Grasshopper vs RingCentral
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedGrasshopper compared with RingCentral
RingCentral is a phone system and Grasshopper is a phone number. RingCentral gives every user an extension, a direct line, recording, queues, desk phones, CRM CTI, and roughly 330 integrations for $20 to $35 per seat per month on annual billing. Grasshopper gives an account one to five numbers with a menu, flat, with unlimited users. Under four people with no office, Grasshopper costs a fraction as much and does enough. With staff, a receptionist, or a CRM that matters, RingCentral is the real product.
RingCentral compared with Grasshopper
Grasshopper is a virtual phone number with an auto attendant, priced flat from $14 a month with unlimited users, and it does not pretend to be a phone system. RingCentral is a phone system with extensions, queues, desk phones, and admin depth, priced per seat. If your business is one to three people who want a professional-sounding number that rings their mobiles, Grasshopper is cheaper and faster; the moment you need per-user extensions, recording, queues, or CRM logging, Grasshopper stops and RingCentral starts.
Choose Grasshopper if
Solo operators, consultants, freelancers, trades, real estate agents, and businesses of two to five people who want a professional business number with a menu and extensions ringing the phones they already own, at a flat price with no per-seat cost and no contract.
Choose RingCentral if
Small and mid-sized businesses that need a real phone system rather than a sales dialer: multiple locations, a receptionist flow, desk phones on desks, e-fax that still matters to their customers, and an IT contact who wants one vendor for phone, video, and messaging with a published SLA behind it.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Grasshopper | RingCentral |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Calling | Calling |
| Starting price | $14 per month (whole account, unlimited users) (7 days trial) | $20 per user per month on annual billing ($30 monthly) (14 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly subscription per account rather than per user, with unlimited users, calls, minutes, and texts within the US and Canada on every plan; tiers differ by how many phone numbers and extensions are included and whether recording, transfers, and simultaneous call handling are available. | Per-user per-month subscription across three published tiers (RingEX Core, Advanced, Ultra), discounted for annual commitment, with unlimited US and Canada domestic calling and capped pools for toll-free minutes and SMS, plus separately priced add-ons and pass-through regulatory fees. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 7 days | 14 days, self-serve, supporting up to 20 phone lines, with SMS excluded from the trial |
| Best for | Solo operators, consultants, freelancers, trades, real estate agents, and businesses of two to five people who want a professional business number with a menu and extensions ringing the phones they already own, at a flat price with no per-seat cost and no contract. | Small and mid-sized businesses that need a real phone system rather than a sales dialer: multiple locations, a receptionist flow, desk phones on desks, e-fax that still matters to their customers, and an IT contact who wants one vendor for phone, video, and messaging with a published SLA behind it. |
| Setup time | Under an hour on a new number: sign up, choose a number, record or upload a greeting, point extensions at existing mobile numbers, and you are live. Porting an existing number takes one to three weeks for a simple local port, during which the old line keeps working. | A single-site business with one auto attendant and under ten users can be live in a day on new numbers. Porting existing numbers adds one to three weeks for simple local ports and longer for toll-free or complex multi-line accounts, with temporary forwarding covering the gap. Desk phone provisioning adds a day of physical work. |
| Learning curve | Minimal. There is no PBX vocabulary to learn, no dial plan, and no device provisioning. The only real decision is how many extensions you need and where each one forwards. | Moderate for users, who mostly need to learn one app, and meaningfully steep for the administrator. The admin console exposes hundreds of settings across users, groups, queues, schedules, and permissions, and misconfigured routing is the most common cause of an unhappy first month. |
| Platforms | iOS, Android, Windows desktop app, macOS desktop app, Web portal, Any existing mobile or landline via call forwarding | Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android, Web browser app, Certified desk phones (Poly, Yealink, Cisco), Microsoft Teams embedded calling, Browser extensions for click-to-call |
| Compliance | STIR/SHAKEN call signing through the underlying carrier, 10DLC brand and campaign registration required for US business texting, E911 registration for the addresses associated with the account | SOC 2 and SOC 3, ISO 27001, HITRUST, HIPAA-eligible with a business associate agreement, GDPR, FedRAMP-authorized offerings for US public sector, STIR/SHAKEN call signing as a licensed US carrier |
| Founded | 2003 | 1999 |
| Headquarters | Boston, Massachusetts, United States (operated as part of GoTo) | Belmont, California, United States |
| Ownership | Owned by GoTo (formerly LogMeIn), which is privately held by Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital | Publicly traded (NYSE: RNG) |
Strengths and limitations
Grasshopper
Strengths
- Flat pricing with unlimited users, which is structurally cheaper than every per-seat competitor once you pass three or four people.
- Unlimited calls, minutes, and texts within the US and Canada on every plan, with no per-minute meter to model.
- The lowest-friction way to stop giving customers a personal mobile number: no hardware, no porting requirement, no new handset, live the same day.
- Instant Response, which texts back every missed call automatically, is genuinely the highest-ROI feature in the product for any local service business competing on who answers first.
Limitations
- No outbound dialer, dispositions, cadences, or local presence rotation, so it is unusable as a sales calling tool.
- Call recording, transfers, and simultaneous call handling are reserved for the top tier, which means the entry plan drops a second concurrent caller to voicemail.
- No meaningful CRM integration: no CTI panel, no screen pop, no automatic activity logging, which puts it well behind Quo, Aircall, and RingCentral.
- Reporting is a call log with charts. There are no per-rep performance metrics and no talk-time analysis.
RingCentral
Strengths
- The deepest telephony feature set at small-business prices: multi-level auto attendants, queues, park, paging, shared lines, desk phone provisioning, and e-fax all included rather than sold as a contact-centre upgrade.
- Unlimited US and Canada calling on every tier means domestic volume never appears on the invoice, which is genuinely simpler than the metered developer platforms and cheaper than per-minute dialers at scale.
- About 330 integrations across 200-plus platforms, including proper CTI for Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk with screen pop and automatic activity logging.
- An unusually serious compliance surface for the price: SOC 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST, HIPAA eligibility with a BAA, GDPR, and FedRAMP-authorized offerings, plus SAML SSO and SCIM.
Limitations
- No dialer of any kind: no power dialing, no parallel dialing, no local presence rotation, no answering machine detection. Outbound sales teams need a different product or a second one.
- The real invoice is meaningfully above the sticker once regulatory recovery fees, taxes, toll-free overage, SMS boosters, and AI add-ons are counted.
- Automatic call recording and CRM integrations are gated above the entry tier, so the $20 headline is not the price of a usable configuration for most sales-adjacent buyers.
- The published prices require an annual commitment; monthly billing carries a 50 percent premium at the Core tier.
Pricing compared
Grasshopper
Flat monthly subscription per account rather than per user, with unlimited users, calls, minutes, and texts within the US and Canada on every plan; tiers differ by how many phone numbers and extensions are included and whether recording, transfers, and simultaneous call handling are available.
- True Solo$14
- Solo PlusAbout $25
- Small BusinessAbout $55
Judged on cost per person, Grasshopper is the cheapest thing in this category by a wide margin and the gap widens as your headcount grows. Small Business at around $55 flat covers unlimited users; five seats of RingCentral Advanced is $125 and five seats of Quo Business is $115. Judged on capability per dollar, it is limited on purpose: no dialer, no CRM logging, no per-user analytics, no desk phone management, no attribution. The right way to read the price is as the cost of a professional phone presence rather than the cost of a phone system. For a three-person team making 100 calls a day each, Grasshopper is technically unlimited and would cost $55 flat, but every one of those 6,300 calls is dialed by hand from a mobile with no disposition, no logging, and no recording below the top tier, which is why the number is misleading and why an outbound team should not buy this.
RingCentral
Per-user per-month subscription across three published tiers (RingEX Core, Advanced, Ultra), discounted for annual commitment, with unlimited US and Canada domestic calling and capped pools for toll-free minutes and SMS, plus separately priced add-ons and pass-through regulatory fees.
- Core$20 annually / $30 monthly
- Advanced$25 annually / $35 monthly
- Ultra$35 annually / $45 monthly
Judged as a phone system, RingCentral is fairly priced and unusually complete: at $25 a seat on Advanced you get unlimited domestic calling, automatic recording, real queues, CRM logging, live monitoring, desk phone provisioning, fax, video, and a compliance surface that includes HITRUST and FedRAMP. Nothing else at that price carries that much telecom substance. Judged as a sales tool, it is poor value, because the dialing, coaching, and attribution work that a revenue team wants is either absent or sold as an add-on that doubles the seat cost. The honest framing is that RingCentral is the safest buy for a business that needs telephony and the wrong buy for a team that needs to make a lot of calls. A three-person team making 100 calls a day pays $60 a month on Core plus fees and makes every one of those calls by hand.
Editorial verdict on each
Grasshopper
Best ValueGrasshopper is the cheapest honest answer to a narrow question: how does a very small business stop giving customers a personal mobile number and start sounding like a company. At $14 a month flat with unlimited users, unlimited calls and texts, a custom greeting, extensions that ring the phones you already own, and automatic text replies to missed calls, it does that job better per dollar than anything else here, and the flat pricing means it gets relatively cheaper as you add people. It is also strictly limited: no dialer, no CRM logging, no per-rep analytics, no desk phones, no marketing attribution, and no recording below the top tier. Buy it if you are one to five people who want a professional front door with zero administration. Move to Quo, Ooma Office, or RingCentral the moment more than one person needs to see the same conversation, log it to a CRM, or be measured on it.
Read the full Grasshopper profileRingCentral
RingCentral is the safe, complete, slightly expensive answer for a small business that needs a real phone system. At $25 a seat on Advanced you get unlimited domestic calling, automatic recording, multi-level auto attendants, proper queues, desk phone provisioning, e-fax, video, Salesforce and HubSpot CTI, and a compliance surface running through SOC 2, HITRUST, HIPAA, and FedRAMP, which nothing else in this category matches at the price. Buy it if you have an office, a receptionist flow, multiple locations, or an IT provider who wants one vendor with an SLA behind it. Do not buy it as a sales tool: there is no dialer, coaching lives in a $60 add-on, and marketing attribution does not exist. And budget above the sticker, because regulatory fees, capped toll-free minutes, capped SMS, and the add-on menu reliably turn a $20 seat into something closer to $30 or $60.
Read the full RingCentral profileGrasshopper profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; RingCentral last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.