RingCentral Review 2024 — Everything You Need to Know

In this RingCentral review, we’ll give you all the insight you need into this VoIP service to know whether it’s the best fit for your needs. We’ll explore its features, pricing, security, and pros and cons and discuss how it compares to other VoIP providers we’ve tested and reviewed in 2024.

Table of Contents Table of Contents

1. RingCentral's Pricing
2. RingCentral's Features
3. RingCentral's Integrations
4. Is RingCentral Safe?
5. RingCentral Customer Reviews
6. What is RingCentral Good for?
7. RingCentral vs Top Competitors
8. Verdict - Is RingCentral Worth it?
9. How We Test VoIP Services
10. How to Choose the Best VoIP Provider
11. FAQs
12. References

Show Full Guide

Table of Contents

1. RingCentral's Pricing
2. RingCentral's Features
3. RingCentral's Integrations
Show Full Guide
4. Is RingCentral Safe?
5. RingCentral Customer Reviews
6. What is RingCentral Good for?
7. RingCentral vs Top Competitors
8. Verdict - Is RingCentral Worth it?
9. How We Test VoIP Services
10. How to Choose the Best VoIP Provider
11. FAQs
12. References

RingCentral’s Pricing

RingCentral offers 3 pricing plans for businesses of all sizes. All of them offer high-definition video and audio call quality, end-to-end encryption (E2EE), and business phone or toll-free numbers.

In addition, each plan lets you make unlimited domestic calls in the US and Canada and offers enhanced business SMS. There are also add-ons and over 300 integration options.

Here’s a quick overview of the RingCentral pricing plans and how they compare:

Core – Starts at $20/user/month

Like most, RingCentral’s starter plan offers unlimited domestic calls in the US and Canada, low international rates, and 100 toll-free minutes.

This cap on toll-free minutes makes this plan best for small teams, especially as, although each user gets a dedicated phone number, RingCentral pools the toll-free minutes across the account.

You’ll also get basic integrations with tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google, but top CRM software integrations (think Salesforce and HubSpot), are only available on the Advanced plan.

Lastly, unlike Ooma or Nextiva, this plan offers call recording and video conferencing for up to 100 users. However, unlike with Nextiva, unlimited internet fax is only available on higher plans.

Advanced – Starts at $25/user/month

For just $5 more, RingCentral’s Advanced plan lets you access hundreds of integrations and advanced features. For starters, you get 10x more toll-free minutes, raising them to 1,000.

Another addition is the call queue capabilities. You’ll get advanced rules and routing, plus hot desking — allowing your team to access their settings, extensions, and voicemail on any shared phone.

As noted in the previous section, you also get unlimited RingCentral fax capabilities. All this makes this plan ideal for small and medium-sized teams looking for better integrations and customer support features.

Ultra – $35/user/month

This introduces all-around improvements. You can expect another tenfold increase for toll-free minutes (10,000/account) and unlimited team message, file-sharing, and recording storage.

You get 100 more seats for video conferences, and while we didn’t find creating reports intuitive with the previous plans, the Ultra plan offers a fresh RingCentral feature — Business Analytics Pro.

This automatically delivers data-driven reports to your inbox and lets you create complex ones with templates. So, while Ooma offers cheaper top-tier plans, RingCentral offers great value for money.

RingCentral’s Add-Ons

Besides the features you get with each plan, RingCentral lets you mix and match to customize your services for an additional fee. Here are the add-ons it offers:

• RingCentral Webinar — $40/host/month
• International Numbers — $5.99/user/month
• Toll-Free or Local Numbers — $4.99/month
• High-Volume SMS — Starts at $0.01/message sent or received
• Vanity Numbers — $30 one-time fee
• RingCentral Rooms License — $49/room/month or $468 annually
• International Toll-Free Numbers — $14.99/user/month + a $25 one-time fee

RingCentral’s Features

RingCentral’s pricing may be higher than its rivals, but for many, the sheer amount of advanced features justifies its price. Here are our impressions of RingCentral’s key features, feel, and performance when testing its services.

Video Conferencing

With recent updates, RingCentral has focused on improving its video conference and similar collaboration-oriented features. We’ve noticed several improvements, especially with:

• Presentation Modes – allow you to share your screen during a video conference to immerse your audience
• Whiteboard Sessions – transform your conference into a brainstorming session for all team members to participate.
• Breakout Rooms – help you split up a large meeting into several separate rooms. 

Although you can’t host video conferences with over 200 members like Nextiva, we found RingCentral easier to use. For starters, switching between mobile and desktop mid-conference is swift.

Beyond this, if you do need to host a bigger conference, the RingCentral Webinar add-on ($40/m) lets you add 10,000 attendees — and we found that the live transcription worked really well.

Call Forwarding/Routing

Although this is standard for VoIP services, we were impressed with how easy it is to manage with RingCentral. Your team can access their calls through the mobile or desktop RingCentral apps.

This makes it near-impossible to miss calls from customers or partners — even if team members are out of the office. Besides this, RingCentral’s call forwarding lets you customize your network.

For example, you can specify the number of times a phone rings before it’s forwarded to the next device. You can even configure it to forward to a group of employees or entire departments.

Call Recording

RingCentral provides call recording even with the starter plan, which is great for small businesses. Simply press a button to start and stop it, and callers will hear a notification when you do.

With its more expensive plans, RingCentral provides automatic call recording (ACR), which is always active and automatically records incoming and outgoing calls.

That means you’ll never miss any crucial information due to human errors. This is so important for call centers, for example. You can play the recordings online or download them for training.

We were impressed with MightyCall‘s call recording, but we were more taken aback by how easy it was to use RingCentral’s, especially when it comes to retrieving recordings.

Voicemail Transcription

RingCentral offers numerous voicemail features, from setting up alternative voicemail greetings for different hours to displaying message envelope information, such as Caller ID, date, and time.

While testing the platform, the voicemail transcription left the best impression. You can access your voicemails through an incredibly intuitive inbox-like interface on your mobile, tablet, laptop, or PC.

In addition, you can have your voicemails delivered to your email in an audio form and with a transcription. We found the transcription was accurate, and the alerts to new voicemails were timely.

Enhanced Business SMS

The messaging app helps you reach contacts faster with templates. We had no issues with this, and we give RingCentral brownie points for letting users switch between devices without losing progress.

It works with Microsoft Teams, and some of the best marketing automation software, but one downfall is that you’re capped to 200 texts/user/month, but you can purchase more for SMS marketing.

Ring Groups

Ring groups let you organize how incoming calls are managed to ensure customers won’t wait long while reducing the need to transfer calls and ensuring the right person will pick them up.

Although most VoIP services provide this, we found RingCentral offers incredibly user-friendly settings for this — something you’ll find other small businesses praise it for.

It lets you set up the feature to ring the phones in order (one by one, in order of your choosing, for up to 10 phones) or at once — simultaneously ringing, letting any free employee answer the call.

However, RingCentral is missing one feature we liked about Ooma, which lets you forward calls to up to 5 subgroups of employees, giving you more room for prioritization.

Auto Attendant

Virtual receptionists route incoming calls without human intervention, saving time and improving the customer experience as they can handle numerous customers at once, unlike a human.

When customers call, they’ll get menu options and be forwarded to the right agent or department based on what they choose. You can also play hold/connect music, and end calls if no option is selected.

While we have absolutely no complaints about the performance of the auto attendant, we did find Nextiva‘s solution slightly easier to implement.

RingCentral’s Integrations

RingCentral removes the tediousness of app switching, as it supports over 300 integrations. Here are popular ones for marketing, customer support, and workflow automation:

• Zoho
• Mailchimp
• Zendesk
• HubSpot
• Microsoft Teams
• Salesforce
• Slack

Seeing Slack impressed us, as that’s something we hoped to find with Nextiva. Furthermore, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Office 365, and Google are available with RingCentral’s starter plan.

That said, while we had no issues with the integrations, we had an easier time integrating Salesforce with Nextiva to make it correctly log call statuses, although the difference was minor.

Is RingCentral Safe?

RingCentral handles your data carefully and uses reliable AES-256 encryption to safeguard it from unauthorized third parties. It also employs these tried and tested open security protocols:

• Message Layer Security (MLS) for end-to-end encryption
• Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol (SRTP), and
• Transport Layer Security (TLS) to protect your data in transit

Advanced and Ultra plan users can also use RingCentral’s Archiver App to move historical and current records to their Box, Smarsh, Google Drive, or Dropbox accounts or an SFTP server.

Besides improving your security, we found that the RingCentral Archiver App truly makes finding and retrieving records a breeze. Other security features include customizable settings, such as:

• Your account’s block list (admins can add emails and phone numbers to prevent phishing attacks).
• Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) – A feature Nextiva and MightyCall don’t have

RingCentral Customer Reviews

Although RingCentral’s implementation, ease of use, and features left a positive impression on us, we’ve decided to see what other users have to say on G2, TrustPilot, and Reddit.

Here’s what we found.

On G2, RingCentral has 3.9 out of 5 stars with over 760 reviews, and the majority describe it as a user-friendly service with excellent uptime and well-designed mobile apps.

Most of these impressions match our own, and we’ve seen more than one review praising video conferencing for over 100 participants, something we couldn’t test ourselves.

However, we’ve noticed several negative reviews about the customer support team’s response times, with just a few reviews giving them a positive score.

Although most negative reviews concern its support response times, we found several on Trustpilot that praise RingCentral’s customer support for its professionalism and knowledge.

In addition, numerous users pointed to RingCentral University as an excellent addition, as it serves as a knowledge base and training ground for teams of any size.

Overall, RingCentral boasts a solid reputation, and although it isn’t without its flaws, it has a lot worth praising.

What is RingCentral Good for?

Although it’s not a provider we’d suggest for residential VoIP needs, RingCentral is undoubtedly one of the best VoIP services for large businesses, thanks to its:

• High-definition audio and video conference capabilities
• Auto Attendant and Interactive Voice Response systems
• Wide range of integrations

Its help center, RingCentral University, and easy setup make it exceptional for first-time users, too. The more expensive plans also offer one of the most feature-rich VoIP solutions we’ve tested.

That said, Vonage may be a better pick if you’re looking for a call center solution, while SMBs will find more value for money with Ooma.

RingCentral vs Top Competitors

In this part of our RingCentral review, you’ll learn how it compares to other prominent VoIP services we’ve tested to help you make an informed decision:

RingCentral vs Ooma

Ooma is a feature-rich VoIP provider, much like RingCentral, and we found its features and performance to be excellent as we tested its services for our Ooma review.

While both deliver high-quality business features and an easy-to-use platform, they cater to different audiences. Ooma is the best VoIP for small businesses.

This is because of its feature-rich starter plan that’s also more affordable than RingCentral’s Core plan. On the other hand, RingCentral’s most expensive plan offers:

• More integrations
• Larger video conferences
• More online storage

All of this makes RingCentral better suited for large companies.

RingCentral vs Nextiva

Nextiva, as with Vonage, is a better choice than RingCentral for call centers. In addition, we prefer its customizable reports and in-depth business analytics to RingCentral’s starter plan solutions.

However, RingCentral’s Business Analytics Pro can match Nextiva’s features, although it comes at a higher price. As such, like Ooma, Nextiva is also more attractive for small businesses.

For example, you get 1,500 toll-free minutes on the starter plan compared to RingCentral’s 100 — but you’ll miss out on advanced features like customizable security settings.

RingCentral vs Zoom

Although Zoom is the only rival that can match RingCentral’s video conference capabilities, its calling features won’t fit most industries. However, it’s excellent for video meetings and presentations.

That said, if you need a business VoIP service, RingCentral offers more features and toll-free calls. The only feature Zoom offers that RingCentral lacks on its starter plan is hot desking.

Overall, the advantages RingCentral offers outweigh the cons for midsize and large businesses — and in some cases, even small businesses.

Verdict – Is RingCentral Worth it?

Finding a service that delivers on its promises is rare, and RingCentral is one of those services.

From its straightforward implementation to easy-to-navigate menus and features, we have no complaints regarding its design, feel, and performance. In fact, leading industry experts recommend RingCentral. 

While you won’t get as many toll-free minutes as with Nextiva on its starter plan, nor as many call center features as with Vonage, RingCentral is an outstanding VoIP provider for larger businesses.

Its video and audio calls have a crisp, clear sound, and switching to your smartphone from your PC or laptop won’t leave you confused or force you to backtrack your progress.

It supports hundreds of integrations, and you can pick add-ons and how many users you need — making RingCentral a scalable solution and an excellent investment for growing businesses.

How We Test VoIP Services

Starting with their implementation and interface, we’ll test their apps on PCs, laptops, and smartphones for user-friendliness, functionality, and reliability.

For example, we’ve tested RingCentral’s video and audio quality in over 50 calls to determine whether it offers clarity, stability, and good latency.

Besides our impression of the software, we factored in other RingCentral reviews to offer a good overview of the general consensus — which also helps in areas where we couldn’t test.

One example of such an instance is the video conferencing with 100 participants. Digging deep into other reviews helps ensure we include everything we can to help you decide if it’s best for you.

How to Choose the Best VoIP Provider

With dozens of VoIP providers advertising themselves as the best, finding one that best suits your company’s needs and budget isn’t easy.

Although subscribing to nearly any VoIP service is an upgrade from relying on traditional landlines, here are some crucial factors to consider before you make a decision:

FAQs