Hosted PBX Guide

I've put together brief summaries of the apparent services provided by the different hosted PBX providers elsewhere on the site, and here's the cut-down who's-who.  These aren't the only people out there who do hosted PBX, these are the industry leaders, the ones that stand out in some manner and have been around for a while.  It's hard to give an overall best, because each company focuses on different customers and provides different features at different prices.  But if I were to pit each against the other to give a quick list, I would give you them in this order, for these reasons:

Number One - Virtual PBX

Reliable, knowledgeable, helpful.  If I were a newcomer looking to get a PBX system, I'd look at this company first.  Their customer service is top notch, they've got excellent reliability, and their features are great.  Their cost is comparable to the others, and they offer the most bang for the buck.  They also have steak and potatoes ACD queues that do everything a queue should do, not just bread and butter hunt groups.  Almost every business finds value out of good queues, so this is a big deal.  Either small companies looking to get full service at low cost or large companies looking for the most sophisticated systems will be wanting to go with Virtual PBX.

Number Two - FreedomVOICE

For those of you who only want basic services at low volume, or for those who have a lot of money to throw around, FreedomVOICE is probably a solid choice.  They get expensive if you want all their features, and they charge both for the call the customer makes to them and their call out to connect that customer to you, so their prices are incredibly high for large volume and full feature sets.  That said, they have a solid system and good service, so if you fall into one of those two categories they're not a bad choice.  They're the only company who offers recording of all inbound calls - starting at $50/month.

Number Three - VoiceNation

This was the hardest company to place.  They're pretty solid, their pricing is alright, their feature list is okay...they're all around solid, but they don't stand out in any way - for good or bad.  So even though I rank them third, you might want to quibble over price with the ones that are lower ranked - if you can get a good deal from them, you might consider giving Voicenation a pass.

Number Four - Onebox

Onebox has a fairly unique pricing structure - it's often more expensive, since it offers few extensions and large amounts of minutes, but for companies with relatively few employees and you use about 2000 minutes a month, it's a good choice.  It isn't the most feature-rich, but does offer outbound faxing, and has pretty good quality of service.  They'd be rated higher if they had a larger area where their pricing was effective.

Number Five - Ringcentral

While not a ‘bad' company, Ringcentral lags behind in service and support.  Their marketing strategies feel mildly deceptive, and their service is prone to poor voice quality and lost calls.  They offer a decent feature set, but be careful of the need to sign up for annual contracts to get the best price, and check into the fine print on all provided services thoroughly so that you aren't surprised to not be receiving what you expected.  All that said, they aren't a bad company, they could just stand to put more of their money into development instead of advertising.

Number Six - GotVMail

Occasionally cheaper than the others, but not as cutting edge quality either.  For the company that needs to cut costs, try comparing their prices with the others.  Depending on your business model, it might come out looking fairly good.  If you don't want Virtual PBX and FreedomVoice is too expensive, or you're just trying to get the lowest-cost and their pricing model works out well for you, GotVMail isn't a bad move.

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