RingCentral

RingCentral is one of the longest-standing names in business VoIP. Founded in 1999 by Vlad Shmunis and Vlad Vendrow and listed on the NYSE since 2013, the company says more than 600,000 businesses use its platform, supported by a global workforce of over 8,000 across 46 available countries.

The core product, RingEX, unifies business phone, team chat, video meetings and business SMS in a single app, with AI features layered throughout – an AI Receptionist, virtual assistant and conversation intelligence sit alongside the phone system rather than as separate products. For teams that outgrow unified communications, RingCX adds an AI-first omnichannel contact center, and an Events platform covers webinars and virtual events.

Pricing is published and modular. RingEX Business Phone plans run Core at $20, Advanced at $25 and Ultra at $35 per user per month at annual billing rates, with toll-free minute bundles and SMS allowances scaling by tier; the company advertises savings of up to 33% for paying annually. Contact center, events and AI agent products are priced separately, some on request. A free trial is available to new subscribers – limited to five users and two desktop phones, with SMS excluded during the trial – though the site does not state its duration.

Reliability is a headline claim: RingCentral advertises 99.999% availability and points to over 15,000 partners, including global service providers, for deployment and connectivity. Integrations are a genuine strength – an open platform since 2016 with APIs, SDKs and an app gallery, plus documented integrations for Microsoft Teams and other major business tools.

Watch-outs: headline prices assume annual billing, so month-to-month costs run higher. The modular portfolio means costs can stack if you add contact center, events or AI agents to a phone plan. And buyers who want a permanent free tier will not find one – evaluation runs through the trial or a demo.

The app gallery lists more than 600 pre-built integrations, with Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, Zendesk and ServiceNow among the named options, and Zapier covered by an official RingCentral user guide for the long tail. Developers get open APIs and SDKs on the RingCentral developer site. Support runs through an online case system and phone lines rather than a published email inbox, and Advanced plans and up add multi-site administration for distributed organizations.

For organizations that want an established, globally supported VoIP provider with room to grow into contact center and AI-led communications, RingCentral is a benchmark pick: the phone fundamentals are proven at unusual scale, the platform is openly extensible, and the pricing is transparent at the RingEX level.