonality support fixes the issue. I would rather see a direct connect to the onsite server and push the changes to the cloud.
Fonality's PBXtra is well suited for day to day VoIP calling and can have some pretty extensive call trees for IVR.
Joe Holden | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Fonality hosted PBX is the phone system used across the entire organization. It is used for all departments, primarily customer service, technical support, and conference calls as well as inter-office communication.
  • Their support has been very good.
  • The communication with sales reps has gone well, very good response to product questions and quotes for additional hardware.
  • The hosted PBX solution has turned out to be solid and it is nice to not have the hardware located in a datacenter environment.
  • Having multiple linked servers has issues with call transfers between phones on servers other than the primary server.
  • Reporting also has limitations when using multiple linked servers.
Great for companies with multiple offices spread across the country.
Joseph Bettencourt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Fonality is currently being used across our whole organization (currently 2 users). We had been using Ooma Office for the last 2+ years and it was actually a pretty decent solution for a small business like ours. We started to have some issues with call quality with Ooma and I'd been on the lookout for another solution.
We started using a CRM program (RepairShopr) that has some great integration with being able to associate inbound phone calls with our customer records and shows a live pop-up of the ticket status of the customers as they're calling. Fonality was one of the providers that supports the integration so we decided to make the switch.

  • The call quality is outstanding. I do a fair amount of small business consulting and have used a variety of VOIP providers in different roles. The call quality with Fonality has been the best of any service I've used.
  • Ticket Response Time is great. I've had to make a few phone calls for minor issues after deployment and I usually get somebody on the phone within a few minutes and they've been knowledgeable and helpful.
  • Abundance of useful features. I'm sure a lof of VOIP Providers have similiar features, but the integration that Fonality's Hudweb provides has been very useful. For our business, if I hear a call ringing at a co-workers desk and he's away, I can literally just drag the phone call to my own extension and answer the call for him without having a specific ring group in place to ring both phones.
  • Onboarding. I spent 8 hours getting our system setup with tech support. EIGHT HOURS of actual time on the phone with support. It took their support staff 7 of those hours to basically determine that my router was blocking a required port and preventing activating my system. Even after reaching out to their sales team to impress upon how frustrating this was, the sales associate helping me (Dan Halloran) offered me a measly two weeks ($35 equivalent) of free service for the time I wasted on the phone and had my own customers waiting an extra day for service. I understand a 2 or even 3 hour onboarding, but it was pretty ridiculous. Honestly, I probably would have just cancelled the service if it wasn't for the unique integration they provide with our CRM Provider.
  • Communication. During the course of signing up, Fonality called 1hr before my scheduled install because an employee had called in sick and they didn't have anybody else to help me. They were able to get another technician to help, but he was (obviously) not very knowledgeable as he wasn't able to get my system setup.
  • On another occasion, my sales rep (Dan Halloran) indicated via e-mail that he was start the porting process for me. 7 days later, I reached out to inquire about the process, and it hadn't been initiated.
  • As a third example, the rep that was finally able to get my system going (Syed Rizvi) was supposed to follow up with me on a Friday, and I never heard from him. After reaching out to him nearly 5 days later, he apologized and indicated he had been very busy.
  • Mobile App. Overall, the Mobile App (I'm using the one on Android) is great. It has it's own dialer so that I can call my clients so they see my work number instead of cell phone. But, I can't access the contacts on my phone from the app. I have to lookup a number, memorize the number and then type it into the dialer. Very minor, but would be great to see this added.
I'd say that Fonality would typically be a great fit for any business looking for a cutting edge phone solution. It would probably be best suited for businesses with at least 4+ employees. A lot of the features are based around functionality for larger teams - call transferring, call queues, departments, call-center features, etc. While it's been great for our business, the setup and installation time for a 2-3 man shop is probably overkill for most smaller businesses like ours. Especially when there are other providers that offer a more cost effective solution for a decent feature-set.
September 02, 2016

Fonality? Why or Why not.

Jono Brooks | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have three companies under one roof. All three are able to use a single fonality system to manage both inbound and outbound calls. We route calls to the three different companies based on number dialed and then drill down to specific departments or individuals with menus. I would describe our usage as typical medium sized to small business usage similar to what a standard local PBX would be used for. Relevant to the discussion here would be that we have inbound and outbound sales as well as tech support using the fonality system. We DO have remote users from time to time, but this is not the norm... just convenient.
  • Call routing with Fonality is very powerful. I spec'd out several cloud based systems that didn't have robust call routing (several "ring" hierarchies to choose from) before landing on Fonality.
  • Fonality isn't stingy with their SIP credentials like most other cloud based companies.
  • Fonality's QOS is fantastic.
  • Fonality has a very knowledgable support staff. They will often fix problems without the customer's required involvement.
  • User Interface for the CP. Needs improved speed at the least.
  • Another VoIP company I've communicated with has what they call "courtesy lines..." I'm actually not completely sure how that works, but the salesman said they are very inexpensive because the only features they have are outbound calling, inbound call menu calling (eg: no direct call) and internal extension. So no voicemail or other features you'd expect. This is nice for a company with a LOT of employees who aren't really using their phones for much more than internal communication via the extensions.
2 factors:
  • If they have solid internet... I recommend it.
  • If they need the same number of phones as lines... I recommend it.
If either of these 2 are not the case.... I move on to something else. I think the # of phones must = # of lines thing is very limiting.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Fonality was used for the business as it grew from 30 to 100 employees as a backbone phone system.
  • Ease of use.
  • Flexibility of device usage.
  • Quick response to support questions.
  • Service issues are not always resolved on the first call.
  • Outages although brief occurred at least monthly.
Small offices with low call volumes would be ideal uses for Fonality.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Fonality's hybrid hosted PBX solution. It is mostly used in one central location for all users.
  • Easy web management interface.
  • Easy to update through web interface.
  • Easy to customize.
  • Good reporting.
  • Quality of support is inconsistent. Sometimes they are extremely helpful, sometimes they will tell you something can't be done and you just have to talk to a different support rep.
  • Getting a responsive account manager can be difficult. I had to go through 3 or 4 to get one who supports us well.
  • Sometimes you need to push them to get them to do what they say they are going to do. Get all communication in writing.
It is very affordable, especially if you can do the implementation yourself. Ongoing costs are low depending on how often you replace your server and what type of backup you want to have. Overall, the server and the service have been very reliable. Support is the weakest link which we generally only need to use when migrating to a new server. The system is intuitive to manage as far as PBX systems go.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use this in our Denver office. Our company as a whole was amidst a technology change from Siemens to Cisco at the time we were building this office out, so we are using Fonality as our telephony solution in the short-term until we can migrate to Cisco with the rest of the company. At the time we did not want to spend money on a Siemen's PBX when it would be thrown out shortly after, and Cisco was not yet ready.
  • The interface is very clean and easy to use. It's generally very easy to set up new phones and make changes to them. The HUD is also very nice.
  • Technical support is terrible, very rarely did I speak with someone that had very much knowledge on the system. I spent hours and hours on the phone with technicians who eventually gave up completely.
  • Account management has been horrendous. We were originally assigned 200 lines, however after the buildout we were unable to get any of them to work. Turns out they accidentally assigned us lines that they didn't own and had to give us new ones. These numbers were given out to clients and posted on company websites, was incredibly embarrassing for myself and our company. The other lines they then offerred didn't meet the criteria I had given them so I asked that they look for a range that does...2 days later they came back with the EXACT same numbers. I gave up and took 100 of those numbers instead. Since then I have been handed off to another Account Manager who seems to have a hard time keeping his customers straight, seems like he is overloaded and is managing too many accounts.
  • Billing, per the above note regarding account management, the best they could do was reimburse us for 1 month of service. They said they couldn't reimburse us for the thousands of dollars we spent on business cards that had to be redone. They they have been unable to get our billing set up correctly, I continue to be charged for more lines than I asked for. I was told it was "escalated" last month, only to find out the billing team hasn't touched my request yet.
It's a nice product for a small business that needs a simple and affordable telephony solution. But don't expect much in terms of support or accountability. I would not recommend it for larger businesses as there are way better products out there that offer high tier support and account management.
August 24, 2016

Phantastic Fone system

Richard Ainsworth | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We use Fonality as our main PBX for our entire company. It allowed us to be flexible with our communication. Our remote locations have seamlessly incorporated in the rest of the company's communication channels.
  • Transparent mobility.
  • Highly customizable.
  • Strong technical support from Fonality.
  • Would like to see an improved desktop app for when it is preferred over the webHUD.
  • Stronger built in protection from SIP attacks.
  • Mobile app could be improved, even though it does function well.
Because of fonality's flexibility to be hosted, onsite or hybrid, it works well for most environments.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Fonality is being used within the district sales office.
  • Ease of use once phone system is set up.
  • Fonality's customer service is prompt and helpful.
  • Billing and invoicing is easy to understand.
  • As I have been a business owner for over 30 years, changing from a hardwired system to VOIP does create some getting used to.
  • Training for "old school" business owners (basic VOIP system).
  • Texting feature.
Fonality is well suited for startup businesses.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used throughout the company. It is used as a phone.
  • Voicemails are emailed
  • Voicemails can be accessed online
  • Interface works but is slow
  • Sometimes calls are very bad quality and clients can't hear me
  • Mobile app volume is really low
It is good for any business, but call quality can be a concern.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Fonality is being used across our organization. We use the ACD queues and the virtual PBX to connect our remote workers to the main office seamlessly.
  • Customer support: Phone communications are critical for us. We continue to use Fonality because of their constant up-time. When issue arise, Fonality support is quick and knowledgeable which leads to prompt resolutions.
  • Connectivity: We have employees in the US, Canada and Asia and are employees are able to communicate easily as if they are in the same building.
  • Ease of use: The fonality control panel and HUD provide an easy interface to manage the account and calls.
  • HUD mobile: app is buggy and needs significant improvement. Fonality should not be charging for this app in its current state. We do use the app and it is helpful for mobile employees but it could add so much more value to the Fonality solution if it worked correctly.
  • Cost: Fonality is more expensive than other solutions. We had resisted change to date due to the hassle of changing all of our settings and ported numbers. It makes it more frustrating that Fonality regularly promotes discounted offers but when we inquire, we are always told that the offer is not applicable to the offering we have.
Fonality solution is good option for companies with remote employees or more than one location. Fonality is also good option for companies that have multiple local numbers or are billed for non local calls. Implementing Fonality in a case like this results in significant long distance charges and local phone company charges for ported numbers.
Jenna Janes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Fonality is being used for our customer support team of three people. Our main issues are that Fonality Customer Support takes doesn't seem to communicate with one another effectively or know enough about the software. We ran into a lot of issues at the beginning that people had a hard time helping us solve. All in all it is not the most ideal software for what we are looking for - but may be good for others.
  • Clear and simple way to transfer calls.
  • Easy to view voicemail.
  • Allow a simpler interface for those who don't need to make conference calls.
Fonality is suited for larger business that want to make conference calls. Not ideal for a customer support team, as we have experienced first hand.
David Sandoval | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We utilize Fonality for not only our main telephone system but also to communicate with our employees both within the local office and remotely. It has helped to be more efficient in areas such as customer service and technical support. The HUD feature has become our main hub for communication. I think we would suffer to be without it at this point.
  • Very user friendly in answering and forwarding calls.
  • We like that it's adaptable in that you can customize it somewhat to fit the needs of your company.
  • It's very easy to make adds, moves and changes.
  • The technical support department has been a tremendous help in times there was any problems.
  • Sometimes when making changes such as users, extensions and permissions, there is a lag in time before the changes are implemented. I wish the changes could be instantaneous.
  • We have had some problems accessing voicemail through the HUD.
  • It can be a little costly to add users.
I think Fonality can be utilized best by companies that have over 3 lines and 5 employees. Since it resides on the cloud, it is crucial to have a dependable internet connection.
Shane Abernathy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Fonality VOIP telephone service for our entire agency operation.
  • It is a reliable telephone service.
  • Excellent service (customer and technical) support.
  • Call drop and it would be great to know if the drop was due to the cellular service of the person on the line or our service.
If you have and excellent ISP and you are good dealing with technology then the savings and ease of use for VOIP and Fonality are a great deal.
Jim Danforth | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Fonality is a true plug-n-play telephone. If you have a fast internet connection this is a no brainer for your telephone requirements. Mobility is key with a cloud phone system that you can bring your phone anywhere and plug it into the internet and it just works. Highly recommended for small businesses that don't want to pay for a telephone system.
  • Reduce costs
  • Reduce complexity
  • Take your telephone home with you
  • Video Conferencing
  • Free softphone app and licensing
  • Better support for phones with no costs for provisioning new phones
I think Fonality is great for home and small businesses where the phone count is less than 50. Also the businesses need to be OK with the phones not working when there is an internet outage unless they have redundant internet lines. Fonality is a system that any small business should consider.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I love our Fonality phone system. My assistant uses one of the phones at her home office and it is like being in the office next to me but she is actually 20 miles away. My office phones ring at her house and she can transfer calls to every on in the office and conference with each of us. We all love seeing each call on our computer screen and being able to listen to each message from our email account. Each recording goes to my email and I can access the messages from any computer, cell phone or traditionally thru the phone itself. Also, I can review a detailed log of all calls that is kept on line on my Fonality HUD. Fonality gives me freedom to work outside of my office from any location and feel connected to my office at all times. Fonality is one of the best business decision I have made.
  • Access to messages from my cell phone or any computer
  • The ability to have my office phones ring from any computer I plug my Fonality phone into.
  • Great customer service and follow thru
  • My HUD goes down from time to time.
I love Fonality and would not want a traditional phone system.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Fonality is being used across the entire organization. Multiple locations across the United States. It addresses the need for a VoIP phone system.
  • It allows us to make phone calls anywhere in the US at a great rate.
  • The Polycom handsets that are the default option are very well built.
  • You can usually just plug a phone in anywhere, in an office or a home, and it just works.
  • Fonality account managers are really just order takers. They have almost no ability to help when there is an issue.
  • Tech support is not the greatest. There is always an excuse, no ETA, and sometimes they just don't fix a known problem for days until it is "safe to reboot the system for all customers."
  • Sometimes the phones just lag. There is now reason given, a call to support offers no answers, and then the lagging stopped. This happened just yesterday.
Fonality is probably best suited for a small to medium single office that is not a call-center environment. It is not well suited for environments that need a rock solid system with top notch service/IT Support.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Fonality as our primary VOIP phone system. We use it in a call center capacity for our customer support team. It is used across our entire corporate headquarters.
  • Fonality's HUD software is the highlight of the product.
  • The control panel (console) is based in the cloud and is ridiculously slow. Fonality will always blame this on its customers never taking responsibility. At some periods it literally takes over a minute for the settings to refresh. We have used Fonality for over 4 years and this has never improved.
  • Support is very hit and miss. You will get a very courteous and experienced tech on one call. The very next call will end up oversea's and unskilled. Generally support is horrendous.
  • Fonality charges a 100.00 per phone to set them up. More often then not I have to wipe the config and redo the setup. This brings the cost per phone way above the standard. you have to purchase phones through fonality and pay setup. you can purchase from other resellers but fonality requires them to be sent to them for setup.
  • fonality provides no maintenance with the support. they do not send out information regarding vulnerabilities to their system. Twice in 4 years we have been hit by vulnerabilities that could have been prevented.
Fonality was a pretty good system for about 1 year. Then things steadily declined. I wouldnt recommend anyone buy this system. Do yourself a favor and read some of the reviews out there.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Fonality as one of our VoIP telephony providers at 7 locations.
  • Tech Support. I was able to contact 3 different very knowledgeable support agents in the wee hours of a Sunday morning and was back up and running without missing a beat. After a service outage the CIO called me personally on a Sunday to apologize and explain what had happened and what was being done to prevent the issue from happening again.
  • Pricing!
  • Sales Rep: My guy is very knowledgeable and available. I first contacted him on a Saturday morning.
  • Their Basic Call Queue sends callers to the same agent. I needed to disable call waiting on the instrument to correct this.
  • When first setting up with them there was 2 different support teams and you couldn't get a question answered without a scheduled appointment. [I think this is no longer the case.]
  • User Control Panel is unwieldy and slow. Luckily it's mostly set and forget.
We use it so that no one gets a busy signal during peak pizza production hours.
Raghuvir Lavari | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Fonality is used as our in-house PBX using PRI Line which reduced major communication issues. It was necessary for our firm to succeed when customer service calls are high. It was used by the whole company as major step forward to improve customer communication and provide instant follow-up, and maintain our high compliance program with the next technology for a new generation.
  • Instant call log when customer calls and keeps history of what the call was for. Real time Chat within High privacy of the firm for internal document.
  • Customer relationship on your finger tip with all information that you need.
  • Crystal clear sound way better than ordinary hosted PBX.
  • Everyone loves Fonality because of the great integration with Salesforce.
  • Mobile communication or App
  • CTI development
  • Find me feature
It has CTI integration with Salesforce and our in-house PBX.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using within my company for the past 5 years and throughout that time the service as well as Fonality's phone server have been unreliable to say the least. We currently us it throughout our whole organization for both incoming and outgoing call's, Roughly 2,000+ calls made a day.

One major thing I have noticed is that the CPU load on the server itself can become overloaded very easily and can occasionally cause poor quality during calls or having the phone system fail over all ( Which I then have to log in and restart the server ). My other problem with the service is that their control panel calling it slow and sluggish is an understatement. Pages take almost a minute to load even during early mornings, This makes me dread having to make any changes to this particular system.
  • The ability to make tree structures for routing your calls is very intuitive. Auto-routing is a breeze and anyone can learn it fairly quickly. Also having the ability to upload your own hold music playlist is great.
  • Customer service are friendly and you receive top notch service.
  • User management is simply laid out and has more than enough functionality out of the box to satisfy any admin.
  • Even though you are an admin and have access to the control panel, you really do not have full control of the server. So calls once and awhile to customer service will be needed.
  • Admin control panel page takes forever to load. Any changes that need to be made every click takes about a minute to load.
  • The Web interface for the control panel can use a but of an update.
if you are in a constantly changing environment and need to make constant changes this will be a nightmare for you. Out of all of the systems I look over this is the one I dread having to log into.

But on the other hand, If you are in an organization that doesn't have many users, Fonality's ease of use will be a great " set it and forget it " product.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We replaced our old InterTel PBX with a Fonality PBXtra VOIP system. We have an inhouse server supported by Fonality under contract. We use this as our only phone system at our main site and to connect to remote sites and users. We use the programmable call menu routing, routing groups, scheduler. We have operators use HUD to route calls. The web based controls are intuitive and easy to use requiring very training which we did ourselves.
  • Fonality support is very quick to respond to our calls and efficient at resolving them whether its an training/education issue or technical problems with our VOIP phones or server.
  • The HUD - Heads up display to see all of our calls, conferences etc and to be able to drap and drop to route calls is very useful.
  • The programmable "find me, follow me" feature is very useful for getting calls to our users who are not bound to a office desk extension, easily fowarding to their cell, home #'s on a schedule.
  • Programming the call menu to handle the voice prompts and routing is easy to set-up and manage
  • The annual cost of support is significant. We have very few calls into support as it is seldom needed. It would be nice if we could have the option to pay on a per call basis vs annual support contract.
Fonality is well suited for companies with a small or no in house I.T. department as it is easy to install, set-up and manage. I am not sure how well it scales to companies with over 500 employees as I have not tried to use it in that environment. VOIP phones work best if your sites network switches support POE (power over ethernet).
Michael Allen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Fonality is being used across our whole organization. We have a customer support department and we use Fonality to manage the Call Center call volume.
  • Managing Call Center queues
  • Add/Moves/Changes of extensions.
  • Use of Heads Up Display (HUDO
  • Easy Call forwarding.
  • setup of HUD app for phones.
  • Add management of do not disturb feature per extension.
  • Add central control ability to remote reboot extensions.
I would recommend Fonality to most customers. It is important that the customer have talent to support the product in house.
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