(Design: Lily Yeh | Credit: scyther5/Getty Images)
If mobile phones alone won't cut it, your business needs to make a choice between digital voice over IP (VoIP) or classic public switched telephone network (PSTN) for office phones. But really, there’s no contest. Based on stats from FinancesOnline, companies that embrace VoIP save as much as 75% on operational costs, not to mention savings on bills, especially for international calls. The US Chamber of Commerce says 31% of US businesses have embraced VoIP, and that number is expected to grow at least through 2028, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com.
By switching to VoIP, your business can also increase its productivity. It's a lot easier for an IT team to troubleshoot VoIP since it uses existing networking and includes management tools (not to mention user extras like call recording, conference calls, and mobile communications). VoIP systems have become fully cloud-based data-communication services you can manage for a couple of users or thousands of them as long as your network can handle the traffic.
For the 12th year running, we've asked PCMag readers to rate the services they use to help determine the best VoIP providers. Even as we expanded our queries to determine the right choice for specific use cases—like working from home or for IT teams—the answer remains the same: Ooma is the top-rated VoIP brand in our survey.
The Top VoIP Brand for 2025 Is a Familiar One
VoIP services come in many flavors, from stalwart brands that specialize specifically in voice technology, such as Cisco, Ooma, and RingCentral; to corporate team collaboration tools that incorporate voice, like Microsoft Teams (which shares a heritage with and users from the soon-to-be discontinued Skype); to the latest generation of video conferencing options that exploded during the pandemic, particularly Zoom. While some things may change—like how people use VoIP, with it appearing more than ever as an app-based connection method for smartphones, for example—one thing stays the same in our results: Ooma is our readers' top pick. This is 12 consecutive wins for Ooma going all the way back to 2014, when we started asking about VoIP providers in PCMag Business Choice surveys.
(Note: Click the down, left, and right arrows in our interactive charts to view various elements of our survey results.)
In the chart above, which covers all the VoIP services' results this year, Ooma is on top in every measure except for mobile app support, in which it ties with Zoom Phone, and in softphone app support, where Zoom is on top. Most of Ooma’s scores are 9.0 or higher, with exceptional 9.2 out of 10 ratings for both cost and email integration.
RingCentral also scores well in many subcategories, tying with Ooma and Zoom in some, but generally, it occupies the middle of the chart. The most venerable VoIP providers like Cisco, which has offered IP telephony services since 1998, and Mitel remain toward the bottom of the chart along with Microsoft Teams. The latter’s best score, for email integration into its voice system, is still ranked below that of Zoom or RingCentral.
The huge shift to working from home during and after the pandemic is slowly reversing, but there are still enough people doing their jobs remotely to ask which brand employees prefer for VoIP in their home offices. Ooma, their top pick, doesn’t share the spotlight with any other vendor in the work-from-home category. Its lowest rating is 8.9 for CRM integration, but it has particularly notable scores for setup, reliability, ease of use, and call quality.
Finally, in the IT management category, the brand of choice is Ooma, the same result as last year when we introduced the IT-managed VoIP option in our survey. Ooma scores among IT pros are slightly lower than above, but still with plenty of stand-out ratings over 9.0, especially for cost, ease of use, call quality, and email integration.
Interestingly, the softphone option—where users can access VoIP services on their PCs or even their mobile devices, using an app to mimic the capabilities of a phone, and add extras like text chat and video conferencing when supported—is tied across Ooma, Teams, and RingCentral. Most other categories show Teams and RingCentral a half point or more behind Ooma’s top ratings.
To see which VoIP service currently leads in our lab testing, read The Best Business VoIP Services for 2025.
The PCMag Business Choice survey for VoIP Services was in the field from Dec. 23, 2024 to Mar. 17, 2025. For more information on how we conduct surveys, read the survey methodology.