In the Nextiva vs Vonage debate, Nextiva stands out for its increased toll-free number minutes, which Vonage only has as an add-on. Vonage, on the other hand, offers international numbers, which is noticeably missing from its competitor. In this guide, we show you how these two compare to help you make an informed business decision about your communications provider.
- Nextiva: The best option for small businesses looking to incorporate toll-free numbers into their communication channels
- Vonage: The best option for businesses looking to make global inroads as it has virtual telephone numbers in over 96 countries
Vonage and Nextiva are powerful solutions, but some businesses require a more robust number of integrations. If you utilize one or more customer resource management (CRM) solution or need integration with hundreds of other third-party apps, consider:
- RingCentral: Best for businesses that require robust integrations and editable application programming interface (API) functionality
- Nextiva vs Vonage at a Glance
- Best Alternatives
- Best for Pricing: Vonage
- Best for Call Handling: Nextiva
- Best for Collaboration: Nextiva
- Best for Audio & Video Conferencing: Nextiva
- Best for International Presence: Vonage
- Best for Integrations: Vonage
- Best for Analytics & Reporting: Vonage
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- How We Evaluated Nextiva vs Vonage
- Bottom Line
Nextiva vs Vonage at a Glance
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| Monthly Price(per User) | $30.95* | $19.99* |
| Free Trial | 7 days | 14 days |
| Unlimited Calling & Texts | ✓ | ✓ |
| Toll-free Minutes | Included | Add-on |
| Video Conferencing Capacity | 250 participants | 200 participants |
| Uptime Guarantee | 99.999% | 99.999% |
| Integrations | About 20 integrations | More than 25 integrations |
| Mobile App | ✓ | ✓ |
| Customer Service | 24/7 via phone, chat, and email | Weekdays: 8 a.m. to midnightWeekends: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.Via phone, chat 24/7 |
| For More Information | Visit Nextiva | Visit Vonage |
*Pricing is based on one to four users.
Best Alternatives
Voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) and unified communications (UC) constitute a very crowded market, so it’s relatively easy to find alternatives for both Vonage and Nextiva. When searching for a business phone system, consider these options as they present similar features that will help streamline your communications stack.
A few Vonage and Nextiva alternatives include:
- RingCentral: One of the market leaders, RingCentral is a powerful solution with a very reasonable price point. With three plans, RingCentral starts at about $30 per month for each user. You get all types of virtual numbers, international calling (metered), and one of the most robust platforms for third-party integrations. For more information, check out our RingCentral review.
- Ooma: Ooma is attractive for solopreneurs looking for a communications platform with a very low price point. In fact, with basic Ooma service, you simply pay about $100 for its signature Telo device to convert your analog phones to VoIP. With that, you pay nothing for calling anywhere in the U.S. Ooma has a business VoIP service with numerous unified communications features. Our Ooma review goes more in-depth.
- Phone.com: A dedicated virtual phone service, Phone.com is a great solution for businesses looking for a calling-first provider. Phone.com has multiple call management features and even some video conferencing functionality, which adds to its overall communications profile. We cover some of the finer-grained features in our Phone.com review.
Best for Pricing: Vonage
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Volume discounts are available for more than five users. |
Discounts apply for annual payments and volume purchases. |
As a small business owner, you’ll often seek out the best providers that deliver the best value for the money. Both Nextiva and Vonage have very reasonable pricing schema that will certainly save you money when compared to traditional landline service providers. Both of these providers have a per-user fee that delivers unlimited calling in the U.S. and Canada and have numerous calling features to provide value. Still, at baseline, Vonage comes out significantly cheaper for businesses looking for this kind of service.
One of the hallmarks of modern VoIP services is the presence of volume or annual discounts to “sweeten the deal.” When it comes to these options, Nextiva does start to look a little more attractive. However, to compete with Vonage’s base-level pricing, you’ll need to take advantage of volume discounts for more than 99 users, dropping the monthly price to $17.95. This also requires that you switch to annual billing. Similar discounts are available through Vonage, with its starting price sinking to $14.99 with just 48 users.
While Vonage lacks an annual plan to decrease the price further, from a pennies-to-pennies perspective, Vonage pulls ahead of its competitor. We cover the pricing features of Vonage in a more thorough manner in our dedicated Vonage review.
Best for Call Handling: Nextiva
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Call routing and management are critical for your business communications. Both Nextiva and Vonage incorporate multiple tools, like automated attendants, to help businesses manage incoming calls. They both use dial plan editors to help you create the perfect call reception experience for your inbound calls. In addition, tools like call park, on-hold music, and classic call forwarding are all available through both providers. Still, as we covered in our guide to the best auto-attendant phone system, Nextiva comes out ahead.
All plan tiers in Nextiva’s structure grant access to auto-attendants. Vonage, on the other hand, doesn’t provide an auto-attendant in its mobile plan. In fact, these are only available on its Premium and Advanced tiers. Nextiva allows you to set up basic call queues, which allow for up to 25 people to wait in line for an agent or a department. This is unavailable with Vonage unless you pay for queues, which costs an additional $14.99 per queue plus fees for wait time.
One standout feature of Nextiva is that those subscribing to its upper two tiers get a free professionally recorded greeting. This is excellent for businesses looking to add credibility to their brand. Vonage has admirable call screening features, such as having callers speak their names so that your agents can decide whether to receive the call or send it to a voicemail.
Nextiva still comes out ahead because its call screening enables users to accept or reject calls based on criteria such as:
- Time of the day
- Caller identification number (ID)
- Day of the week
- Whether the number’s Caller ID is unavailable
Best for Collaboration: Nextiva
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When it comes to the realm of team collaboration, there are few providers with a more buckled-down overall experience than Nextiva. This small business VoIP service has its proprietary Cospace—a unified communications app that ties it all together in a user-friendly way. This solution is free with all subscription plans and comes with:
- Document sharing
- Team calendar sharing
- Task assignment
- Participant feedback and voting
- Meeting scheduling
- Task management
- Persistent chat
- One-click video or voice meetings from chat
Use Nextiva Cospace on your mobile phone or desktop (Source: Nextiva)
Nextiva also has key features, like a built-in customer relationship management (CRM) solution, so customer interactions and changes are tracked across the team.
Comparatively, Vonage just doesn’t do as good of a job when it comes to team collaboration. Its platform does come with team messaging and file sharing, but the tied-together experience of Cospace is simply missing. There’s no team calendar, CRM functionality (though this is available through integrations), or built-in task management tools.
Additionally, with Vonage, you have to rise above the Mobile plan for video conferencing. With Nextiva, all plans include one-to-one meetings.
Best for Audio & Video Conferencing: Nextiva
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When it comes to the overall conferencing experience, the battle of Vonage vs Nextiva is also fairly decisive. While Nextiva has a three-way calling, Vonage has built-in conference bridges. On the audio conferencing front, Nextiva doubles the capacity of Vonage, with 100 more participants being able to take part in audio meetings.
On the video conferencing front, Nextiva’s maximum cap of 250 attendees is slightly larger than Vonage’s 200-participant meetings. While not a massive difference, having the ability to bring in an extra 50 meeting guests is advantageous for any business.
Both platforms have a similar set of video conferencing features, so subscribers to both providers will have the tools they need for video collaboration. However, Nextiva edges out the competition thanks to higher attendee capacities.
Best for International Presence: Vonage
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Nextiva has more international calling options at reasonable rates. However, when creating an international presence, Vonage is the clear winner. Nextiva doesn’t support international virtual numbers at all, so if you’re looking to expand your business globally, you’ll have to have your international customers dial outside of their home country. While this would be a free option for you since Nextiva doesn’t charge for inbound calls, it would greatly inconvenience callers.
Comparatively, Vonage has bundled calling packages that grant specific minute packages, which makes your monthly calling to international territories plannable. Minute bundles range from 1,000 to 100,000 monthly minutes.
Vonage also has international virtual numbers in more than 80 countries. This provides your international callers with a means to dial your business, even if you don’t have a physical location in the country they are dialing from. The call would count as local for the caller. Here’s a breakdown of these kinds of virtual numbers:
Our guide to international virtual numbers
Finally, with Vonage World Office, your disparate international offices will have free calling between branches. This is critical when mitigating the cost of calls between your colleagues. The company will have an international company number with unlimited mobile extensions. When dialing, the branch’s caller ID will display as a local number.
Best for Integrations: Vonage
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Integrations allow your communications system to connect seamlessly with a variety of third-party solutions. For example, connecting your business phone system with Salesforce allows you to seamlessly utilize existing customer information when you make outbound contact or receive an inbound call from a customer. While both providers have some key integrations that many expect with VoIP and unified communications as a service (UCaaS), Vonage has more than 25, while Nextiva has about 20.
This balance is further upset when you notice that Vonage’s application programming interfaces (APIs) are more robust and available than Nextiva’s. These allow you to create your own connections with third-party applications—as long as you have the IT infrastructure. While Nextiva does have some APIs, they are mostly available with its contact center offering.
Best for Analytics & Reporting: Vonage
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Both Vonage and Nextiva deliver general and in-depth reports when analyzing the performance of your communications system. For example, both show statistics for individual users, call groups, and company-wide performance. Reports can be exported or emailed and set for daily, monthly, or weekly reporting intervals. Both Vonage and Nextiva reports attach associated call recordings so that you are able to listen to the recordings while perusing associated statistics.
Nextiva’s overall performance is strong, but for analytics, Vonage wins out, thanks to the various artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools that it incorporates—providing more detailed reports. Vonage’s Einstein AI dashboard helps you visualize conversations made during the preset period.
Conversations are visually segmented, and speech-to-text software incorporates natural language processing (NLP) to transcribe calls. These calls are logged into Salesforce objects and linked to contacts, custom objects, or specific customer cases. This kind of deep-dive functionality ensures your team is in compliance and has the right level of product knowledge.
Vonage’s conversation analyzer automatically pairs call recording data with metrics that help improve overall performance. This is all done as a low-code solution to gain quick critical insights from the data. Some of these insights include conversation length, disposition, and total call count during the preset period of time.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Yes, Vonage and Nextiva offer iOS apps for mobile phones and iPad tablets. You can also download apps for Android devices. The mobile applications work like desktop apps, allowing users to start video meetings, share screens, and chat with co-workers.
Provider uptime is the percentage of time that service is available per year. Most providers have a service level agreement (SLA) that guarantees a certain amount of service during this period. Both Vonage and Nextiva have a 99.999% or “five nines” uptime guarantee. This means users should expect less than five minutes of downtime per year.
You can purchase desk or cordless phones through Nextiva and Vonage. Nextiva sells 41 phones, headsets, and adapters from brands like Cisco and Yealink. Vonage sells 29 telephones, adapters, and routers from Panasonic and Poly.
How We Evaluated Nextiva vs Vonage
The best business phone systems support mobile and on-site workers with messaging, voice, and video tools. However, the platforms offer different price points and advanced features. We assessed Nextiva vs Vonage based on pricing, general and advanced features, and an expert score.
Here’s a complete breakdown of these factors:
- Pricing: The costs for each platform are based on the number of users and included features. Our comparison reviewed discounts for larger teams and annual billing. We also looked at fees for international calling, integrations, and add-ons.
- General features: Most VoIP platforms include call handling and task management tools, but the feature set varies by tier. We examined options for each plan and compared functionality.
- Advanced conferencing tools: We looked at advanced collaboration, conferencing, and analytics tools during our evaluation. We determined meeting capacity, engagement, and automation features to see which worked best for larger teams. We also took a look at the integrations available with each provider.
- Expert score: Our expert score factored in the platform’s unique features, popularity, and customer service availability. We also took into account the ease of use with setup and the simplicity of the overall interface.
Bottom Line
When comparing Vonage vs Nextiva, deciding an overall victor isn’t as cut-and-dried because each provider has unique selling points that make it stand out. For example, some users might favor Nextiva because day-to-day, infrequent international calling could be cheaper, thanks to metered calling. On the other hand, other users might value Vonage’s international numbers and bundled calling plans to global locations.
Considering typical business needs, we give Vonage the win here. It has more built-in integration capabilities with API options, is slightly cheaper than Nextiva, and uses powerful artificial intelligence (AI) for call analytics. Visit Vonage to learn more about its packages and take advantage of its 14-day trial.
