Quo (formerly OpenPhone) 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
Editorial assessmentRingCentral compared with Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
Quo (formerly OpenPhone) is the modern small-team alternative at $15 to $35 a seat, with a far better shared inbox and texting experience, a number included per seat, and no seat minimum. RingCentral wins on routing depth, desk phones, fax, compliance, and integrations, and loses badly on interface and on total invoice clarity. Under ten people with conversation-led phone usage, Quo. Above that, or with a physical office and a receptionist, RingCentral.
Choose Quo (formerly OpenPhone) if
Small businesses, agencies, trades, and founder-led sales teams who need a shared work number with texting, light routing, and CRM logging, and who make dozens of calls a day rather than hundreds. Anyone who wants a business phone that costs less than a lunch per seat and can be live in an afternoon.
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 | Quo (formerly OpenPhone) | RingCentral |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Calling | Calling |
| Starting price | $15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly) (7 days trial) | $20 per user per month on annual billing ($30 monthly) (14 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Per-user per-month subscription with a number included in every seat, unlimited US and Canada calling and messaging on all tiers, and usage-based charges only for international calling, extra numbers, automated SMS, and AI credits. | 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 | Small businesses, agencies, trades, and founder-led sales teams who need a shared work number with texting, light routing, and CRM logging, and who make dozens of calls a day rather than hundreds. Anyone who wants a business phone that costs less than a lunch per seat and can be live in an afternoon. | 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 for a solo user and about half a day for a small team. Choose a number, install the apps, set business hours and a ring group, and you are live. Number porting takes longer, typically one to two weeks, and runs in parallel while you use a temporary number. | 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 | Near zero. The interface is a messaging app with a keypad, and staff who have never used a business phone system understand it without training. The only genuinely unfamiliar concept is A2P 10DLC registration, which the product walks you through. | 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, macOS desktop app, Windows desktop app, Web app, Chrome extension | 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 | SOC 2, GDPR, A2P 10DLC carrier registration handled in-product, STIR/SHAKEN attestation on outbound US calls | 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 | 2018 | 1999 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States (remote-first) | Belmont, California, United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Publicly traded (NYSE: RNG) |
Strengths and limitations
Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
Strengths
- The shared-number inbox with internal comments and assignment is the single best small-team phone experience on the market and is why the product spreads by word of mouth.
- A phone number is included in every seat, unlimited US and Canada calling is on the cheapest tier, and there is no seat minimum, so the entry cost is genuinely $15.
- API access on every plan including Starter, which most competitors reserve for their top tier or a custom contract.
- Setup is measured in minutes, not days: pick a number, install apps, invite the team. No PBX concepts, no dial plans, no reseller.
Limitations
- No dialer of any kind: no power dialing, no parallel lines, no answering machine detection, no local presence rotation. For a real outbound motion this is disqualifying.
- Unlimited calling stops at the US and Canadian border, and international is metered, which makes cost modelling awkward for anyone selling across regions.
- Call recording, CRM logging, and phone menus are all gated behind the Business tier, so the advertised $15 entry price is not the price most buyers actually pay.
- The Scale tier at $35 mostly buys support and call tags. The value curve flattens hard after Business.
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
Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
Per-user per-month subscription with a number included in every seat, unlimited US and Canada calling and messaging on all tiers, and usage-based charges only for international calling, extra numbers, automated SMS, and AI credits.
- Starter$15
- Business$23
- Scale$35
At $23 a seat for recording, transcripts, AI summaries, and CRM write-back, Business is the best price-to-capability ratio in small-business phone, and the fact that a number is included rather than billed separately quietly saves another few dollars a seat against Aircall or CloudTalk. The value case collapses only in two places: heavy international traffic, which is metered, and outbound dialing, which does not exist here at all. Judged as a phone system for a company under 30 people, it is underpriced. Judged as a sales dialer, it is not competing.
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
Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
Quo is the best small-business phone system you can buy for the money, and it is not an outbound sales tool. The shared-number inbox, the included number in every seat, the absence of a seat minimum, and API access on the cheapest plan add up to a product that a two-person company can adopt in an afternoon and never think about again. Business at $23 with recording, transcripts, AI summaries, and HubSpot or Salesforce write-back is the tier to buy. What you do not get is any dialer, any local presence rotation, any spam remediation, or unlimited calling beyond North America, and those absences are the whole difference between this category's phone systems and its dialers. If your reps work lists, buy Kixie or PhoneBurner. If customers call you and you call them back, buy Quo and stop shopping.
Read the full Quo (formerly OpenPhone) 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 profileQuo (formerly OpenPhone) 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.