10 Best International Calling Apps 2023 | Tech.co

Vonage

Vonage is a name that needs no introduction. It’s incredibly well known in the phone business, and even if you’re yet to try it, you probably already know that its international calling options will more than suffice. Admittedly, the Vonage set up was a little more complicated than we expected when we did our testing, but I’ll do my best to explain how it works.

To put it as simply as possible, Vonage requires you to sign up for the home phone or business service to make international calls, which has a variety of international pricing options. If you want to make international calls on your smartphone, you’ll have to then download the Vonage Extensions app, which will give you control over your home or business phone service on your device. After this, it’s just a matter of how many minutes you have, or whether or not you signed up for the unlimited plan. See- not too complicated!

In comparison to other VoIP providers like Nextiva or Google Voice, Vonage features knocks it out of the park — providing everything you need to handle large levels of inbound calls including call queue, spam shield, company-wide call recording, on-demand call recording, toll-free numbers, virtual mailboxes, visual voicemail, group paging and more, in the packages it offers. When we put it head to head with other VoIP providers our researchers found it to be one of the best, scoring a total of 4.4 out of 5 in our VoIP features category.

Vonage pricing

Vonage offers two consumer pricing plans for international calling: North America and World. The North America plan covers the US, Mexico, Canada, and Puerto Rico, and will cost you $9.99 per month for unlimited calling for the first six months and then $26.99 per month after that.

The World plan, on the other hand, will cost you $9.99 per month for the first six months and then $29.99 after that. and allows you to call 60 countries on landlines and 10 countries on mobile. Beware though; if you don’t sign up for an annual contract, those prices can go up substantially.

However, Vonage also has plans geared towards businesses. The Mobile plan is available from $19.99 per line, per month (includes mobile and desktop apps, unlimited calls and SMS, and unlimited team messaging).

The Premium plan is available for $29.99 per line, per month (includes all mobile plan features, plus unlimited meetings for up to 100 participants, multi-level auto attendance, CRM integration, and IP desk phone capabilities), and the Advanced plan is available from $39.99 per month (including everything in the Premium plan, call recording on-demand, visual voicemail and more).

Prices for international calls aren’t bad though, with calls to Mexico setting you back just 2¢ per minute for mobile and 1¢ per minute for landline, and UK calls costing 2¢ per minute for both mobile and landlines.

Is Vonage better for business or personal use?

Whether Vonage is better for business or personal use will depend entirely on your needs. It’s a great VoIP system for retail and customer service businesses, due to its strong training features, but for those with less that 50 employees, you may be better off finding a VoIP alternative.

If Vonage is a match for your business needs, you should opt for the Advanced plan. In our testing, we found Vonage to be great for scalability and customer service in businesses of 50-250 people who could afford its Advanced package, while its premium package was notably expensive in comparison to other VoIP providers, and didn’t offer the same level of security features and external connections.

Overall, we scored Vonage 4.3 out of 5 for businesses. It should go without saying that the home phone plan is better for personal use.