8x8 Pricing, Plans, and Features: Complete Breakdown

8x8 provides a business VoIP system integrated with unified communications and contact center plans. Agents can use 8x8 for video meetings, file sharing, and internal chat–while administrators can use it to supervise teams.

This article will outline 8x8’s pricing and plans, discussing what each plan includes, key features, pros and cons, and alternatives.

• What is 8x8?
• Pricing and Plans
• Key Features
• Pros and Cons
• Alternatives

What is 8x8?

8x8 is a cloud-based phone system offering both unified communications and contact center products that bundle VoIP calling, team chat, SMS texting, and video conferencing.

Pricing is currently quote-based, you will need to contact their sales team to get specific details. They offer pay-as-you-go pricing without commitments or contracts for some of their calling and texting services, but are mostly subscription-based with customized rates based on your organization size. 8x8 also offers enterprise plans for large scale operations. That being said, 8x8’s software applications support team collaboration, routing and queueing, analytics, AI support and automations, and integrations with hundreds of third-party platforms.

8x8 Pricing and Plans

8x8’s offers four primary offerings: a unified communications (UCaaS) platform, a contact center solution, an AI-powered customer engagement platform, and APIs that can be used to build a custom system.

8x8 Work

8x8’s Work is a UCaaS plan that includes VoIP, team messaging, SMS, video conferencing, collaboration, routing, analytics, and more.

Notable Features:

• Unlimited calling to 48 countries: Users can make unlimited calls to 48 countries, including the UK and Italy. While 8x8 doesn’t allow you to call mobile numbers from many of these countries, the unlimited calling area is still impressively large.
• Interactive video meetings: Host meetings with up to 500 people, with the option for Youtube live-streaming. Meetings include interactive features like polls, emoji reactions, and breakout rooms.
• Conversation IQ: Live transcription for all voice calls, plus AI analysis that offers script suggestions, customer sentiment, and agent feedback
• Team Chat: 1:1 instant messaging, file sharing, and group chat with fine-tuned access. Users can follow topics or launch a video or phone call directly from a thread
• Cloud PBX: Enterprise-grade phone system with advanced call routing, IVR, and auto-attendant

8x8 Contact Center

8x8 offers 8x8 Contact Center, a comprehensive CCaaS platform. Features include an agent workspace, high volume messaging, omnichannel and skills-based routing, and more. 8x8's Contact Center combines these features with UCaaS tools like calling and video conferencing, with advanced queue management and conversational intelligence.

Notable Features:

• Agent workspace: An agent view that unifies not only communication channels, but integrated data and customer contact information. Agents have fuller context and the ability to easily transfer calls, or communicate with coworkers while live on call.
• Omnichannel routing: Route all inbound contacts to the best-suited agent, across all channels
• Co-browsing: Agents can view a customer’s screen during live interactions to gain a better understanding of the customer’s experience
• Intelligent Customer Assistant: Create a virtual chatbot that can support customers with everything from routing to processing payments. Chatbots can recommend knowledge base articles and have conversations across digital messaging channels.
• Auto dialer: Preview, progressive, and predictive dialer technology that automatically dials customers from a list, before connecting live recipients to agents
• Workforce management: AI algorithms track call volume and forecast staffing needs, creating schedules and delivering them to employees and supervisors. This algorithm also monitors employee adherence and notifies supervisors when an issue arises
• Receptionist Console: 8x8 Frontdesk is included: check employee presence and availability, transfer calls to contact/voicemail, and direct calls to AI attendants and queues without dedicated hardware, special consoles, or specialized operator skills

8x8 Engage

​8x8 also offers 8x8 Engage, an AI-driven solution that unlocks customer experience (CX) capabilities beyond traditional contact centers. Tailored for customer-facing sales, field service, and retail employees across various departments, 8x8 Engage leverages both contact center and unified communications tools into a single powerful offering.

Notable Features:

• All-in-One Interface: Combines Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) components, enabling seamless customer interactions and internal collaboration within one platform
• Conversational Intelligence: Use AI to extrapolate and form insights and form data-driven conversations to enhance the quality and effectiveness of your team’s communication strategy
• Comprehensive Analytics: Get front-to-back visibility into customer interaction journeys to equip team leaders with predictive insights that fine-tune and tackle every touchpoint
• Integration Capabilities: Deep integrations and data synchronization with 8x8’s native apps and your preferred third-party applications work to streamline your processes and ensure customer data is accessible everywhere
• Global Communication Tools: Get 8x8’s reliable calling, messaging, and meeting capabilities from anywhere around the globe using your team’s favorite devices
• Digital Channel Support: Handle customer interactions through their preferred channels, including video, SMS, and support for Viber, WhatsApp, email, and RCS Business Messaging coming shortly
• Team Lead Analytics: Equips leaders with insights to optimize team performance and operational efficiency.​

8x8 Communication APIs

8x8's Communication APIs are a no-code CPaaS solution enabling users to build a custom system that includes messaging, voice, video, and high-volume SMS capabilities. Protect customer data and privacy with 8x8 authentication and fraud prevention solutions to detect and block fraudulent traffic so you can focus on fostering real customer connections.

• No-code setup: Launch and manage communication workflows without writing code to create intuitive tools that make integration fast and easy
• Voice, video, and messaging APIs: Connect through reliable, high-quality voice, video, SMS, and messaging channels at scale
• Privacy and fraud protection: Built-in authentication and real-time fraud detection help secure customer data and block suspicious activity

8x8 Key Features

8x8 offers a wide range of features designed to support every aspect of business communication—from phone systems and video conferencing to team messaging and analytics.

Below is a breakdown of the key features available across 8x8 plans, organized by function.

Business Phone System and SMS

All 8x8 applications feature a business phone system that’s scalable and easy to set up. The phone system includes routing features like multi-level auto attendants, custom call flows, call queues, and ring groups. Supervisors and agents can send unlimited SMS text messages,  record calls, use call monitoring, and access visual voicemail.

All plans included real-time call analytics and conversation IQ, which provides agents with live conversation support. Purchase local, toll-free, and vanity phone numbers from around the world, assigning them to agents in minutes for domestic or international VoIP calling.

8x8 Business Phone System Features:

• Multi-level auto attendant: Create a self-service routing menu, attached to a phone number, that helps customers navigate to the queue or message best suited to help them. Build multiple IVR menus with custom call flow controls.
• Ring groups: Group multiple agents and extensions together to share inbound call responsibility. Choose each group's ring pattern–simultaneous, cyclical that rotates down a user list, or a repetitive cycle that repeats with each new inbound call.
• Call queues: Organize agents into groups or departments, each with its own queue for callers on hold. Link call queues to IVR and routing rules, with custom hold music and one-click callback options for agents. Each queue has its own voicemail box.
• Call monitoring: Supervisors can listen in quietly to agent conversations to monitor and evaluate performance. They can “barge” in to join the agent’s conversion, whisper private guidance, or take over the call entirely.
• Call recording: Set up on-demand or automated call recording for any user or phone number. Recordings are saved, where users can review, download, and delete them.
• Conversation IQ: Real-time AI support that transcribes each call live, creating a separate audio track for each party. The software tracks and categorizes keywords, evaluates and scores agents, provides response and script feedback, and powers in-depth analytics.

Unlimited Calling Area

8x8 offers a massive unlimited calling area that outperforms nearly all phone-system competitors.

The UCaaS and CX plans include unlimited phone service to 48 countries with the ability to call mobile numbers in a large number of countries. We’ve outlined popular destinations in the table below.

* indicates the unlimited calling excludes mobile and premium numbers

Unlimited calling is available to: USA, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, and more.

Video Conferencing

All 8x8 plans support video conferencing with up to 500 participants and no time limit, for internal team use and customer support. Users can access HD video meetings from any device with no download, and agents can create meetings directly within the 8x8 app to invite participants.

All meetings are encrypted and have the option for password protection. Meeting hosts can delegate co-hosts, lock meetings, add a participant lobby, and set permissions for each participant. Attendees can call in toll-free for audio-only.

8x8 Video Meeting Features:

• Calendar integrations: Sync meetings with 8x8 integrated calendar apps like Google Chrome and Microsoft Outlook
• Meeting creation: Users can create an unlimited number of meetings, choosing a repetition schedule, time and date, location, and an invite note. Generate a passcode and invite link to email other users.
• Screen sharing: Any user can share their screen or application window on any device–even mobile
• Recording: Record meetings on-demand and save recordings
• Live transcription and translation: All meetings have live captions, with the option to translate into 46 languages
• Chat: During a meeting, users can message the entire group or other individual attendees
• Live YouTube streaming: Stream live to Youtube, for larger audiences and webinars
• Meeting analytics: Each meeting automatically gathers and archives analytics and data–start and end time, meeting link, and information about attendees
• Virtual background: Users can blur their background or set an image as their background
• Interactive features: Hand raising, polls, emoji reactions, and breakout rooms

Team Chat and Collaboration

8x8’s desktop and mobile app supports team chat for 1:1 or large-group collaboration. Teams can create unlimited public or private rooms to share files.

All of a user’s chats are organized in the application’s left-hand menu, with notification pings for new activity.

8x8 Team Chat Features:

• File sharing: Share and store documents, images, and other file types
• One-click audio and video calls: Users within a room can launch audio and video calls at any time with one click
• Push notifications: The 8x8 Work mobile app enables users to respond to chat messages directly from the push notification, without opening the app
• Add teammates: Easily add new teammates to chat from the company directory, by typing their name

Analytics

8x8 plans include a wide variety of customizable dashboards and reports, which display call center metrics and KPIs. Supervisor analytics track real-time and historical data insights and trends regarding agent performance, call activity, multichannel usage, connection quality, customer service, and contact history.

Reports are customizable and filterable, so supervisors can drill down into particular queues, agents, or calls. Sort data by a certain metric–like average handle time or queue wait time–or click on a particular interaction to view details like the audio recording, transcript, and any AI-generated notes.

8x8 Analytics Reports and Features:

• Call reports: Information about all calls, including the callers involved, date and time, call length, queue, and wait time. Supervisors can click on any call to revisit the audio and transcript.

• Customer experience analytics: Live queue reports that monitor all calls and include current wait time, each agent’s status, and customer satisfaction–arranged in color-coded visuals and reports

• Call quality: Diagnostic reports for all calls and video meetings, about message delivery, call quality, and audio data transfer speed
• Speech and sentiment analysis: AI records, transcribes, and analyzes customer sentiment for every call. This enables supervisors to click on interactions afterward, to revisit the audio, transcript, and sentiment.
• Custom dashboards: Supervisors can combine users, KPIs, widgets, and visual displays like graphs and charts to create custom reports

Contact Center Features

8x8’s Contact Center supports your phone system with new channels, workflows, routing capabilities, and outbound customer-engagement tools.

8x8 Contact Center Channels:

• Voice: With outbound auto dialer and inbound routing
• Email: With prebuilt workflows and queues, with time-based processing and priority routing
• Chat: Chatbots and up to 6 chat concurrent live-chat sessions per agent, embeddable into your website. Includes real-time translation.
• SMS: One-way and two-way SMS, plus the ability to send links to knowledge-base articles
• Social media: Facebook and Twitter DM, with scripting tools and skills-based routing based on the channel
• Instant messaging apps: WhatsApp, Viber, and more
• Co-browsing: Agents can join customers on your app, from the customer’s view, in real-time

The contact center provides a new agent workspace that unifies customer context, team collaboration, and multichannel functionality. Agents can view each customer’s journey, transfer customers to other agents, and view background information about customers and products using integrated CRM systems and databases. The CCaaS supervisor dashboard gives an overview of queue activity and agent status, with monitoring tools for administrators to jump into live calls.

8x8 Contact Center Features:

• Intelligent Customer Assistant: Create multichannel self-service chatbots using a drag-and-drop flow builder, connecting with a variety of integrations like CRM systems, Google Translate, ChatGPT, and more. Chatbots embed into your website and provide payment processing, routing, knowledge base information, and more.
• Workforce management: Algorithms that track contact center activity to forecast volume and staffing needs across all channels. 8x8 WFM creates schedules, tracks employee schedule adherence, and automatically notifies involved parties when an issue occurs.
• Auto dialer: Preview, progressive, and predictive dialers that automatically reach out to qualified leads, detect voicemail machines and busy signals, and connect live recipients with agents
• Omnichannel routing: Receive inbound contacts across all contact center channels, routing each customer to the right agent or queue according to availability, channel, skills required, and customer VIP status
• Customer surveys: Create and send automatic customer surveys after customer interactions, via voice or messaging channels

Integrations

All 8x8 plans support over 40 integrations with popular third-party applications: CRM integrations like HubSpot, workforce management tools, collaboration apps, and even other call center platforms like Zendesk.

Popular 8x8 Integrations:

• Salesforce: Extract contact profile information and campaign lists from Salesforce, for auto dialer dialing lists and agent context during live interactions
• Google Workspace: Schedule 8x8 video meetings in Google Workspace and Microsoft Outlook calendar
• Microsoft Outlook: Integrate 8x8 contact center with Microsoft Teams for automated workflows, notifications, messaging, and calendars
• Alvaria and Calabrio: Stream live and historical data from 8x8 into workforce management apps, like Alvaria and Calabrio, for analytics and automated workflows

8x8 Pros and Cons

8x8’s main pros are that its plans include all core communication channels and powerful analytics, and it boasts a massive unlimited calling area. However, the main cons are that 8x8 offers a limited number of integrations, and the higher-tier plans can get pricey.

What We Like About 8x8

• Multichannel offerings: All 8x8 plans offer VoIP, SMS, internal team chat, and video conferencing
• Unlimited calling area: The UCaaS and CX plans offer 48-country unlimited voice areas, respectively. This is a significantly wider unlimited area than other VoIP providers
• Video meeting capacity: 8x8 video meetings support up to 500 participants on all plans, which is over double what most competitors offer
• Analytics and AI support: All 8x8 plans include real-time artificial intelligence and analytics. Competitors often reserve these advanced features for high-tier plans

What We Dislike About 8x8

• Expensive plans: 8x8 no longer publicly lists their pricing, but in the past, their UCaaS plan cost $44 per user, per month, which is on the pricier side for a UCaaS application
• No whiteboards: Some competitors’ video meetings include whiteboards–a feature that enhances remote collaboration
• Unlimited calling area limitations: While 8x8 does support a large unlimited calling area, some of the destinations don’t include calling to mobile numbers
• Limited integrations: Some competitors offer over 200 integrated apps, while 8x8 offers only around 40

8x8 Alternatives

The table below outlines the top 8x8 alternatives, including both contact center (CCaaS) and unified communications (UCaaS) platforms.

Use 8x8 for Internal Collaboration or Customer Support

8x8 provides UCaaS and CCaaS offerings, supporting teams of all sizes. The phone system makes a great option for teams with high international call volumes, or large teams planning to use video for demonstrations and webinars.

Artificial intelligence enables agent support and supervisor monitoring, while the contact center provides outbound customer engagement tools like outbound auto dialers and post-call surveys.