RingCentral vs. Nextiva: 2024 Comparison of Features, Pricing & Integrations

As more businesses shift to remote operations, collaboration and communication platforms are increasingly becoming more critical to the daily operations of the modern workplace. To manage remote employees and at the same deliver a consistent and effective customer experience, companies today rely heavily on key systems and applications for productivity and efficiency.

Communication platforms are indispensable tools for facilitating better interactions and collaboration between your in-house teams and your clients and partners. After all, communication within any kind of organization is essential to both employee relationships and business success.

In this sense, we will take a deeper look into two of the leading communication software products today, RingCentral and Nextiva. This article deep dives into a detailed RingCentral vs Nextiva comparison of core features, pricing, integrations, ease of use, and other important factors that you should consider before choosing which one to invest in.

In any kind of business, effective communication is needed to improve employee productivity and drive business success. With a proper communication system in the workplace, management teams and employees can work harmoniously and stay on the same page even when handling multiple projects at once. Collaborative teams are also more likely to work more efficiently and minimize errors in their current tasks at hand.

As a team leader, it is your responsibility to encourage good communication habits in your workplace. By implementing an effective team communication strategy, you can positively impact employee productivity, retention, and trust. According to a recent McKinsey report, collaboration between teams can increase employee productivity by up to 20% to 25% (Mckinsey, 2021).

For this reason, choosing the right communication platform can be a game changer for your business. This type of tool can be used to connect and integrate your most critical business processes, which helps ensure that your business runs at peak performance at all times.

RingCentral and Nextiva are two of the leading communication platforms that have proven its worth to businesses in various industries. To help you decide which one is better for your company, we outline below a detailed RingCentral vs Nextiva comparison and give you an insight into how each product works in different business settings.

Overview of RingCentral and Nextiva

RingCentral

RingCentral is an industry-leading communication platform that enables modern businesses to work and collaborate the way they need to. It provides state-of-the-art features and functionalities, including team messaging, chat, SMS, and video conferencing tools. The platform optimizes business workflows by allowing teams to connect with the people and apps that they need at any given time.

RingCentral

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As a powerful communication hub, RingCentral also allows you to seamlessly transition between team messages, phone calls, and video meetings via web or your personal mobile and desktop devices. Regardless of your physical location, the platform helps you connect with every person from your team by turning your devices into fully functioning mobile offices. Moreover, RingCentral allows you to organize and pin documents, send files, and connect to the tools that your team is already using.

Nextiva

Nextiva is a VoIP platform that enables businesses of all scales to streamline communication processes and improve customer relationships. Complete with video conferencing, contact center, phone system, and collaboration tools, the platform is ideal for businesses and call centers, ranging from small to large.

The solution also comes with an array of sales and service capabilities specifically designed to support your marketing, sales, and customer service processes. Its built-in CRM feature allows you to build a stronger connection with your customers and respond to queries that need your immediate attention. Nextiva also provides powerful communication features that bring your team together and ensure that everyone stays on the same page.

Comparison of RingCentral and Nextiva

RingCentral and Nextiva are both powerful communication platforms, and both offer a wide range of capabilities to improve your team’s collaboration and streamline communication processes. To help you choose which one is the most ideal for your business, we outline below the most essential factors that compare RingCentral and Nextiva. This article also provides you with an in-depth analysis and comparison of how the two platforms fare against one another.

Core Features

RingCentral and Nextiva are two of the most trusted and well-known products in their category. Both platforms offer top-tier features and capabilities, but certain differences are evident in each functionality that they offer. In the following sections, we’ll give you an in-depth RingCentral vs Nextiva comparison of core features.

Messaging

Direct messaging or instant messaging is easily the most important feature that every business should look for in a communication platform. With RingCentral, this feature is especially highlighted, providing teams with a more efficient way of communicating one-on-one. The platform also expands its functionality to group messaging, which allows each member of the team to address everyone in important messages and announcements.

RingCentral’s integrated messaging system lets you send and receive text and fax messages instantly. As soon as you sign up for RingCentral, the platform provides your business with a single branded phone number, eliminating the need for separate telephone systems for the different departments or branches of your office. Additionally, RingCentral offers a team chat feature that lets you create separate group chats and messaging threads for different projects or discussions.

On the other hand, Nextiva’s text messaging tool allows you to open up as many channels as you need to communicate with your teammates and customers. Like the former product, Nextiva also gives you a local or toll-free company number that you can use to send and receive texts from your mobile or desktop device. This allows you to connect with your team and customers, send appointment confirmations, or receive customer queries via text messaging.

Live Chat

When it comes to live chat features, RingCentral does a very good job of providing businesses with a better way to reach out to their customers and potentially turn prospects into buyers. The platform lets you make your own live chat window and customize them using your own brand logo, colors, and designs.

Also, RingCentral gives you total control over the way you want your live chat function to appear on your app or website, whether as a link, an invite pop-up, or a floating button. In addition to that, RingCentral helps you create amazing live chat experiences for your customers by providing context to your conversations.

For instance, you can access all information about how much time your customers have spent on the page they are currently looking at, as well as the total number of visits and the pages they accessed on your site. With these insightful data at hand, you can better understand where your customers are coming from.

Likewise, Nextiva’s live chat feature allows you to respond to your customer’s questions right away. Once the discussion turns to a much bigger conversation, however, you can convert the chat to a case, letting your agent know that the customer’s query now demands a higher level of assistance from your team. By having chat, email, and voice support all in one place, you can increase the efficiency of your contact center and assist customers faster.

Email Management

Email management is an essential part of any company’s omni-digital customer care strategy. By centralizing emails in a single, unified platform, you can optimize your activities and provide responses to your customers more quickly.

RingCentral makes this possible by providing you with a range of email management functionalities, such as organizing and categorizing messages, attaching files, requesting approvals, and more.

Moreover, RingCentral provides you with a customer information section that houses all data about each customer’s record, activities, and history of cases and messages. This helps you manage customer information and identity, making it easier for you to interact with your customer and resolve issues more efficiently. In cases where your customers are using multiple accounts on various digital channels, RingCentral lets you link those identities by merging them.

In a slightly different manner, Nextiva automatically generates a case in its built-in CRM system whenever a customer sends you an email. The platform also lets you send your customers automated responses, which contain a confirmation of the email’s receipt, the case number, subject, department, and status of their case.

Social Media Management

To improve your overall digital customer service strategy, both RingCentral and Nextiva offer the essential functionalities to help you manage all your social media interactions on a single platform. With RingCentral, you can merge a customer’s profile across different social media accounts into a single identity.

The platform also leverages AI in classifying and routing posts to the right agent in your marketing, customer service, or sales department so actions can be taken accordingly. Whether your customers are reaching out to you via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or other social media channels, RingCentral lets you manage your responses in its customer engagement hub.

Additionally, the platform lets you handle large volumes of social media interactions. In turn, this allows you to offer customer support to every single customer who interacts with your brand.

Meanwhile, Nextiva’s contact center and VoIP technology orchestrate all customer communication across different social media platforms. The solution’s skills-based routing capability also helps you simplify agent and customer experience across all social media interactions taking place.

Intelligent Call Routing

Both RingCentral and Nextiva have advanced routing capabilities that automatically queue and distribute incoming calls to the right agent according to a preconfigured set of rules and criteria. With the intelligent call routing system that these two platforms offer, you can speed up waiting times and ensure smooth and efficient customer support for your clients.

To be specific, RingCentral’s intelligent routing uses the available customer data to give context to their queries and provide them with the right kind of support that they need. The platform then matches each customer with the best-qualified agent to make sure that they can get quick solutions to their problems.

Powered by AI and machine learning, RingCentral’s omnichannel routing prioritizes phone calls and other customer messages based on urgency and then passes them along to the right agents in your team.

RingCentral allows you to monitor the total number of calls on queue and the number of hours your team is spending on their tasks.

Nextiva basically offers the same kind of intelligent routing for inbound calls and messages. Whether you are running a small business or a larger contact center for your company, Nextiva’s intelligent call routing helps you manage long wait times and improve customer experiences.

Automation

Between RingCentral and Nextiva, it’s difficult to say who wins in the automation criteria. Both platforms offer an array of automation capabilities, from sending automatic email replies and welcome messages to using chatbots to answer questions, requests, and concerns more quickly.

Aside from chatbots, RingCentral also offers virtual agents that provide more sophisticated answers or instructions based on customer questions. Using natural language processing, or NLP technology, RingCentral’s virtual agents can easily read, understand, and derive meaning from your customer’s messages. By understanding a customer’s intent right off the bat, virtual agents can accurately provide personalized, meaningful responses.

In contrast, Nextiva automatically detects subjects related to your customers’ messages. Then, it provides a range of suggestions in real-time to resolve customer issues more quickly. Nextiva’s automation capabilities extend to sending friendly reminders to prospects and customers, as well as automatic follow-ups and check-ins to ensure smooth flowing conversations.

Moreover, Nextiva comes with self-service interactive voice response or IVR, which lets you handle high call volumes and solve problems with less manual work from your team

Outbound Dialing

RingCentral takes a proactive approach in its outbound contact center and campaign management. With its dynamic outbound dialing capabilities, the platform lets you cross-sell, upsell, and promote your brand more efficiently. RingCentral comes with manual, preview, progressive, and predictive dialers, enabling you to make the most out of your conversations with your customers.

As for Nextiva, the solution’s outbound dialing features allow you to optimize your communication strategies, whether you are after hitting sales targets, scheduling appointments, or promoting your brand. The platform also offers robust outbound dialers to maximize agent-to-customer connections.

Supervisor Tools

In contact center management, measuring relevant metrics and KPIs in real-time is an important part of providing consistent performance to your customers and better employee engagement. Thus, you’ll find RingCentral’s set of supervisor tools and capabilities quite useful to your contact center and customer support processes. The platform offers a range of supervisor functionalities, which include tracking KPIs, monitoring agent performance, and improving customer interactions.

To improve the performance of your workforce, RingCentral helps you collaborate with your team through team messaging, call monitoring, and KPI monitoring. With data sheets and various reports at hand, you can easily identify which agents are at the top of their roster and which ones need coaching. The platform also allows you to review historical call and screen recordings, providing you with valuable insights into each of your agent’s performance.

Alternatively, Nextiva offers a silent monitoring function that you can use to keep track of your agents’ performance without disrupting their daily workflows. The solution offers powerful reporting and management features that let you in on relevant KPIs, such as wait times and the total number of calls in queue.

Moreover, Nextiva provides organized and neat dashboards where you can easily view and customize the stats and reports that you need to monitor. In just a few clicks, you can access an agent’s availability or silently monitor current and incoming calls taken by a specific agent.

RingCentral comes with a call monitoring feature to help you track the performance of your agents.

Scripting

Agent scripting is a powerful tool that most contact centers and customer support teams use to help their agents conduct smooth-flowing conversations and interactions with customers. Basically, a well-built script can shape and guide conversations in a way that is intended to resolve customer issues. With a script prepared beforehand, your agents always know what to tell your customers in every specific scenario.

Most contact center solutions, including RingCentral and Nextiva, offer powerful and robust scripting tools that do so much more than just provide a few lines of dialogue. For instance, RingCentral’s scripting tool lets you incorporate a variety of elements into your scripts, from commands that stop and resume conversation recordings to facilitating web service calls that collect and share information to and from external websites.

In contrast, Nextiva provides an auto attendant script that allows you to relay important announcements, special promotions, and seasonal schedules, including business holidays and other business-related information. By automatically providing responses, Nextiva helps you prevent missed calls and instead builds you a reputable and reliable business image.

Call Transfers

Your contact center or customer service likely involves transferring calls from one agent to another. After all, customers expect their issues to get resolved by the right qualified agents, so it is inevitable for some of their calls to get transferred to another agent who has more knowledge about their queries. While call transfer may seem like a common or standard feature of modern telecommunications, not all call transferring tools are created equal.

Case in point, RingCentral lets you transfer a phone call depending on the device that you are using. For instance, if your contact center is working with a desk phone, then you can simply pass callers to another agent using a transfer button.

However, if you are transferring calls using RingCentral’s desktop software, there are three types of call transfers available for you. One is through warm transfer, in which you have to wait until all parties are ready to resume the phone call. The second type is a cold transfer, where operators immediately transfer calls in straightforward steps. Lastly, RingCentral gives you the option to transfer certain calls directly to an agent’s voicemail.

With Nextiva, call transferring is done in almost the same way. The platform supports transferring calls regardless of the device that you have, and you can opt for two types of call transfers—personal or immediate. A personal call transfer requires your agent to brief the next customer support staff about the call that they are handling, whereas an immediate call transfer allows your agents to transfer calls to any number or extension without going into further details.

Remote Agents

As remote contact centers and customer support become key trends amid the global COVID-19 crisis, it only makes sense for you to look for the right platform that can offer the most efficient tools for managing remote agents. Nextiva and RingCentral are both powerful solutions when it comes to managing remote contact center teams, but there are subtle differences when it comes to how each solution improves the efficiency and productivity of your agents.

Essentially, RingCentral offers numerous remote collaboration tools to ensure that your team is not limited to geographical constraints when providing customer support. The solution easily provides your agents with resources that allow them to reliably connect and interact with coworkers and customers from the comfort of their homes. With RingCentral, you can build a virtual contact center that helps you meet your business goals while working remotely and immediately see results.

Meanwhile, the best thing about Nextiva’s VoIP technology is that it allows you to set up a communication hub regardless of where your agents and their devices are physically located. Since the platform works via the Internet, your agents can follow rules for remote work without any disruptions, which in turn drastically reduces your need for office space.

Nextiva’s remote phone office system provides businesses with unified communications, making it easier for anyone from your team to switch between voice, chat, video conferencing, and email. The platform’s mobility also ensures that each of your agents is reliable on every device that they are using.

Analytics

Analytics is the key to making smarter business decisions and delivering a superior user experience. By gaining valuable data and insights about the overall performance of your business, you can easily identify focus areas and understand user preferences, trends, and behaviors.

RingCentral’s analytics and reporting features allow you to keep track of relevant KPIs and metrics. The solution provides you with an analytics portal where you can access reports such as company numbers, device status, adoption and usage, quality of service, and live reports. These data sources help you understand your customers better, enabling you to provide more efficient customer service and support.

Nextiva, however, comes with a built-in business intelligence tool that allows you to uncover hidden insights, make better business decisions, and increase employee performance. Specifically, the platform offers a voice analytics tool that gives you a real-time overview of all activities across your contact center. Also, you can make use of Nextiva’s interactive graphs and maps to visualize the voice analytics data that you need.

Nextiva provides you with the data and insights that you need to know to maximize the efficiency of your business.

Collaboration Tools

There’s a reason why RingCentral is one of the top-ranking communication solutions available today—it offers some of the best collaboration tools that businesses find most useful to their contact center and customer support processes. As an all-in-one communications platform, RingCentral combines chat, video conferencing, and team messaging to streamline collaboration between your team members.

With RingCentral, you can easily create a collaboration hub for your organization. Aside from communication tools, the platform also extends its feature offerings to file-sharing and document management. This enables you to store, organize, and share files with your team without having to switch between different apps. Also, RingCentral offers an array of task management capabilities, allowing you to assign tasks to your team members and track the progress of the projects that you are working on.

In contrast, Nextiva provides a dedicated collaboration app to keep everyone in your company connected even in remote work setups. Cospace by Nextiva comes complete with video and voice calls, file-sharing, one-on-one chat, team messaging, screen sharing, and team task tracking.

This solution combines all your collaboration tools in a single, centralized location to streamline your day-to-day workflows. From a single application, you can easily accomplish the important tasks that make up your daily routine, from scheduling meetings, making calls, and video conferencing with your team to sharing links and files relevant to your projects at hand.

Contact Management

Contact management is also another important feature that you should look out for before buying a communications platform. A good communications and contact center solution should be able to organize your contact lists and improve the way you connect with each of your customers.

One way RingCentral enhances your contact management is by providing you with a shared directory. This helps your team leaders manage the availability of each agent and maximize the efficiency of your contact center’s day-to-day operations.

By making your company directory easily accessible across your entire organization, you can also simplify the management of your contact lists and streamline communication between on-site and remote employees. RingCentral also has a caller ID control feature that gives you total control when managing both your outgoing and incoming caller IDs.

On the other hand, Nextiva helps you manage your contacts with its contact list feature, which lets you record every important contact detail about each of your customers. For instance, you can create an account, case, contact, lead, opportunity, product, or a custom record type for every record on your contact list. This allows your agents to easily view and edit contact details, interactions, relationships, analytics, and more.

RingCentral’s contact management feature allows you to set up and organize caller IDs.

Security

When it comes to the security of your contact center, both Nextiva and RingCentral implement the highest security standards to protect the integrity and confidentiality of your data. RingCentral utilizes TLS 1.2 encryption to ensure the security of both your web-session traffic and phone provisioning sessions for RingCentral desk phones.

All calls made across RingCentral’s mobile applications, desk phones, and desktop applications are also encrypted using SRTP for media and SIP over TLS for signaling.

Likewise, Nextiva ensures the security of your data and connection in the cloud with its multi-factor authentication, SD-WAN support, and TLS and SRTP call encryptions.

Integrations

App integrations can open up opportunities for you to connect disparate systems and applications, bring your processes together, and improve the efficiency of your business. So before you make the decision on which software product to buy, it is important to consider the integrations that your chosen platform supports.

RingCentral and Nextiva both offer a wide array of integrations to streamline your workflows and help you reduce data repetition and redundancy. The two platforms allow you to integrate various services into your chosen app, although the selection of supported software products varies between the two.

Compared to Nextiva, RingCentral offers more flexible options for system integrations. The platform supports integration with most commonly used business apps, from third-party automation platforms to collaboration and CRM tools. In its built-in app gallery, you can choose from a range of external platforms that you want to integrate within your system. RingCentral’s developer tool also allows you to build your own app and integrate them via APIs and SDKs.

On the other hand, Nextiva lets you choose from its app gallery the external platform you want to connect your system to. Integration for the most widely used business apps is supported by the platform.

Pricing

Pricing plans for RingCentral and Nextiva are mostly based on tiers and the number of users. Both platforms have pricing plans that are ideal for small, medium, and large businesses. Depending on your chosen plan, each provides you with the essential features that you need to support your contact center operations.

Basically, RingCentral is available in four pricing plans—Essentials, Standard, Premium, and Ultimate. Essentials is priced at $29.99/user/month, although it only allows up to 20 users. It includes limited features, such as team messaging, document sharing, unlimited calls, and business phone or toll-free numbers. Meanwhile, the Standard plan is priced at $37.99 user/month, Premium at $44.99/user/month, and Ultimate at $59.99/user/month. These plans offer more advanced features that maximize the potential of your contact centers.

Nextiva also comes in several pricing plans for its business communication and contact center platforms. If you will be using Nextiva for business communications, the Essential plan costs $18.95/user/month and includes features such as unlimited voice and video calling, unlimited Internet fax, toll-free numbers, voicemail, and more.

The platform also offers a Professional plan at $22.95/user/month and Enterprise plan at $32.95/user/month. For contact center plans, however, you may need to request a quote from the vendor to avail of their product offerings.

RingCentral’s pricing pans range from $29.99/user/month to $59.99/user/month.

Ease of Use

When choosing the right software product to use, ease of use is another factor that you should consider. A user-friendly software allows you to be more productive and maximize the efficiency of your workflows.

Furthermore, solutions that are easy to use enable both your techie and non-tech-savvy employees to adapt and get used to the platform in less time. RingCentral and Nextiva are both known for their user-friendly features and capabilities, although certain differences lie in how each platform optimizes certain functionalities.

Starting from the user interface, RingCentral offers a user-friendly design that allows you to navigate through the dashboards and features more easily. The solution also lets administrators and employees create custom designs and personalize the system to their liking. This makes RingCentral an ideal choice for businesses with lots of beginners on their teams.

In contrast, Nextiva prides itself in simplifying complex tasks that users can easily follow. Whether it’s adjusting voice mails, setting up call flows, or managing users, Nextiva’s ease of use makes it a viable option for businesses that need a simple and intuitive platform.

Getting Started

One of the best things about RingCentral is the way it provides a consistent, intuitive interface right off the bat. Its user-friendly features and functionalities eliminate the need for long implementation processes that involve hefty user manuals and teams of IT staff and consultants.

Instead, RingCentral allows you to configure the system in minutes and start enjoying the advanced functionalities that you most need, such as collaboration tools, call management and logging, team messaging, and industry-grade integrations. Even better, the platform lets you personalize the system to make sure that it aligns with your business objectives and daily workflows.

Whether you are using RingCentral from your tablet, desktop computer, mobile phone, or smartwatch, the platform provides a consistent and seamless experience across all of your devices. With its ease of use, reliability, and complete set of features and capabilities, RingCentral enables you to take advantage of a powerful and unified communications and PBX system right from the start.

As for Nextiva, the solution combines all communication and collaboration tools in one place, allowing you to save time and have the proper context and insightful data that you need to manage all your customer and team conversations. When it comes to onboarding, Nextiva matches you with a dedicated team that can assist you throughout the setup of your contact center and the custom services that you need.

Use Cases

Use cases for RingCentral and Nextiva span multiple industries, from business services and manufacturing to financial services, healthcare, insurance, advertising, and more. Both platforms cater to businesses of all scales and offer a good balance of collaboration and customer support features, such as audio conferencing, Internet fax, team messaging, and video meetings with as many participants as your business needs

One specific use case of RingCentral is for teams that need to consolidate their collaboration tools and unify their communication services. For these teams, RingCentral solves the problem of having different platforms for team messaging, cloud faxing, and video conferencing. By implementing RingCentral in the workplaces, business teams are able to streamline and improve their operations and provide better customer service.

Meanwhile, Nextiva proves its numerous benefits to businesses in the retail, professional services, and nonprofit industries. The platform’s wide range of features, especially its call recording, analytics, and cloud communications, enable businesses to improve their customer care strategy and meet the needs of their customers more quickly.

RingCentral vs. Nextiva Comparison Table

RingCentral vs Nextiva—Which Is Better?

Now that you have a better understanding of the core features and capabilities offered by RingCentral and Nextiva, we will leave the decision to you on which one you think best meets the demands of your business. But before investing in a software product, consider what it can offer you in terms of functionalities, ease of use, and integrations. Pricing should also be an important factor that you should consider before deciding to implement a business solution—after all, you will be using this product in the long run.

In all these RingCentral vs Nextiva criteria, RingCentral easily maintains an edge against Nextiva. It offers user-friendly interface and features, and it provides a range of functionalities that can streamline your communication processes and contact center operations. Also, the platform has plenty of collaboration tools to maximize productivity and improve the efficiency of your team.

Before sealing the deal, though, you may want to do a test drive of these two platforms so you can see for yourself how each one fares against the other. By signing up for a free trial of RingCentral, you can try the features and functionalities it offers at no cost. You can also read our guide to effective communication strategies to have a better idea of what to look for in a communication platform.

By Jenny Chang

Jenny Chang is a senior writer specializing in SaaS and B2B software solutions. Her decision to focus on these two industries was spurred by their explosive growth in the last decade, much of it she attributes to the emergence of disruptive technologies and the quick adoption by businesses that were quick to recognize their values to their organizations. She has covered all the major developments in SaaS and B2B software solutions, from the introduction of massive ERPs to small business platforms to help startups on their way to success.