Written by Joe De Bari, Lead of Marketing Communications at OnSIP. The following content was last updated on January 24, 2020. Any new information since that date may not be included in this article.
OnSIP and Nextiva are two leading cloud-based phone system providers that cater to small, medium sized, and enterprise businesses. While both providers are recognized as leaders in the VoIP industry, with both companies offering quality service for well over a decade, each platform ultimately offers distinct advantages depending on what you are looking for.
We recently embarked upon a deep dive comparison between OnSIP and Nextiva in an effort to gather information for this blog. Most of the information is freely available on Nextiva's site; the other facts were gathered in conversations with Nextiva's sales team.
Here's a VoIP comparison of how OnSIP and Nextiva hold up on pricing, features, and phone support.
Pricing
Nextiva
Focusing on their 'Business Communication Suite' plans, Nextiva offers three general pricing plans: Basic ($20.00 - $35.00 per month per user), Pro ($25.00 - $38.00 per month per user), and Enterprise ($30.00 - $55.00 per month per user). Pricing tiers fall into four categories based on the number of users on your account: 1 - 4 users, 5 - 19 users, 20 - 99 users, and 100+ users. You also have the option to choose between month to month and contract pricing. Contract pricing offers a lesser per month per user charge than month to month pricing.
Each plan has unlimited calling and includes features like auto attendants and hold music. The Pro plan additionally offers a couple of more advanced business phone system features like text messaging and the Nextiva App. And the Enterprise plan additionally offers a few more features, such as call recording and voicemail to text.
OnSIP
OnSIP offers two paid pricing plans and one free plan:
- Unlimited Plan: OnSIP's Unlimited Plan offers unlimited Standard Area calling for $18.95 per person per month (the Standard Calling Area covers the contiguous U.S. and 16 other countries). In addition, this plan enables customers to set up an unlimited amount of calling features like voicemail boxes, groups, and auto attendants; additional features like conference suites and call queues can be bought a la carte. Call recording is also included in this plan.
- Basic Plan: The Basic Plan allows you to pay for features and calls on a month-to-month basis—it does not cost anything to add phones or users to this plan. This plan lets you customize your account by building your own feature package: starting off with a basic set of popular business phone features at $49.95 per month, you can then add (and delete) additional features to your account as your business requires. Under this plan, you do not have to pay anything to add a phone onto your system. With the Basic Plan, you are charged for the minutes that the phone uses (at 3.2 cents per minute; inbound calls to a toll-free number are charged at 3.9 cents per minute), rather than for the 'seat' itself.
- sayso Website Chat Plan: OnSIP's innovative sayso Website Chat Plan lets you use sayso, our website voice and video chat solution, for free! Once you add sayso to your website, site visitors can click on a call button to quickly start a voice or video call with one of your business representatives right through the browser window—no phones needed. The call occurs within the browser and entirely over the Internet.
All OnSIP plans have a 30-day free trial period.
Features
OnSIP and Nextiva both offer hosted PBX features that have become mainstays in the market. Each company has auto attendants, busy lamp field, call parking, ring groups, Music on Hold, voicemail to email, ACD queues, conference bridges, HD VoIP, and call forwarding as part of their platforms.
When it comes to CRM integration, Nextiva offers their own Sales and Customer Service CRM platform, with three different tiers of pricing for their 'Customer Relationship Suite.' Integrations with popular business applications like Salesforce and Outlook are available. OnSIP's CRM integrations include Zendesk and HubSpot.
OnSIP and Nextiva both offer advanced call queues; these allows supervisors to monitor the queue in real-time and generate performance reports. Call queues provide up to three supervisory options:
- Call Monitor - Queue supervisors can listen in (in real-time) on any agent who is on a call. Neither the agent nor the caller will know the supervisor is listening.
- Call Whisper - While listening in on a call, queue supervisors can speak to the agent without the caller hearing.
- Call Barge - Supervisors can 'barge' into a call and speak to both the agent and customer simultaneously.
OnSIP offers the OnSIP app, a softphone that can replace your desk phone. It's available in the browser (Chrome, Firefox, and Opera), as a desktop app for Mac and Windows computers, and as a mobile app for iOS and Android. The OnSIP app can make voice and video calls at the click of a button. App users can also view the presence statuses of their coworkers and can even listen to, delete, and manage their voicemails right from the app interface.
In addition, OnSIP offers a unique web calling solution called sayso, which allows website visitors to engage in video or voice calls with one of your employees using only their Internet web browsers—no downloads or plugins required. Your customers can quickly start up a conversation with your sales and support team members with just a mouse click.
Nextiva offers customers a downloadable desktop softphone and mobile softphone. The Nextiva App is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android platforms. These apps offer unified communications features such as: IM, voice and video calling/conferencing, and SMS capabilities from a mobile device.
Call recording is available in Nextiva's Enterprise plan. Recorded files are saved for up to six months and can be downloaded using a Nextiva-provided application. OnSIP also offers Call Recording; all recorded calls are saved in a third-party Storage Service Provider (linked by the customer to his OnSIP account) and can be accessed and retrieved at any time.
All three of Nextiva's plans also offer free online faxing. Users can fax their documents via Nextiva's vFAX Portal, or from an email address or traditional fax machine.
Phones
Nextiva sells phones through its service but also has a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy for certain supported models. OnSIP does not sell phones to its customers but offers provisioned phones through a preferred partner. OnSIP also has a BYOD policy that allows customers to use any SIP-compatible phones that they want. Furthermore, customers are not required to purchase phones from any specific vendor, allowing them to shop around for the best price.
There are still some limitations to the kinds of phones that can be used with each service. Nextiva sells Polycom, Cisco, Panasonic, and VTech phones, among others. OnSIP provides a 'boot server' to customers that automatically configures Polycom, Panasonic, Cisco, Yealink, and Grandstream phones, although any phone that follows the SIP RFC standards will work with the service. OnSIP also maintains its own section of objective phone reviews to help guide customers to the right phone for them. The review information Nextiva provides deals with phone features rather than qualitative reviews.
Support
OnSIP's Customer Success Team is based in Doylestown, PA and has an average caller wait time of 22 seconds per call. OnSIP customers have given the service a 4.5/5 TrustScore rating on Trustpilot. OnSIP CEO Mike Oeth continues to answer at least one support call per day, in order to stay in tune with issues that customers are facing.
The Nextiva Amazing Service support team offers dedicated account managers and multi-channel, in-house support. Nextiva enables its customers to contact them via live phone support, live chat, and email/ticket submission.
NEXTIVA is a registered trademark of Nextiva, Inc. Nextiva and its products/services are not affiliated with OnSIP or Junction Networks, Inc.