A RingCentral Alternative for Companies That Wanted Video and Got Quoted a Phone System

Zoom is the deepest of the four taken purely as a meeting product, and much the strongest on conference rooms and hardware. Google Meet is not sold on its own at all; it is one component of a Workspace seat. Webex has a free plan substantial enough to run a small business on for a while, and meters simultaneous meetings by host license. RingCentral is the odd one out. It is a business phone system that happens to include video, and it is the only one of the four that publishes no price for its video product at all. All four will connect the call. None of them decides which of your sessions deserve to exist.

No. What it has instead is a fourteen day trial, open to new subscribers only, supporting up to twenty phone lines and up to two desktop phones. Voice, auto attendant, online meetings, team messaging, fax and conferencing are all included in it. SMS is not. Any hardware sent out for the trial has to come back within twenty one days of canceling or you are charged for it. Read that list again and notice how much of it is telephony rather than video.

Whether the Monday call still deserves an hour of nine salaries. Whether last quarter’s recordings sit in a governed store or in a platform nobody administers. Whether the twelve people on that recurring invite ever needed to be on it. Whether the client who could not get into last week’s call gave up or rang somebody instead. None of that is a feature you can buy on any plan of anything. It is a job somebody has to hold.

Frequently you should not, and we tell people so. Where somebody in the building already owns the admin portal, can say how many seats you hold and why, and gets called when a guest cannot join, hiring us duplicates a job that is already being done. The call worth making is the one after that person resigns.

We cannot give you that number, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, because RingCentral publishes no rate our fetch can read for either the plans or the video product. The arithmetic is simple enough once a quote is in front of you. They charge per user and we charge once for the organization, so their line rises with every person you hire and ours does not. Above some headcount we cost less and below it they do. Bring the quote to the call. Keep in mind the two figures are not the same kind of thing either. Theirs is software. Ours is somebody configuring and watching it, and you buy the Zoho Meeting license separately.

On everybody who needs a phone. RingEX is licensed per user, and the user in question is a telephony user rather than a meeting host, so the count tracks your headcount much the way Google’s does rather than the way Webex’s concurrency rule does. Attendees need nothing at all to join a call. What that means in practice is that your meeting cost is set by how many people you employ, including the ones who only ever attend. None of those figures tells you anything about how much work the setup needs, which is the only thing that predicts how much of somebody’s week disappears into it.

As a communications platform, yes, and it is not close. Calling, contact center, messaging and meetings in one product with three hundred and thirty integrations behind it is a far bigger thing than Zoho Meeting is trying to be. But it is answering a different question. If what you need is video conferencing rather than a phone system, most of that depth is capability you pay for and never touch. Zoho Meeting wins on a narrower point. It sits in the estate where your customers, your deals and your reporting already live, and bought from us it arrives with somebody whose job is to run it.

That is the reason to pick it. Meeting writes into CRM and Analytics, so a webinar registration lands on the record your salesperson already has open, and attendance reaches your reporting with no spreadsheet in between. One honest caveat: RingCentral ships prebuilt connectors for Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk and ServiceNow, so if your customer data lives in one of those rather than in Zoho, this argument is a good deal weaker and you should weigh it accordingly.

We set up the organization and its hosts, build the meeting and webinar templates, write the registration pages and set the reminder timings, decide and configure the recording and retention rules, set the policy for external guests and waiting rooms, connect whichever dial in options you actually use, build the attendance reporting, and wire it into CRM and Analytics. The figure covers the organization and it does not move when you hire somebody.

You do, and that is deliberate. The subscription is bought in your name and stays there. If you stop working with us you keep the account, the hosts, every recording and every registration ever taken in it, and there is no migration to do. Zoho Assist is the single exception, where the license sits with us instead.

Yes, and with RingCentral there is usually one step that surprises people. The meetings side moves quickly. The part that does not is the telephony, because if your business numbers are hosted there you are looking at porting them, and that is a separate project with its own timetable which we are not going to pretend is quick. Alongside that, each recording gets a decision rather than a copy. Some should move, most should be deleted, and a few need somebody to actually watch them before either. Migrating two years of unwatched video faithfully is not a migration worth paying for.

No. Three hundred a month, month to month, thirty days’ notice. RingCentral prices annual billing at a saving of up to thirty three percent against monthly, which is a real discount and also a real commitment, and that discount is the mechanism by which most buyers end up on the longer term. Compare what you are agreeing to as well as what you are paying.

Then RingCentral is very probably the right answer and you should go and buy it. This page is written for the company that wanted video conferencing and found itself being quoted a communications platform, not for the company that genuinely needs both. If you are replacing a PBX, running a contact center, or you want one vendor and one invoice covering calls and meetings together, we do not sell that and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Zoho Meeting is a meeting product. Buy the phone system from somebody who makes one.

It happens. Once you are running thousand person broadcasts, or you need every session tied to an enrollment and a completion record, Zoho Meeting is the wrong shape and we will tell you before you get there.

Three hundred a month for the organization covers the read of what you actually run, the host and template rebuild, the recording and access configuration, the migration off RingCentral, and the revisions after it goes live.