RingCentral vs. Microsoft Teams Phone | Reviewing the differences for a medium-large-size company

Your medium-large-size company is in the market for a new phone system, and you, as the IT department have heard about RingCentral and Microsoft Teams Phone system, but you’re not sure which one is better for your company.

In this video, I’m going to review 5 key differences between RingCentral and Teams Phone system on cost, footprint, features, integrations, and administration.

Want my recommendations on the best business phone system or Teams Phone provider? Ask me today.

About Me

Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

You work for a medium to large sized company that is in the market for a new phone system. And you’ve heard of RingCentral and you’ve heard of Microsoft teams phone system. But you’re wondering, are either of these a good fit for medium to large sized companies like ours? And are there things about them that might make them not such a good fit and how do they compare to one another? Maybe, hey, maybe we want to go with one or the other. Which ones should we go with? Those are all great questions. Those are two of the biggest names in cloud phone systems. In today’s day and age. So great idea. Great thought in this video. I’m going to cover that. I’m going to compare RingCentral to Microsoft teams phone system in the areas of cost footprint features, integrations and administrative capabilities.

Want my recommendation? Reach out and contact me

But before we get to that, if you want a shortcut, hey, watch this video. That’s great and everything. But if you want to quickly get to the right vendors, your company should be coding for a new phone system. Reach out, send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011). I will help your company make a lot better decision at a fraction of the time. More information on that at the end of the video. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss any of my weekly, sometimes bi weekly videos and like the video. Ring the bell and leave a comment. Let me know what you think about the video. Let me know what other questions you have or what other technologies you’d like me to do. An educational video on.

RingCentral vs Microsoft Teams Phone

All right. So what are the differences between RingCentral and Microsoft teams phone system when it comes to cloud based phone systems? We’re going to jump into it. You know, this video, though, I just wanted to let you know, is really geared for medium to large size companies. If you’re a small business, some of these differences might apply to you as well. But my specialty is medium to large size businesses. That’s who I work with the most. So that’s where my area of expertise is. So that’s what I’m going to focus on in this video.

Cost

So let’s talk about cost. Well, if your company has a microsoft 365 E5 license, then Microsoft teams phone system wins. When it comes to cost, they’re going to be the lowest price if you want more information on on price of Microsoft teams phone system, watch my video that covers the cost of Microsoft teams phone system. But if your company does not have an E5 license, then it’s really a tie. Microsoft teams phone system and RingCentral are going to cost about the same, which is, I’d say in the range of 10 to $15 per month per user, depending on the size of your company, depending on the features that your company needs, all that good stuff. So cost is about the same unless your company has an E five license and if so, then teams phone system is a lower cost

Footprint

footprint. Let’s say your company has a global footprint. You have locations all over the United States, all over the world. Is that going to be an issue with either of these? Well, it’s not both RingCentral and Microsoft teams phone systems have a global footprint, some of the largest footprints of the industry. So I would say that’s a tie between RingCentral and Microsoft teams phone system. Neither one of them gets an edge. However, if your company is located in some obscure places, you might want to reach out to me and let me know the location of those specific sites. And maybe one provider versus the other has an edge.

Features

features which of the two has better features while RingCentral wins this one hands down Microsoft teams phone system does have a lot of feature gaps. If you want to know which feature gaps. Specifically, watch my other video that describes the feature gaps in Microsoft teams phone system. But essentially things like call center, call reporting and analytics, SMS texting, reception console things like that, call recording, always on call recording, things like that. Teams phone system does not have. So Microsoft teams phone system is not the best when it comes to features. RingCentral is the best.

Integrations

Who has better integrations. So let’s assume your company has a CRM like Salesforce or ERP software like Sequel or Oracle. You know which of the two can integrate best with third party software like HubSpot, Salesforce, all those or RingCentral wins this one. Again, the reason why is Microsoft teams phone system does not have open APIs. They don’t allow access to all their APIs where RingCentral does. RingCentral has a ton of prebuilt integrations and open APIs so you can integrate with any CTA integration, with any cloud based software that your company is using. So integrations, definitely better with RingCentral over Microsoft teams phone system. In addition, when it comes to integrations, one thing you should know RingCentral can actually embed add their dialer inside teams. It’s called their teams dialer plug in. And so you can actually use RingCentral inside of Microsoft teams, but you can’t use teams inside of the RingCentral app. So just a little twist there.

Administration

And lastly, what about administrative features or administration of the phone system? So this is where your guys feature comes in. So who’s going to be administering the phone system? How easy is it to administer the phone system? Well, RingCentral wins this one as well. If you look at my video on the review of Microsoft teams phone system for 2024 or 2023, I’m about to do one for 2024. You’ll see that administering Microsoft teams phone system is not as easy as other cloud PBX solutions like RingCentral. So just and what I mean by that, just to give you some specifics, like for instance, when you add a an auto tenant or a call queue to Microsoft teams phone system, it’s like a three step process. First, you have to set up the call queue, then you have to set up a resource account. Then you have to take a phone number and assign it to the resource account. So it’s not just one seamless process of, Hey, like with RingCentral, if I want to add an auto attendant or a call queue, it walks me through the step process, step by step and ask me for each one of those things along the way. I don’t have to go back and create these things in separate processes. That’s just one example.

Don’t decide right now

But overall, if you’ve been inside the Microsoft admin portal for 365, you know what I’m talking about. First, there’s a portal for 365, then you got to go to the portal for teams. Then within teams you’ve got to click the voice services. So it’s just a little bit more cumbersome. There’s more steps to it. It’s a little bit more confusing to administer Microsoft teams phone system as opposed to RingCentral. RingCentral ironed out a lot of that stuff over the years. They’ve been around a long time, so RingCentral wins when it comes to which system is easier to administer. So if you’ve kept score, you can see that RingCentral wins when it comes to the score, right? According to my evaluation. So you’re thinking, I guess RingCentral is better. Hold on. That’s not necessarily the case. Really. It depends on your company’s requirements. So say your company has an F five license and you don’t need any of those features. And the administrative part doesn’t really bother you a whole lot. And you have thousands of employees and they’re all using teams, really. Religiously today. Well, that may be a hard decision to go with RingCentral for that type of situation. So it just kind of depends on your company and the needs that you guys have. But the main thing is if you’re going to Microsoft teams phone system, you really want to look into an operator connect provider. There’s a lot of providers out there that do operator connect and that’s how you’re going to get a lower price on Microsoft teams phone system to begin with.

Still confused? Reach out and contact me

So I look at Operator connect for Microsoft teams phone system or RingCentral, but either one, if you want to look at either of those things, don’t just call them up. Don’t just look them up on the Internet. Get assigned to a random rep. Reach out, send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011) if your company is in the market for a cloud phone system at all. The reason why is I’m a broker for all the major cloud phone systems, service providers, all the operator connect providers for Microsoft teams phone system. And I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. So based on your company’s requirements, I can tell you which vendors you should be quoting. I can introduce you to the best salespeople to work with at those organizations. I can also oversee the quoting process to make sure you get the best pricing on the technology on the vendor of your choice. So overall, I will help your company make a lot better decision in a fraction of the time. And if you’re wondering how much I charge, that’s the nice thing is I don’t charge your company a dime for my services. The service providers actually pay me my broker fee so you don’t have to pay me anything. So there’s no excuse to at least not reach out and get my opinion on which vendors your company should be quoting today. All right. Well, I hope you found the video helpful. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss any of my upcoming videos that I release at least once a week.