Finding the right business telephony service at the right price can be difficult. There are so many places to look, and so many services offering either too little or too much, that it’s easy for any small business owner to sign up for the wrong one. We’re not saying OneSuite is the wrong one. We’re just saying it may not be exactly what you’re looking for, or precisely what it claims to be.

OneSuite offers a range of features that on first glance appear to come at an affordable rate $2.95 per month. It’s only when you come in for a closer look that you discover there’s something of a “nickel and dime” approach to OneSuite’s tiered account structure. Some would call this misleading, but we’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt by saying they probably just don’t do a great job of making the bottom line clear.

For example, OneSuite offers a BYOD (bring your own device) VoIP service called SuiteAdvantage. This is the portion of the service that issues you a secondary phone number and enables you to place and receive calls on any interconnected device, including a computer or a smartphone running the app (iOS and Android supported). It also includes voicemail, caller ID, and call waiting. SuiteAdvantage costs $2.95 per month but requires a minimum $10 prepaid credit deposit, out of which your monthly subscription fee and the cost of any outgoing calls are deducted. Incoming calls are free, but outgoing calls are charged to your account. Calling rates vary by country. Within the U.S. and Canada, the rates are 1.3 cents per minute.

If you’re looking for something a bit more than just a phone number with voicemail, OneSuite offers its Business account package at an additional $2.95 per month and a minimum credit deposit requirement of $30. This plan lets you set up a total of 99 sub-accounts (at a one-time setup fee of 50 cents per sub-account), but doesn’t offer you the ability to do much more than monitor phone usage and run reports. It doesn’t provide you with an auto attendant or the ability to forward calls.

Call forwarding is available, but only for another $2.95 per month and a $10 credit deposit. Even then, that’s just for forwarding calls to local numbers. If you want to also be able to forward to a toll-free number, it’ll cost you another $2.95 per month. If you want to be able to forward incoming calls to an international number, it’s an extra $3.95 per month.

At this point, you’re up to a bare minimum of $8.85 per month – and that’s not including the $50 you’ve already deposited just to get started. You also still don’t have what you probably really want, which is an auto attendant feature that you can use to set business hours so that calls coming in at those times will automatically transfer to voicemail. OneDrive has no such service, which is where it all goes wrong very quickly. Even the app interface is crudely designed and features little beyond a dialer and minimal configurations.

In comparison, eVoice is an app-based service with fully transparent pricing and significantly more complex features. The mobile app is available for iOS and Android devices and boasts a logically designed UI that is as easy to master as it is diverse in functionality.

Unlike OneSuite, eVoice lets you sign up for a phone number without paying a dime. You can use the free version of eVoice to make and receive local calls, with a monthly recurring limit of 20 minutes. This isn’t exactly enough to facilitate even a small portion of business calls, but it is sufficient to allow you to test the quality of call service and the voicemail feature.

Pay plans for eVoice start at $12.99 per month and go as high as $79.99 per month. The $12.99 package gets you 300 minutes of talk time per month. Overages are charged at a rate of 3.9 cents per minute. You also get two extensions, six phone numbers, and a host of features that include: auto attendant, dial-by-name directory, conference calling, hold music, call forwarding, voicemail transcription, inbound fax, and the ability to program call handling rules for different types of calls.

You can get more minutes and more phone numbers by signing up for the more expensive plans, which also bring premium features like outbound faxing, call recording, and video conferencing. All eVoice plans offer a free 30-day trial, for which you’ll have to provide credit card information.

If you’re simply looking for a second business phone number and have no interest in features any more advanced than voicemail, the OneSuite SuiteAdvantage could be ideal for you. On the other hand, if what you want is a versatile PBX-like system that you can grow into, we suggest checking out eVoice instead.

There are other business phone options, like Ring Central. Read our full Ring Central review.

Available for iOS and Android smartphones, Flyp is a downloadable app that gets you up to six different phone numbers on a single handset. A seemingly ideal solution if you’re on a budget and don’t want to use your personal digits for business purposes, installation of the app is entirely free, and so is the first phone number. We took Flyp for a spin to test out its performance and to help you determine if it’s the right service for your professional needs. Here’s what we found.

Flyp, which is only available for use with U.S.-based phone numbers, requires an existing mobile plan to function. All calls made or received piggyback off your plan minutes and will show up on your phone bill. The app also supports text messaging, but these are routed through Flyp and don’t count against any messaging limits on your carrier plan. Unfortunately, messaging currently only supports text and can’t be used to swap photos, videos, other multimedia files or emojis.

Too Good to be True?

No (to low) cost is among the primary appeals of Flyp. At first glance, it almost seems too good to be true. If you took the traditional route and added a second phone number from a local or mobile carrier, you’d be in for a considerable amount more than zero dollars per month. As we’ve already said, Flyp gives you your first phone number free of charge. But since beggars can’t be choosers, there are some potentially significant limitations to only using the freebie version.

For one, you don’t get to choose your area code and are automatically assigned a New Jersey phone number. This might not be a big deal if you actually live in New Jersey or have business clients scattered throughout the country, but if you live elsewhere and your base is mostly local, they’ll get hit with long distance fees anytime they ring you. The free Flyp number also doesn’t let you personalize your outgoing voicemail greeting, either, which some may find to be an essential component of doing business.

Got Business Intent?

If you’ve got hardcore business intent, you can upgrade to a premium number. This comes at a cost of $2.99 per month, or $29.99 if you sign up for a full year. You can get up to five premium phone numbers, each at the same price points – which, at a maximum spending threshold of $150 per year, is still a lot more affordable than other higher-end solutions.

Premium Flyp phone numbers come with added features you don’t get with the free number. To begin with, you get to choose your own area code – although as of this writing, not all area codes are supported and no time table is offered by the makers of the app to let you know when your area code might be available. On the plus side, you are given the opportunity to see if your desired area code is available before you upgrade. A premium number also gives you the option of creating a personalized outgoing voicemail greeting to let people know they’ve reached the right place if you can’t pick up.

The app has a “quick reply” option that enables you to prioritize calls as they come in. Again, this is a feature available only for premium numbers. When someone calls you, the app sounds off with a proprietary Flyp ringtone and you’re given the option of answering the call, directing it to voicemail, or deferring it with a pre-programmed voice message that gets played to the caller. Premium numbers also let you set your own pre-recorded messages, which you can cater to your specific business needs. Settings also allows you to activate a “do not disturb” feature, which is helpful for enforcing business hours.

In addition to providing you with separate phone numbers for individual purposes, you can also dial calls from within the app. Calls are shown on the receiving end as originating from your Flyp number. There’s also an “import contacts” feature that pulls numbers in from your existing list of contacts so you won’t have to operate from memory.

Slightly Challenging

Where overall performance is concerned, Flyp ranks somewhere in the vicinity of “slightly challenging” and “moderately frustrating.” The UI interface is not overly-cluttered and is easy to negotiate without too much of a learning curve, but it may not be right for power users who demand steadfast consistency and rely heavily on their phone for business.

In practical operation, we noticed the software has a tendency to bog your smartphone down. In testing, we detected a bit of a delay in voice communication. Most troubling, we were unable to play back received voicemail messages. Importing individual contacts worked well, but the app failed when tasked with the job of importing large batches of names and numbers.

If you’re working with a shoestring budget and are interested in testing the waters, we suggest trying out Flyp. But if you’ve already got an existing telephony system in place for your business, don’t go cutting ties with your provider until you’ve had time to give it a thorough evaluation.

Flyp is available as a free download for iOS and Android devices and requires an existing mobile plan to function. It requires iOS 8.0 or later, or Android 4.4 “KitKat” and above.

Before signing on, read our review of Line2 for another business phone alternative.

The days of paying through the nose for the installation and maintenance of expensive phone systems are pretty much over. So are the days of having to rely on your personal cell phone for business purposes when all other alternatives proved too costly.

The arrival of complex telephony services that operate in the cloud and can be accessed from your smartphone have seen to this. The only real problem – if you want to call it that – is that there are so many out there, it’s tough to know where to sink your time and money. To make life a bit easier for you, we took Grasshopper, which is owned by the enterprise software company Citrix, on a spin and recorded our findings, all the better to help you decide if it’s the right service for you.

The Virtual Phone System

Grasshopper is a virtual phone system that requires no hardware to buy and no software to install, other than a single smartphone application. Everything is maintained in the cloud. You can get one (or more) 800 numbers for your business, or you can pick a local number. It can be used with landline phones or mobile phones.

From this point, you record a main company greeting that’s broadcast to all inbound callers, which’ll serve to identify your company. You can establish different extensions to reach various people if you have employees who need to take business calls. When a caller punches in a particular extension, their call is forwarded to that employee’s phone (whether it’s a landline or a mobile). Calls can even be forwarded to Skype, if that’s how you roll.

Additionally, you can also use Grasshopper to make outgoing calls, which is useful if you want your professional number to show up on your recipient’s caller ID. You’ll need to use the smartphone app when you dial out to ensure your Grasshopper number is used.

Call Forwarding and What Else?

Aside from acting like a high-end telephony service that forwards calls around, Grasshopper also folds in some features that you’d never get if you just operated off of traditional hardware.

Call Screening and Announce lets you know who’s calling so you can take the call or let it go to voicemail. When you answer, you get three options: answer, forward to voicemail, or hear the caller’s name if you’re not sure which option you want to exercise.

Anytime you get a voicemail, Grasshopper emails you an MP3 recording of the message that you can listen via your computer, if you desire. It also uses speech to text tech to you a transcript of the voicemail message so you can check your voicemail without having to put a phone to your ear.

Outbound fax functionality is supported, including a virtual fax feature that you can use to forward incoming faxes to a standalone machine. Grasshopper virtual fax can also convert incoming faxes to online-accessible digital images, or convert it to PDF and forward to your email inbox. Grasshopper doesn’t support outbound faxing.

On-hold music is provided for your callers and even lets you upload your own tunes, or self-produced commercials, to play during hold.

The system comes with the ability for you to set up a names directory that you key in via the online platform so that callers can route their calls to specific persons if they don’t know their extensions.

Conference calling is also supported, albeit with limitations. For one, each conference call is limited to 10 participants including yourself. It’s also imbued with a bit of DIY functionality in that you have to manually dial all participant numbers to queue them in to a group call. There is no way for conference call participants to dial in themselves.

$12 and Up

Since Grasshopper caters to everyone from sole business proprietors to medium sized companies, they offer a variety of plans that range in cost and functionality. Plans start at $12 per month and top out at $199 per month. Here’s how each one of them breaks down.

Please note that all Grasshopper plans come with the above-mentioned features, including a custom main greeting, call forwarding, and the ability to handle unlimited calls in the unlikely event that every single one of your clients decides to call you at the exact same moment. As of this writing, a $25 activation fee typically charged for all but the top tier plan is being waived.

• Pay As You Grow ($12/mo): The most barebones package offered by Grasshopper, Pay As You Grow assigns you one local or toll free 800 number. In addition to the base monthly payment of $12, you’ll also be charged 6 cents per minute for any calls received or placed. Other more expensive plans offer free minutes up to a certain limit, after which the 6-cent-per-minute fee is charged. As you might imagine, you’ll also be billed for minutes used according to your mobile plan.
• Ramp ($24/mo): The Grasshopper Ramp plan is the next step up from base. Here, the difference is that instead of paying for minutes as you go, you’re given 500 minutes per month. If you exceed this, the 6-cent-per-minute billing will kick in. If you come close but don’t exceed your 500 minute monthly max, this could be a significantly better plan. Just do the math. Paying an additional $12 for 500 minutes means you’re only being charged about 2.5 cents per minute – whereas under the Pay As You Grow Plan, you could easily wind up with a higher bill. Bear in mind that Grasshopper doesn’t roll over unused minutes. Ramp also comes with a single phone number.
• Grow ($49/mo): The Grow plan comes with 2000 monthly minutes and gives you two phone numbers. This can be useful if you’d like to have one phone number for customer inquiries and another phone number for your vendors. The same rules about minutes and the 6-cent overage rate applies to this plan, too.
• Max ($199/mo): Designed for power phone users, the Max plan may not meet your needs if you’re running an out-and-out call center, but it does offer you the greatest flexibility with respect to the number of phone numbers you can have and the number of monthly minutes allotted. Three phone numbers are supplied with this plan, and the threshold for minutes used is 10,000. This breaks down to under 2 cents per minute. Also included free with the Max plan is a feature called Voice Studio, which is a platform you can use to record professional-quality outgoing messages.

Important Note About Minutes: With Grasshopper, used minutes are cumulative. This means that if you hold a 30-minute conference call with 10 participants, you’ll be billed for a total of 300 minutes.

Lots of Bells and Whistles

Grasshopper is a powerful cloud-based phone system with lots of bells and whistles, but it’s not the cheapest out there. If cost is a major deciding factor, you may want to keep shopping. But if you have the budget to spend a little extra for a slick front-end phone system, it could be precisely what you’re looking for.

It’s not perfect, and remains something of a work in progress – especially for Android smartphone users. Currently, the full scale of functionality is available only to iOS users. The Android app is still only available in Beta and is missing some of the functionalities you may need right away, including some fax features. Android users will need 4.1 and up, and iOS users are required to have 6.0 or later.

Still not sold on Grasshopper? Give BusinessCall a whirl, but first read our full BusinessCall review.

Most small business owners are loath to use their personal phone numbers to field calls. But sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, especially if getting a second mobile account or installing a business landline is too expensive. Fortunately, there are shoestring solutions that can help you keep costs down while maintaining boundaries between your business and personal life. Google Voice represents one such solution – a cheap way to get a business phone number. In fact, it’s so cheap that it’s free.

Google Voice works by assigning you a Google number. Its purpose is to enable incoming calls to route to all of your operational devices simultaneously (home phone, business number, mobile phone) so that you can be reached more easily. This way when someone calls your Google number, Google Voice rings all of your configured phones at the same time until you pick up, or it transfers to voicemail. You can also adjust settings to route calls to voicemail during certain times of day, or block specific callers from reaching you.

With Google Voice, you also get unique features like the ability to listen in on voicemails as they’re being recorded, and pick up the call if you determine you need to take it. You can receive speech-to-text transcripts of your voicemail messages, send text messages straight from your computer, check voicemail and SMS messages via the web, make calls from your smartphone or computer, and create personalized voicemail greetings for specific callers. With the app installed on your smartphone, you can set Google Voice to act as the default voicemail service for your handset. If you decide against this, you can continue to use your carrier voicemail but you won’t be able to create personalized greetings for individual callers.

A Google phone number can be obtained free of charge. All you need to get one is a Google account, and you probably already have one of those. When you set up a Google number, you have the option of choosing your desired area code. If it’s not available, you’ll be given the choice of an alternative nearby area code. You can even choose an area code in another part of the country, which might be helpful if the majority of your client base is located on the other side of the country. Also, you can search the database of available Google numbers to find one that’ll be more easily memorized by your callers (for example, 801-555-WORK).

Once you have a Google number, you can set up all (or just some) of your devices to ring when someone calls it. You can also identify who’s calling so you’ll know how to answer the phone (“Thank you for calling Acme Landscaping” versus “Hi, honey”). Additionally, you can use your Google number to place calls from your computer, or from your iOS or Android smartphone. When you do that, your call recipient will see your assigned Google phone number on their caller ID.

Google Voice gives you the option to port your existing mobile number for a one-time fee of $20 – but if you do this, you’ll be passing up the opportunity to get a free number for business purposes. There are other unpleasant complexities involved with porting, such as the fact it doesn’t work with corporate landlines and VoIP numbers. For the purposes of using Google Voice to get a second number for business purposes, we suggest not taking this route.

Additional perks of Google Voice include being able to hold conference calls with multiple participants, or move between phones right in the middle of a call. Needless to say, this only works if the device you’re switching to has already been configured to operate with Google Voice.

In testing, we found that the interfaces differ if you’re using an Android or iOS device. To place a call on an Android smartphone, this is done by accessing your standard dialer. During setup, you can choose to have all outbound calls take place via Google Voice, or you can require the app to ask if you want to use Google Voice for individual calls. iOS devices are required to place Google Voice calls from within the app itself. The iOS app is also integrated to enable Click2Call functionality.

As of this moment, Google Voice is only available to U.S. Google account holders. All calls placed to the U.S. and Canada are free, with the exception of “a few U.S. and Canadian destinations” that could cost you a penny per minute. To place calls to these areas, or to make international calls, you’ll have to add credits to your Google account using a credit card. Placing calls from your smartphone on Google Voice uses minutes on your carrier plan.

If you’re looking for a cost-effective means of adding a second line to your repertoire for business purposes, using Google Voice could save you serious money you might otherwise spend installing a business landline or signing up for a second number through your mobile carrier. Even if you never take advantage of the included free SMS messaging and only use it to make and receive calls, it’s a powerful tool that you can use to great professional advantage.

There are some inherent drawbacks, not the least of which include having to reprint business cards and stationery to include your new Google number. But if you’re shopping around for the cheapest method of adding a professional phone line to better separate business from leisure, Google Voice could be a viable solution.

Google Voice is available for Android devices running 2.0 and up, and iOS devices running 6.0 or later. Bear in mind that you cannot use Google Voice to place 911 calls, so you should always keep an open line of communication for emergencies.

Looking for something similar? Try Skype for Business, but first read our full Skype for Business review.

Cloud-based PBX systems abound. Some do it better than others, delivering a sleek interface with features so versatile and plentiful you wonder how they managed to pack it all into one platform. Finding such a service at a cost you can afford is sometimes a challenge, and although Ring Central isn’t exactly the cheapest on the block, it’s readily apparent where the money goes the minute you begin to tinker with it.

Ring Central replaces traditional PBX telephony with VoIP, with cloud elements that bring integration with third party programs like Oracle, Office 365, Google, Dropbox, Salesforce and Zendesk. Even if a company doesn’t need integration, Ring Central’s ability to bring landlines in sync with smartphones is impressive and highly useful.

Complicated Price Structure

In answer to the previously alluded issue of cost, here’s how Ring Central breaks down. There are three available plans: Standard, Premium and Enterprise. In all three, cost depends on how many employees you have signed up at once. Individual cost per employee drops when you add more users. All plans include a new phone number, call management administration, functionality with mobile apps for Android and iOS, call log reports, unlimited calling, unlimited conferencing, and unlimited use of internet fax.

The Standard plan starts at $34.99 per month for an individual user. For between two and 19 users, the cost drops to $24.99 apiece. If you have 20 to 99 users, the price is $21.99 per head, and if you have 100 to 999 users it drops to $19.99. In addition to the aforementioned inclusions that all packages have, Standard allots 1000 toll free minutes per user per month and imposes a limit of four participants for HD video conferencing and online meetings.

The Premium plan costs $44.99 monthly for one user, $34.99 for two to 19 users, $31.99 for 20 to 99, and $29.99 for 100 to 999. Toll free minutes are boosted to 2500 per month, and as many as 25 people can participate in HD video conferencing and online meetings. The Premium plan also adds inbound caller ID, automatic call recording, HD voice quality, and integration with Salesforce, Zendesk and Desk.com.

The Enterprise plan costs $59.99 per month for a single user, $49.99 for two to 19, $44.99 for 20 to 99, and $39.99 for 100 to 999. For that, each user gets 10,000 toll free minutes per month and up to 50 people at a time can join HD a video conference or online meeting. Enterprise folds in all other features offered by the Premium and Standard plans, plus voicemail to text transcription.

1-800-789-COOL

Signing up for Ring Central gets each account a new primary number, which can be a local number or a toll free number. International numbers can also be assigned, although this process takes up to 10 days to set up. Even “vanity” numbers are supported. For example, if you wanted your company to assume an easier name for clients to remember, like 1-800-789-COOL. Phone numbers are assigned within minutes of signup (with the exception of international), after which you can sign in to the online portal and begin assigning extensions and setting preferences with the provided auto attendant. Ring Central does give you the opportunity to test drive the service for free for 30 days, however getting a test account established can take up to 24 hours. Existing numbers can also be ported, in the event you already have an established phone number you wish to continue using.

Since inbound call management is one of the features most often sought after by small business owners looking to the cloud for a second phone number, we threw much of our focus into evaluating what Ring Central offers there. Not surprisingly, you get plenty of options and adjustable preferences that can be catered to manage calls professionally. Using the auto attendant, you can record an official greeting that all callers will hear when they ring your business phone number.

The capabilities of the auto attendant are so vast that you can set up complex rules that govern how calls are treated at specific times of day, where and when to forward certain call types, and even what music to play while a caller is on hold. Auto attendant also lets you set up a dial-by-name directory that can forward calls to any number in the world.

There’s An App for That

Ring Central does have an app, which means that you and your employees can use a smartphone in place of a physical landline to receive and place calls in HD quality, send and receive texts, access voicemail and faxes, and join conference calls remotely. Placing outbound calls via the app also shows your assigned phone number on the call recipient’s caller ID instead of displaying your personal mobile number. Making calls through the app over a cellular connection will use up minutes on your individual mobile plan, however calls placed over Wi-Fi won’t. The app also lets you access cloud storage and set up call forwarding. The Ring Central app is available as a free download for iOS and Android devices. Naturally, it requires an active Ring Central account to use.

The interface for both the computer-based and mobile-based applications are well designed and highly responsive. Unlocking the full capacity of the service might take some getting used to, but that’s more a reflection on the complexity of the service and the diversity of features on offer than any shortcomings in the way of design.

Ring Central is far from ideal if you’re a small business owner with only a handful of employees. It’s a complicated service to master and it requires some time to get the hang of it. It’s even less valuable if you’re a sole proprietor simply shopping for a cheap way to add a second phone number to your smartphone so you don’t have to think about how to answer every time it rings. But if you’re at the helm of a quickly expanding company, or in the decision-making chair of a small to medium sized corporation, you may find the money you spend to unlock all of the service’s available features a smart buy.

There are other business phone options, like OneSuite and eVoice. Read our full review.