Business Choice Awards 2020: Voice Over IP (VoIP) Providers

The Voice over IP (VoIP) category covers a lot of ground, from Google Voice, which offers virtual numbers, to major corporate accounts with ISPs and standalone providers that install cloud-based PBX services.

This year, 12 VoIP brands received enough responses in our Business Choice survey to be included in the mix. But one particular vendor remains the most worthy of your office's consideration.

Voice Over IP Providers for 2020

Business Choice Winner: OOMABusiness Choice Winner: OOMAThis is the seventh year in a row that Ooma's VoIP service has crushed the competition, according to PCMag readers who use it. There isn't a single measurement we ask about—satisfaction, cost, ease of use, likelihood to recommend—where Ooma doesn't dominate.

OomaOoma has won top honors in PCMag’s VoIP category for the last seven years, and 2020 isn’t going to alter that. In our survey this year, Ooma was the most used vendor by far, which in many other categories doesn't help—simply because a company is ubiquitous, especially in business, doesn't make it beloved. Ooma is both.

Ooma has the top score in every single category of our survey. That's really all you need to know. Browse the chart below for each section and you'll see it clearly. Most of Ooma's scores are even above 9.0 (out of 10). One exception is the overall satisfaction score—the most important number we look at when determining Business Choice Award winners—but at 8.9, it's still worlds ahead of other top brands. Ooma's lowest score is actually for tech support, but that still-stellar 8.8 tells you that Ooma is a company worth calling when you need help.

Is there another VoIP system worth considering among the vendors that made the cut this year? Definitely. Our Editors' Choice, RingCentral, also scores incredibly well. Not enough to overtake or even equal Ooma's numbers, but it came close in many cases, including an excellent 8.6 for overall satisfaction. Its score overall is a nice lift from the 8.1 it received last year, when it was in sixth place.

It's interesting to see big names like Avaya and Mitel back on the list this year, but the corporate-leaning vendors have dismal scores, indicating that office users are not huge fans. ISPs with VoIP services—like Spectrum, Verizon, and AT&T—were all pretty middle of the road.

For expert opinion, read The Best Business VoIP Providers for 2020The Best Business VoIP Providers for 2020.

Here's the full table of results for Business Choice 2020: Voice over IP Services:

Business Choice 2020: Voice over IP Services FULL TABLE

The PCMag Readers' Choice survey for Voice over IP Services was in the field from January 27, 2020, through February 17, 2020. For more information on how the survey is conducted, read the survey methodologysurvey methodology.

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About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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