RingCentral Review: Best VoIP Software for Any UK Business?

RingCentral positions itself as a full-stack business phone system for UK organisations, with four cloud VoIP plans that scale from its entry-level Essentials (£12.99 pp/pm, billed annually) up to the feature-packed Ultimate (£29.99 pp/pm).

For most firms, we’d say the sweet spots are RingCentral Standard (geared to small businesses with 750 inclusive UK & EMEA minutes) and RingCentral Ultimate (suited to medium-sized to large teams with 4,000 minutes and advanced analytics).

With a blend of AI-ready video meetings and the UK’s largest catalogue of CRM and productivity integrations, RingCentral is a compelling VoIP provider for growth-minded SMEs searching for a reliable, scalable alternative to 8×8, bOnline, or Zoom Phone.

RingCentral Review: Key Features

RingCentral is packed with advanced features across calling, video, messaging, and integrations, especially on its higher-tier plans, where it truly stands out from most VoIP competitors. Let’s dive into them one by one, starting with its call management features.

Call management

RingCentral offers extensive call management tools that support diverse business communication needs. It scored perfectly in our research and testing assessment for both its Advanced and Ultra plans, while still achieving one of the highest scores around for its Core plan.

Auto-attendant and multi-level IV

RingCentral’s cloud phone system includes an unlimited-layer virtual receptionist that greets callers, plays branded messages, and routes them by language, postcode, or opening hours.

Even the £19.99 Standard tier unlocks this drag-and-drop IVR designer, so a regional law firm can play a GDPR disclaimer, ask the caller’s case type, and send them straight to the right practice group. Competing UK mid-market plans from GoTo Connect and 8×8 Work cap IVRs at two layers, so RingCentral offers more routing depth for multi-brand or multi-language businesses.

Ring groups and smart routing

RingCentral lets teams build ring groups that fan a call to every handset in, say, a pharmacy counter until someone answers, or distribute calls round-robin to balance workload. Standard and above also allow rules based on caller ID or time of day, something Google Voice’s UK plan still lacks.

Call queues – but only on Premium and Ultimate

Where RingCentral falls behind at the entry level is queuing. The Standard plan omits a virtual waiting room altogether, while Dialpad Pro and GoTo Connect include one at a similar price point.

Still, the Premium and Ultimate plans restore full queuing, music-on-hold, and position announcements, helping RingCentral outpace 8×8 Work and Vonage as a choice for medium to large businesses in 2025.

Supervisor controls, recording and analytics

Premium and Ultimate tiers add on-demand or automatic recording, live monitoring, whisper, and barge, which are vital for contact-centre style coaching.

These tools, together with real-time quality-of-service dashboards, put RingCentral ahead of smaller-business rivals like bOnline (which offers recording but no coaching) and keep it level with 8×8 Work at the higher end.

Call screening and nuisance-call blocking

All RingCentral plans provide caller ID, voicemail screening, and automatic spam blocking. That breadth helped Standard score top marks for screening in the small-business tests, whereas the likes of Vonage and Google Voice lost ground by lacking automatic blocking features.

Communication channels

For most UK businesses, RingCentral offers one of the broadest native channel suites – HD voice, generous video limits, team chat and integrated e-fax – all managed from a single app. Although there is a lack of SMS capability and social media tools. Let’s dive into what it offers here.

Voice and call-conferencing at the core

Every RingCentral UK plan delivers HD voice on mobile and desktop apps, plus one-click audio conferencing with local dial-ins. With Standard, Premium, and Ultimate, this is even branded as “unlimited”, so a five-person consultancy can spin up impromptu board calls without buying extra bridging minutes.

Most UK rivals (8×8 Work, Vonage, Dialpad) include audio bridges too, but RingCentral’s native call-conferencing pairs with its real-time quality-of-service dashboards, giving supervisors clearer insight into line health than bOnline or Zoom Phone can offer out of the box.

HD video meetings baked into every tier

Video is not an add-on here: Standard supports up to 100 attendees, while Premium and Ultimate raise the limit to 200 and allow 24-hour sessions – handy for all-hands calls or client training days.

8×8 Work matches RingCentral on participant limits, but budget providers such as bOnline cap video at forty users, so growing teams get more headroom with RingCentral.

An AI notetaker can transcribe, summarise, and translate meetings in real time, saving admins the cost of a separate licence for products like Otter AI.

Team messaging that links straight into calls

Slack-style channels, file sharing, and @mentions sit alongside the phone dialler in RingCentral’s desktop and mobile apps, and you can escalate any chat to a voice or video call in one click.

Both the Standard and Ultimate plans we assessed were awarded full marks for this area, on par with 8×8 Work and ahead of Vonage, which still relies on a third-party chat plug-in.

AI writing assistance – also new for 2025 – drafts replies or translates posts into 15+ languages, a perk currently missing from competitors like GoTo Connect.

Internet fax still included

If you operate in healthcare, legal or property, built-in e-faxing matters. RingCentral keeps electronic faxing on Standard and above, whereas bOnline and Dialpad drop it entirely, pushing customers to external services.

SMS conspicuously absent in the UK SKU

Unlike its US cousin, the UK edition has no native business SMS. Compared to GoTo Connect and Dialpad, which both offer such a service, this could be a major downside depending on your usual communication methods.

You can bolt on texting via RingCentral’s Contact Centre (a separate type of package starting from £52/user/month) or third-party integrations, but if outbound SMS campaigns are mission-critical, the competitors listed above will be faster to deploy.

Omnichannel caveat

RingCentral’s core licences stop at voice, video, chat and fax. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and live-chat widgets are possible through the Contact Centre product, but as discussed above, this is a higher-priced, separate product.

Businesses needing true “all channels in one licence” may find GoTo Connect’s SMS or Vonage’s social-messaging toolkit more straightforward.

Software integrations

One of the main areas where RingCentral significantly stands out from other VoIP software is in software integration.

It offers the richest plug-and-play ecosystem in the category we’ve seen, with RingCentral’s App Gallery now listing more than 500 pre-built integrations spanning CRM, help-desk, productivity and industry-specific tools. Plus, it has an expansive API for bespoke projects.

For a practical example, a London estate agency can embed RingCentral inside Salesforce so that property details pop up automatically when a buyer rings – no alt-tabbing, fewer mis-dialled notes.

The next closest competitor in terms of raw integration numbers would be 8×8 Work, which advertises around 76 prebuilt apps, and that is still dwarfed in number by RingCentral. Teams relying on niche property or healthcare software are more likely to find an off-the-shelf option in RingCentral’s gallery.

Specifically, RingCentral’s native integration includes the likes of Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. That means agents can log calls, launch video meetings from Outlook or Gmail, and see caller history inside Zendesk tickets, for instance. You can also link up external calendars so that you never miss a call, meeting or event.

Open API for bespoke workflows

If your company runs a bespoke Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system – an all-in-one software that handles stock, finance and operations – or you want to see call statistics inside Microsoft’s Power BI dashboards, RingCentral makes that connection surprisingly straightforward.

It publishes REST APIs (think of them as secure plug-sockets that let two apps swap data over the web) and ships ready-made SDKs (starter code libraries) in popular languages such as Java, Python and C#. A lone in-house developer can usually wire things up in an afternoon.

To picture the power this unlocks, imagine a Midlands factory with Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors on its production line. If a temperature probe spots an overheating motor, the plant’s control system could use RingCentral’s API to ring and text the on-call engineer instantly.

Competing platforms like 8×8 and Dialpad do have developer toolkits, but RingCentral supports more channels – voice, SMS, fax, meeting transcripts and even Quality-of-Service (QoS) statistics – so coders need fewer extra licences to cover every scenario.

Hardware integrations

RingCentral lets UK teams bring almost any modern SIP handset or conference unit into the platform. The plans page lists desk and conference phone rental as an option on every tier, so companies that do not already own equipment can lease devices from day one.

Businesses that already have Poly, Yealink or Cisco handsets can keep them in service, avoiding a costly rip-and-replace. A flexibility that smaller rivals such as bOnline, which only works with Yealink models, simply cannot match, although others like GoTo Connect also offer this plug-and-play support.

Device-as-a-Service

RingCentral’s phone-rental scheme spreads hardware costs over a multi-year contract and bundles warranty replacements – handy for SMEs that want predictable opex rather than a large capex hit.

8×8 sells devices outright without a leasing option, and Vonage’s UK store is limited to two desk-phone ranges, so RingCentral’s rental catalogue stands out for breadth.

Device monitoring and support

Premium and Ultimate plans add device status reports and real-time alerts, so an ops manager sees if a branch office phone goes offline before staff even notice. GoTo Connect offers a similar dashboard, but 8×8 Work and Dialpad rely on third-party monitoring, so RingCentral gives medium-sized enterprises a clearer, in-house view of hardware uptime.

Video rooms and peripherals

Teams that run hybrid board meetings can bolt on RingCentral Rooms licences, turning an existing Poly or Yealink video bar into a fully managed meeting room for about £32 per room per month.

Smaller competitors such as Google Voice and bOnline lack a native video-room option, requiring separate Zoom or Teams rooms instead.

Security options

RingCentral offers a multi-layered security framework to protect customer data and communications, making it a particularly strong choice for regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and legal services.

At the network level, every call, message and meeting is encrypted in transit with TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.2 for signalling and SRTP (Secure Real-time Transport Protocol) for voice/video streams, while data at rest is protected with AES-256 (Advanced Encryption Standard 256-bit). Firewalls, session-border controllers, intrusion detection, and real-time fraud analytics sit behind the scenes, and admins can enforce multi-factor authentication for extra account protection.

Physically, traffic is processed in SSAE 18 (Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 18) and ISO 27001 (International Organisation for Standardisation)-audited data centres with geographic redundancy, so a London outage can fail over to another European site without user action.

UK-relevant compliance badges

RingCentral ticks the boxes most British buyers ask about:

• ISO 27001 / 27017 / 27018 for information-security, cloud-security, and data-privacy controls
• ISO 22301 for business-continuity planning
• SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 3 (System and Organization Controls) assurance reports, plus controls mapped to FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) guidance for financial-services firms
• Cyber Essentials Plus – the UK government-backed scheme that proves basic defences against common cyber-attacks
• Listing on the NHS (National Health Service) Data Security & Protection Toolkit (DSPT), confirming the platform meets the National Data Guardian’s ten data-security standards for handling patient information
• PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) attestation for safe cardholder data handling in contact-centre scenarios
• A GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)-ready Data-Processing Addendum that spells out roles, sub-processors and standard contractual clauses for UK-EU personal data

Few mid-market VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) providers publish such a broad UK-specific compliance slate. 8×8 Work also offers ISO 27001, SOC 2 and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) support, yet buyers in healthcare or central government still need to request proof of Cyber Essentials or NHS DSPT separately, and FINRA alignment may require extra configuration.

RingCentral Review: Pricing Plans Explained

RingCentral sells four cloud-phone bundles in Britain: Essentials, Standard, Premium and Ultimate. All prices below are the lower “pay annually” figure advertised on RingCentral’s UK pricing page, which is what most SMEs select to unlock the headline saving.

Pricing and feature comparison

Here’s a table for a topline comparison of RingCentral’s plans before we compare them (and their respective value) in greater detail:

Essentials – Best for micro-firms that just need a phone number

At £12.99 per user, Essentials is one of the cheapest branded VoIP tiers on the UK market. It covers voice, mobile and desktop apps, team messaging and 24/7 support, but no video meetings, IVR or CRM connectors.

The 100-minute bundle works for sole traders, yet feels restrictive once calls pick up. Dialpad’s entry plan offers unlimited UK minutes at a similar price, so most growing startups outgrow Essentials quickly.

Standard – The small-business sweet spot

Standard adds HD video for up to 100 participants, internet faxing, on-demand call recording and a graphical IVR – the elements our testing found small firms rely on day-to-day.

Despite the generous toolkit it still costs under £20 when paid annually, earning a top “price” rating in our small-business study, the trade-off is its 750-minute cap, so talk-heavy sales teams may prefer rivals that bundle unlimited UK calling.

Premium – Headroom for scaling SMEs

Premium lifts the minute pool to 2,000 and introduces automatic recording, single sign-on, hot-desking and live coaching tools such as whisper and barge.

It is the first tier to unlock native CRM integrations, meaning a scaling agency can log calls inside Salesforce without middleware. For just £5 extra over Standard it removes most small-business pain-points, making it the pragmatic “grow with us” choice.

Ultimate – Feature-complete for medium and large enterprises

Ultimate layers device-status reporting, real-time alerts and unlimited storage on top of Premium, while doubling the minute bank to 4,000. This plan achieved the highest overall score in our medium-business comparison, outpacing 8×8 Work on analytics depth and hardware health.

The cost is still below £30 when paid annually, yet minutes are not truly unlimited; companies with huge outbound volumes will need either the optional EMEA unlimited add-on or an alternative such as bOnline’s Unlimited plan.

RingCentral Review: Help & Support

RingCentral backs its UK service with one of the broadest support menus in the VoIP field, combining round-the-clock human help with extensive self-serve resources.

Support channels available on every plan

• 24/7 phone helpline and live chat – Essentials through to Ultimate include both channels, so users can reach a real agent at any hour.
• Email ticketing – For less urgent issues, customers can raise a case and receive updates by email; this option is present on Standard and Ultimate and absent from some budget rivals.
• Extensive knowledge base & community forum – Step-by-step articles, video tutorials and peer answers cover everything from handset setup to API calls.
• Uptime guarantee – all plans come with a published service-level agreement and a 99.999 % target, something several cheaper UK competitors do not match.

Plan-specific extras

• Onboarding and implementation – Customers with two or more users receive guided setup and training sessions at no extra cost.
• Priority handling and advanced consultancy – While RingCentral does not publicly gate basic support behind higher tiers, Premium and Ultimate buyers can opt into Premier Success packages that add faster response targets and a named technical account manager (smaller rivals such as Vonage reserve this level of hand-holding for their most expensive enterprise licences).

RingCentral Review: VoIP Phone Alternatives

While RingCentral is a market leader for VoIP and cloud phone systems, our research found several strong competitors that may better suit specific business needs, whether that’s a tighter budget, simpler software, or improved video and global calling capabilities.

To provide the best view for most businesses, we’ll look at plans suitable for medium-sized businesses primarily in this comparison. Let’s look at an overview first, before diving into some specific comparisons further down.

➡️ 8×8 Work – best for unlimited global calling

8×8 Work gives UK users unlimited inbound and outbound minutes to UK- destinations, plus up to 48 countries. It matched RingCentral Ultimate on advanced analytics and live-coaching tools, too, such as call barge and whisper.

However, its pricing is “bespoke”, so true cost certainty depends on negotiation. You also miss RingCentral’s device-health dashboards and built-in hardware rental, meaning larger estates must add separate monitoring.

➡️ bOnline Unlimited Calling & Video – Budget-friendly domestic minutes

At about £14 per user, per month in our small-business study, bOnline delivered the joint-best price score and bundles unlimited UK & EMEA calling, beating RingCentral’s capped minutes by a distance.

It integrates with Salesforce and a handful of popular CRMs, too (albeit when paid for via an add-on). However, it scores zero for call coaching as it has no call-whisper or barge features, so it suits cost-conscious firms that do not run large contact-centre teams.

➡️ GoTo Connect Phone System – Bring-your-own-device champion

At £18 per user, per month, GoTo Connect’s Phone System has some appealing benefits. We found it has wider hardware compatibility (including Poly, Yealink and Cisco) than any other provider we assessed, offering Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) flexibility to integrate with most hardware options.

It also has unlimited international calling to 50+ countries, and notably, GoTo is one of the few providers offering integrated e-fax capabilities, should that be essential to your operations.

How We Reviewed RingCentral

It’s worth stating from the get-go that each of RingCentral’s plans has slightly different assessment criteria applied to them based on the type of customer we expect them to have.

For instance, RingCentral’s Standard plan was assessed under our “Small Business” criteria, since it is comparable in cost to similar plans from other providers. Meanwhile, RingCentral Ultimate was assessed under our “Medium-sized Business” criteria for similar reasons.