Microsoft Teams vs. RingCentral Office: What’s the Best Tool for Business Communication?
RingCentral is a top performing VoIP provider with team collaboration features. Microsoft Teams is a leading team collaboration platform with VoIP capabilities. But which one is right for your business? We’ve tested both and here’s how they stack up.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams may not be the first name that comes to mind when folks consider a business Voice-over-IP solution. Teams is known primarily a business messaging solution that competes with the likes of Slack. However, Microsoft sees Teams as an all-up communications hub and has integrated both voice and video calling capabilities in the product with more to come. Teams is a gateway to the rest of Microsoft’s business messaging suite, which is why it’s so easily accessible to Microsoft Office 365 Business subscribers.
Microsoft Teams has seen a surge in use, specially since it has been made available for non Office 365 users. During their earnings call this week, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella disclosed that Teams usage has increased by 70 percent to more than 75 million daily active users. Microsoft Teams also saw 200 million meeting participants in a single day. This is only going to increase in number as the work from home initiatives for social distancing continue.
Out of the box, Teams supports the ability for users to make Voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls from Teams client to Teams client. In Teams, it is possible for users to make, receive, and transfer calls to and from landlines and mobile phones on the public switched telephone network (PSTN) by accessing Microsoft’s cloud PBX features. But at the moment, this is largely a peripheral function of Teams, which requires a Microsoft-assigned phone number and a domestic or international calling plan. All that will costs an extra $12 per user per month for US calls and $24 per month for International calls.
RingCentral Office
A long-standing PC Mag Editors’ Choice pick, RingCentral Office is what most companies expect from a full-featured cloud PBX solution. The platform includes everything from artificial intelligence (AI) integration to capabilities like faxing, video conferencing, and custom application integration, too.
In 2019, RingCentral announced an extension of its partnership with Zoom video conferencing, which allows RingCentral customers to integrate that application with their RingCentral Office implementation. Additionally, users can also purchase RingCentral Meetings, a similar but standalone conferencing and shared meeting app. New for 2020 is a freshened user interface that’s cleaner and somewhat more intuitive. However, some useful features are actually separate-cost add-ons to the base service, so do your math carefully before purchasing.
RingCentral Office’s strengths lie in its ease of deployment and ability to shift to a multi-mode and multi-device tool. Whether you’re using a desktop, a PBX, or your mobile device, RingCentral is easily optimized while ensuring voice communications are always reliable.
Price
RingCentral Office begins at $19.99 per user per month for the Essentials plan, its lowest tier. For small to midsize businesses (SMBs), it provides the foundation for a hosted Private Branch Exchange (PBX) system with a variety of high-end features. While its price is still slightly higher than some of the competition, it’s become more competitive over the past couple of years as features have been added, including its Glip online collaboration software as well as video conferencing. International dialing rates from North America vary by country for RingCentral Office, so this is a factor to consider when pricing out your solution.
The version of Microsoft Teams that comes with Office 365 adds all the tight integrations with other Office apps, plus 24/7 support, and business-grade tools for administration, security, and compliance. As with the free version, this version lets you have up to 300 team members, unless you have the enterprise edition, which is good for as many people as you need.
The three versions of Office that include Teams are Office 365 Business Essentials: $5 per person per month with annual commitment; Office 365 Business Premium: $12.50 per person per month with annual commitment; and, Office 365 E3 (enterprise): $20 per person per month with annual commitment. Microsoft Teams offers a lower price of admission at $5 per person per month. Even its Business Premium tier, at $12.50 per person per month is more affordable than RingCentral Office’s $19.99 starting price.
But, considering that calling non-Teams members will require a calling plan ($12 per user per month for US calling or $24 per user per month for International calls) over the subscription price makes RingCentral Office the more flexible solution for VoIP voice calling. Edge: RingCentral Office.
Setup and Ease of Use
Setting up RingCentral Office is straightforward. The web management user interface (UI) allows for the creation and maintenance of user extensions, the configuration of auto attendant services, company information, and phones and devices. The desktop app gives multiple ways to start or join calls including video conferencing, dial-in (with numbers for 50 countries), join by Meeting ID, or by Participant ID. There’s also a useful Call Me feature which makes the system call participants on their landlines or mobile phones, this is useful for people on the field who may not want to jump through hoops to join a meeting or a call. You do need an assigned digital line to the user extension to place outgoing calls.
Getting to the voice call function on Microsoft Teams is straightforward. You can place a call from the chat, the command bar, or the calling tab. Teams gives users manifold ways to shift modes from messaging, to video, or voice calling.
Clicking on the Calls tab in Microsoft Teams brings up the dial pad to enter the number and initiating a call. Clicking on a the phone icon next to any contact in Teams calls them. From the Command bar in Teams, you can type a backslash (which lets Teams know you are giving it a command, and you are prompted to type the email or name of the person you’d like to call. Edge: Tie.
Feature Set
At the Standard plan level, RingCentral delivers a multi-faceted communications platform including business phone or toll-free numbers and unlimited business SMS. Your Standard plan also offers integrations with Dropbox , Google Drive, and Microsoft Office. Although Ooma also integrates with Dropbox, it doesn’t offer instant access to Google and Microsoft, both of which deliver the productivity tools the majority of the American workforce uses. Additional Standard features include user paging, office intercom, and templates for batch configurations.
At the Premium level, RingCentral integrates with Desk.com, Salesforce.com, and Zendesk , all of which give your sales and service reps instant access to customer records. The Premium plan also provides automatic call recording and single sign-on (SSO) security. RingCentral Office customers know that they are getting a solid enterprise-grade security solution that’s backed by an industry-leading 99.999% uptime
Microsoft Teams makes it easy for users within an organization or a team to jump on a call from a text message thread. Screen sharing and video call recording features are easy to use, but calling external users or participants requires a calling plan and few extra steps and might be less than ideal.
For organizations like small to midsize businesses (SMBs), as well as schools and universities, Microsoft Teams provides a multifaceted collaboration solution. The VoIP calling functionality will be familiar to anyone that’s used Skype with the added advantage of being able to jump on other aspects of team messaging and collaboration which are already on tap. Edge: Microsoft Teams.
And the Winner Is…
While comparing an integrated team messaging solution like Microsoft Teams against a VoIP tool like RingCentral Office may not yield a one-to-one feature comparison, both solutions enable a broad range of internet-based communication options that overlap considerably. RingCentral Office is a PC Mag Editors’ Choice pick in the VoIP category for its reliability and generous range of features including everything from artificial intelligence (AI) integration to meeting collaboration capabilities and other staples, like faxing and even some call center features. It also supports custom application integrations via standard APIs, which is something many enterprises value in a calling solution. Overall, RingCentral has a much wider range of VoIP calling options, calling plans, and higher-end PBX capabilities.
Microsoft Teams has an excellent foundation as a multi-faceted team communications platform, which lets it seamlessly transition between text, voice, and video connections. Microsoft Teams’ ability to serve a larger pool of attendees (up to 10,000 within and outside an organization) also makes it stand out as does its advantage of being backed by Microsoft’s excellent Azure Cloud infrastructure. However, while you can make calls with Teams, Microsoft is still working to mature the VoIP and PBX capabilities included with the product. Businesses that are focused on calling and therefore looking for versatile VoIP functionality will find better value in Editors’ Choice pick RingCentral Office.
Winner: RingCentral Office.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
