Vonage Review and Pricing Plans

Why Vonage is Best for APIs and Customization

Most cloud-based business phone systems offer a handful of optional paid add-ons that allow you to modify your service plan slightly. With a limited pool of add-on options, you often need to jump to a top-tier plan to get every feature you want. Unfortunately, startups and businesses that are new to business phone systems might not know exactly which features they need, which could result in wasted time and money spent on the wrong plan.

Vonage gives you the flexibility to mix and match different features, adding and dropping them as needed without changing pricing tiers. The company offers 18 paid add-ons you can apply to any plan, giving many businesses the opportunity to take advantage of a lower-cost plan without sacrificing one or two higher-level features like on-demand call recording or a virtual assistant. Vonage also allows unlimited admin user accounts, ensuring each phone user can customize their features and functionality to their preferences.

Vonage also has a separate communications application programming interface (API) product to help you connect with your customers whenever and wherever they congregate.

Vonage also sets itself apart with the ability to support video conferencing for up to 200 participants. While the company doesn’t have the longest list of integrations, it does offer many business essentials such as G Suite, Office 365, HubSpot CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Zapier and Zendesk right out of the box. Vonage APIs reach across a dozen categories, including video, voice, messaging, short message service (SMS), email, SIP trunking and dispatch to orchestrate multichannel message delivery. 

Usability

With such a high level of customization, Vonage’s ease of use can change depending on the way you build your phone system. While it is generally considered an easy-to-use Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) platform, many users will have the best experience working from the desktop and mobile apps as opposed to a web browser integration or desk phone, which can have limitations. 

For example, if you prefer to handle most of your business calls from your IP desk phone, you’ll need to select the middle- or upper-tier plans to access that capability. If you want to initiate a call from a web browser, you’ll need to install the integration suite browser add-on that’s available for Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

Flipping calls between the desktop and mobile app is seamless and jumping from a team chat window to a video meeting within those apps only takes a few seconds. With the ability to assign as many administrator accounts as you want, your team members can customize their platform or make changes to their accounts if you allow it. From the admin portal, it’s easy to add and remove communications features or upgrade lines temporarily for busy times like new product launches or specific holidays when you know you’ll need extra support on the phone.

Adding a desk phone for a new employee is fast and easy with a helpful drop-down menu to guide you through the process. Source: Vonage

Vonage Features

All Vonage Unified Communications plans include more than 50 essential call-handling and communications features — everything a business needs to communicate in a professional manner. For new businesses trying to establish a good reputation with their customers and partners, these features will be indispensable. Businesses on a tight budget will also appreciate the ability to add or drop many of these features as needed, without affecting their core plan.

AI Virtual Assistant

Vonage’s AI-powered virtual assistant uses a voice-driven self-service model to address customer inquiries immediately. This expedites conversations and carries out simple actions without the assistance of a human agent. If deployed properly, the assistant can use machine learning models to optimize responses with higher-performing messages over time. Businesses with a small team can use a virtual assistant to ensure callers aren’t left waiting without dedicating a staff member to simply manning the phones, stretching precious resources further.

For customer service agents who spend a lot of time answering relatively simple questions, this tool can reduce wait time and free employees to focus on higher-priority items. The virtual assistant can also summarize interactions, analyze discussions and provide recommendations to help sales reps throughout the customer journey.

The language assistant currently supports English, German and Hebrew. Vonage is beta-testing support in Dutch, Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Indonesian, Catalan, Basque, Galician, Mandarin, Swedish, Welsh and Japanese, with Korean coming soon.

Call Announce

This included feature lets you know the reason for a call before it’s connected, helping you make faster and more accurate decisions when answering or routing your incoming calls. It works with custom tags that can be set to business phone numbers to track things like a specific product. This ensures your support staff is alerted to the caller’s issue before they pick up the phone. 

The call announce feature works in conjunction with your call screening and call menu, allowing you to answer the incoming call, send it directly to voicemail or transfer it to another extension when appropriate. Even if you decide to transfer the call to a personal line, the call announce feature will still let the recipient know the incoming call is a business call.

Business call recording

This $49.99/month add-on allows you to record all of the phone conversations for everyone in your organization. It works for inbound and outbound calls with the option to schedule when you want to record conversations. From the admin portal, you can customize the recording rules to determine who has access to download, playback and share recordings for review and training purposes. 

The software also meets compliance regulations with preset messages informing inbound callers they are being recorded. Vonage provides 500 hours of storage, with additional time available for purchase in 250-hour increments. To ensure privacy, all of your call recordings are protected by a password.

Vonage Meetings

For small businesses, Vonage’s no-download video and audio conferencing tool provides all of the collaborative features and tools needed to conduct meaningful meetings that keep audiences engaged. The video communications tool supports up to 200 participants with great features like whiteboarding for collaboration, blurred and virtual backgrounds for a professional look, recording options so you can reference important conversations later and emojis to help gauge the reaction of your meeting participants. 

Jumping to a video call from a team messaging or SMS chat window is instant when using the desktop or mobile app. International companies will appreciate the ability to schedule a meeting with Google and Outlook calendars and provide a dial-in number from 60 countries. Unfortunately, video conferencing is not included with the entry-level Mobile plan.

Vonage Costs

All of Vonage’s unified communications plans come standard with more than 50 modern voice and phone features, including an auto attendant, call routing, music on hold and everything else a business needs to take and direct calls in a professional manner. We found it to be a cost-effective and feature-rich option especially suitable for new or very small businesses. 

Other Vonage costs to consider include the separate Communications API product with tools for voice, video, SMS and verification at scale. API pricing is tied to specific actions, meaning Vonage will only charge you for what you use. For example, the Messages API costs $0.054 for each delivered message, while the Voice API costs $0.014 per minute. Unlimited use is available for some heavy-use APIs like the call detail record reporting tool that cost about  $490 per month.

Vonage Setup

Small businesses that do not need to port an existing number can get their service up and running within a few minutes — another reason Vonage is an exceptional choice for businesses setting up a business phone system for the first time. As with all business phone solutions, the wait to port numbers could range from a few days to a few weeks depending on your previous carrier. New Vonage customers will have access to a project manager or coordinator who can provide basic system training for the admin portal and help with setting up the account, which is not something you’ll find with most business phone systems we’ve reviewed.

Setting up your call routing and flows is typically the most time-consuming part of the implementation process. First-time VoIP phone users should take advantage of the complementary customer support, but anyone who’s managed these types of systems won’t have any trouble using features like the call routing schedule that looks and functions much like an Outlook or Google Calendar. If you decide to purchase phones from Vonage directly, they will arrive pre-provisioned for your account. All you’ll need to do is plug them in and assign your preferred extension from the administrator’s portal to begin making and receiving calls.

Vonage Customer Service

Vonage includes the same U.S.-based customer service and technical support with all three of its unified communications plans. You can contact a support specialist by phone on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 12 a.m. EDT and on weekends from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. EDT, or directly through the app with a support ticket. We liked that agents were available every day of the week, which is especially important for businesses that are using a business phone system for the first time.

The Vonage Training Center is home to a set of tutorials, guides and webinars. This is where you can find videos demonstrating the features and functions of your desk phones and tips on using your business apps. You can also register for live customer training or webinars covering the mobile app’s features or dive deeper into the entire platform with sessions designed for administrators and end users. 

The company also hosts an online resource page with more than 350 posts for its unified communications platform. While much of this content is focused on basic educational topics like defining a softphone, some do provide easy-to-understand training to help you set up a multiphone system for your business.

Vonage Drawbacks

We love the Premium plan’s ability to support video conferencing for up to 200 participants, but it feels like the entry-level Mobile plan is missing a basic tool for conducting small video meetings. While not every cloud phone plan we’ve reviewed includes video conferencing tools at every subscription level, many competitors with affordable starter plans including Zoom and Dialpad offer separate but free video tools for anyone to use. [Check out our Zoom Phone review and Dialpad review for more information on each business phone system.]

We certainly appreciate the Mobile plan’s low starting price, but it’s unable to compete with many other entry-level unified communications plans without team messaging. One of the biggest benefits cloud-based phone systems provide businesses with is a centralized location for communications data. Without it, employees are forced to use multiple apps to communicate effectively throughout the day. Free team chat tools like Slack are easy for companies using Vonage to access separately or integrate for free with a Premium or Advanced plan, but we think the service could be improved greatly with a native team messaging feature across all plans.

Methodology

In searching for the top business phone systems, we investigated more than a dozen platforms. We researched and analyzed each offering, participated in demos whenever possible and tried free and paid plans. We evaluated each solution based on its tools and features, pricing, limitations, ease of use, setup process and customer service options. We determined Vonage is the best business phone system for customization thanks to its long list of available add-ons, unlimited admin accounts and a separate communications API product that you can use to engage with customers across messaging, voice and video.

Overall Value

We recommend Vonage for …

• Businesses that prioritize customization with their software-as-a-service products.
• Any business that needs to host video conferences for up to 200 people.
• Small businesses that want help setting up their VoIP phone system and training to use it.

We don’t recommend Vonage for …

• Small businesses looking for as many AI-powered business phone features as possible.
• Businesses that want basic video conferencing tools with an entry-level phone plan. 
• Businesses that need dozens if not hundreds of prebuilt software integrations.