We Tested and Compared RingCentral vs Nextiva: Which Provider Should You Choose?

Summary: While RingCentral RingEX and Nextiva Small Business offer comparable unified communications features and 24/7 customer support on all plans, the similarities between the two providers end there.

RingEX offers far better voice calling features than Nextiva, but Nextiva offers extensive social media and reputation management capabilities not available on any RingEX plan. Unlike RingEX, Nextiva Small Business includes live website chat, automated chatbots, and a shared email inbox to optimize digital customer communication. However, RingEX leverages AI-powered automation to streamline workflows, improve internal communication, and optimize customer self-service in a way Nextiva does not.

Because it offers limited voice calling capabilities compared to RingEX, Nextiva Small Business is best for digital-first contact centers focused on reputation management across social media and online review sites.

RingEX is best for small-to-medium remote call centers looking for an AI-powered business phone system with scalable analytics, marketing, and online event tools at an affordable price.

How We Compared RingCentral and Nextiva

We used the following criteria to compare Nextiva and RingCentral:

• Pricing and Plans: We reviewed each provider’s available pricing, plans, and add-ons to evaluate overall affordability, scalability, and value
• Voice Calling: We compared essential voice calling features like IVR, call routing, call queuing, call recording/transcription, and AI call summaries
• Digital Communication Channels: We evaluated each provider’s available digital communication channels, including website chat messaging, automated chatbots, virtual faxing, email, and social media messaging
• Business Text Messaging: We compared the providers’ SMS/MMS features, pricing, and availability
• Video Meetings: We evaluated in-meeting collaboration tools, video meeting participant and time limits, post-meeting summary tools, recording capabilities, and more
• Team Collaboration: We reviewed team chat messaging features and collaboration tools like screen and file sharing, co-editing, and task management
• Reputation Management: We looked at available reputation management features across social media, e-commerce websites, and online review platforms
• Analytics: We reviewed real-time and historical reports, AI analytics, and available add-ons
• Third-Party Integrations: We compared available third-party integrations and APIs
• Security+Network Reliability: We evaluated provider uptimes, compliance certifications, and security standards
• Customer Support: We compared customer support channels, availability, and quality

RingCentral vs Nextiva: At A Glance

Note that, while RingCentral and Nextiva both offer enterprise-level CCaaS platforms, this article compares RingCentral RingEX and Nextiva’s Small Business CX solution.

RingCentral vs Nextiva Pricing and Plans

While RingCentral and Nextiva both offer scalable plans starting from $20/user/month, their pricing structures are quite different.

The most affordable RingCentral plan includes multi-level IVR and on-demand call recording, team chat and AI-powered video conferencing, SMS, cloud recording storage, and basic third-party integrations–none of which the cheapest Nextiva plan includes. That said, Nextiva offers more flexible pricing tiers for digital-only, voice-only, and omnichannel contact centers, plus social media messaging and review management capabilities that are unavailable with RingEX.

RingEX plans offer better value for money than Nextiva, more advanced calling features, and AI-powered video conferencing to streamline internal communications. Nextiva, however, provides far better digital contact center features than RingEX, including multi-account social media messaging, online review and reputation management capabilities, and shared email inboxes.

RingCentral Pricing

RingCentral pricing for RingEX offers 3 paid plans from $20-$35/user/month with annual pricing and $30-$45/user/month with monthly pricing. A 14-day free trial and volume discounts for 50+ users are available. All RingCentral EX plans include voice and video calling, SMS/MMS texting, and AI-powered workflow automation. Extensive add-on features are also available, including real-time reporting, RingSense Conversational intelligence for Sales, RingCentral Webinar/Rooms, and additional business phone numbers.

Nextiva Pricing

Nextiva pricing offers 4 Small Business plans from $20-60/user/month with annual pricing and $25-$75/user/month with monthly pricing. No free trial is available. Advanced workflow automation features like call summaries, intelligent routing, multi-level IVR, and call transcription are only available via paid add-ons–as are CRM integrations and APIs. The number of included group email inboxes, reporting dashboards, monthly SMS messages, and social media/review site accounts varies by plan.

RingCentral vs Nextiva: Voice Calling and SMS

Summary: RingCentral RingEX offers far superior voice calling capabilities than Nextiva Small Business, and is easily the better option for blended call centers. All RingEX plans include unlimited domestic calling, multi-level IVR, on-demand recording, and toll-free calling–while Nextiva limits all these capabilities to the two top-tier plans.

RingCentral RingEX includes unlimited domestic voice calling, SMS/MMS, multi-level IVR, visual voicemail, on-demand call recording, and basic call queues in all plans. All RingEX plans also include RingSense AI for voice calling, meaning users can review automatically generated call summaries, suggested action items, decisions, and automated call notes for all calls. All RingCentral plans also include essential voice calling features like call routing and forwarding, auto attendants with a drag-and-drop call flow editor, custom answering rules, and toll-free calling.

While Nextiva includes unlimited domestic voice calling and visual voicemail in Core plans and above, it can’t compete with RingEX’s voice calling features. Nextiva tacks on additional fees for multi-level IVR, intelligent and skills-based routing, and AI-powered call transcripts and summaries. Call queues, toll-free calling, SMS, and call recording are limited to Nextiva’s top-tier plans. Puzzlingly, Nextiva has eliminated built-in CRM tools, one of its most successful calling features. Especially when compared to RingCentral, Nextiva is no longer a good fit for call centers, pivoting its focus to reputation and customer experience management to digital-first customer service and sales teams.

RingCentral vs Nextiva: Digital Channels and Reputation Management

Summary: All Nextiva plans include social media messaging, live website chat, a group email inbox, social media management, and reputation management across multiple online review sites. Nextiva Engage and Power Suite plans include automated website chatbots and digital faxing. RingEX doesn’t include any social media messaging, website chat, or reputation management capabilities, although unlimited internet faxing is included with Advanced and Ultra plans.

Nextiva Small Business offers numerous digital communication channels and capabilities unavailable on any RingEX plan, although the RingCentral Contact Center includes digital channels and social messaging.

All Nextiva plans include live website chat with basic automated prompts that collect essential customer data and ensure site visitors are connected to the best available live agent. Nextiva Engage and Power Suite plans include 24/7 automated chatbots powered by Nextiva AI. The AI chatbot automates appointment scheduling, lead capture and qualification processes, customer service requests, and product recommendations, leveraging NLP to evaluate customer sentiment and intent.

All Nextiva plans also come with a group email inbox with custom routing rules, automatic ticket creation and assignment, and the ability to prioritize emails. The Nextiva Messenger feature (also included in all plans) streamlines all social media, WhatsApp, and in-app messages into a single unified inbox for efficient customer communication across popular social platforms.

In addition to social messaging, all Nextiva users can access advanced social media management features. Users can schedule and publish posts across multiple social media platforms from a single interface, monitor social media engagements, receive real-time alerts for new comments/replies, and review trends, competitor benchmarks, and brand mentions via social listening tools. Social media interactions can be filtered by channel, date, or custom rules, turned into support tickets, and assigned to the best available agent via intelligent routing. Users can create custom social tags, monitor specific keywords, and directly reply to social media comments from the Nextiva messaging inbox.

Finally, all Nextiva Small Business plans include reputation and review management tools that let users monitor and respond to reviews across app stores, online marketplaces, eCommerce sites, review websites, and more within a unified inbox–no app switching required. Users can respond to reviews manually or leverage Nextiva AI to reply automatically.

RingCentral vs Nextiva: Video Meetings and Team Collaboration

Summary: RingCentral has lower video meeting participant capacities than Nextiva and does not provide customer-agent video calling and screen sharing. That said, RingCentral has more feature-rich video conferencing and team collaboration tools than Nextiva, including automated video call summaries and highlights, real-time meeting transcription, and GenAI-powered team chat summaries.

Nextiva offers unlimited video conferencing for up to 250 users with in-meeting chat, screen sharing, file sharing, and meeting recordings. Unlike RingCentral, Nextiva users can make video calls to customers and view/control customer screens to provide superior customer service. That said, Nextiva lacks advanced video calling features that come standard with RingCentral, including breakout rooms, whiteboards, closed captioning, and automatically-generated meeting summaries with suggested action items. While Nextiva’s basic video calling tool may be robust enough for small teams that want to meet face-to-face a few times a month, RingCentral Video allows for true collaboration.

RingCentral also offers better team collaboration features than Nextiva Small Business. While both providers include team chat messaging, file sharing and co-editing, and third-party calendar integration, RingCentral leverages AI to take team messaging to the next level. RingEX users can use the AI writer to create and respond to chat messages, adjust message length and tone, and check message grammar. RingEX creates AI-powered messaging recaps/summaries, meaning users can avoid having to scroll through long conversations just to find their relevant messages. Message translation is also included. Most impressively, RingCentral provides a GenAI search feature that lets users type in a question and receive an automatically generated response based on existing phone, message, and video transcripts and recordings.

RingCentral vs Nextiva: Analytics

Summary: RingCentral offers far better voice calling analytics than Nextiva, and its Sales Intelligence add-on includes Conversational AI insights like sentiment analysis, trending topics, and agent performance monitoring. Nextiva provides standard voice calling analytics and advanced social media reporting tools, but limits the number of reports on nearly all plans.

Nextiva and RingCentral both provide real-time and historical voice calling analytics that let call center managers monitor call volume changes, review call queue statistics, get real-time KPI alerts, and evaluate agent performance. However, Nextiva Voice Analytics are only included in the top two small business plans, and unlimited reporting is only available to Power Suite users. That said, Nextiva provides excellent social media analytics that include customer sentiment monitoring, competitor tracking, customer engagement monitoring across social media platforms, and trend analysis.

By contrast, RingCentral RingEX plans include basic call logs and QoS monitoring alongside custom call center reporting with 30+ KPIs, agent activity monitoring, multiple reporting dashboards, and the option to add on RingSense for Sales to access AI-powered analytics and in-call agent coaching.

RingCentral vs Nextiva: Third-Party Integrations

Summary: RingCentral RingEX integrates with far more third-party business software than Nextiva Small Business, which restricts even basic integrations to top-tier plans or paid add-ons. However, Nextiva integrates with more social media and online review platforms than RingEX.

All RingEX plans include API access and integration with Slack, Microsoft 365, Google, and telephony for Microsoft Teams. Advanced and Ultra plans give users access to 200+ CRM and industry-specific integrations, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Canvas, Smarsh, and the RingCentral Archiver App for cloud storage backup.

Nextiva Small Business’s app ecosystem pales in comparison to RingCentral, and seems designed to force users to upgrade to more expensive plans (or purchase add-ons) to access integrations that come standard on most RingEX plans. While the Nextiva Core plan includes Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace integrations, CRM integrations and API access are only accessible via paid add-ons–even for Power Suite users. Core users can purchase Microsoft Teams integration as an add-on, but Teams integration is included in Engage and Power Suite plans.

That said, unlike RingEX, all Nextiva Small Business plans integrate with the Google Store, Amazon, Google Reviews, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and numerous social media platforms including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.

RingCentral vs Nextiva: Customer Support and Security

Summary: All RingCentral and Nextiva plans include 24/7 customer support on multiple channels, and both providers have a 99.999% uptime.

RingCentral and Nextiva offer comparable customer support, as both providers include 24/7 support via phone and chat on all plans. Nextiva and RingCentral also offer add-on premium support plans for customized product implementation, agent training, priority support responses, and more. Both platforms have an extensive online knowledge base with written and video product tutorials, FAQs, and an online ticketing portal.

Both providers offer a 99.999% uptime, 24/7 network monitoring, and global points of presence to ensure consistent service. In addition to SSO, RingCentral and Nextiva provide end-to-end encryption, GDPR and HIPAA compliance, PCI compliance, and video meeting host controls.

RingCentral vs Nextiva: Which Provider Should You Choose?

When choosing between RingCentral and Nextiva, the best option for your business depends on where you communicate with your customers, the number of available third-party integrations you need, and how you plan to leverage automation and AI to streamline business processes. Below, we’ve highlighted each platform’s ideal user base and biggest drawbacks. If neither platform seems like a good fit, consider other unified communications providers like GoTo Connect, Vonage Business Communications, and Zoom Workplace.

RingCentral Is Best For

• Voice-First Contact Centers: RingCentral RingEx is best for customer service and sales teams that primarily communicate with customers via voice calling. All RingEX plans include advanced VoIP calling features that RingCentral competitors usually reserve for top-tier plans, such as multi-level IVR, call recording, call queues, and visual voicemail.
• AI-Powered Automation: RingCentral RingEX comes with built-in AI capabilities that optimize internal communications, automate routine business processes, and identify areas for improvement throughout the customer journey. Automatic video meeting and call summaries, GenAI-enhanced messaging, and AI-powered coaching tools make RingEX an ideal fit for smaller teams that need to leverage artificial intelligence to increase conversions, improve customer self-service, and cut down on miscommunications.
• Analytics: RingCentral offers some of the best analytics and reporting tools in the UCaaS space, including real-time KPI monitoring for 30+ metrics, agent activity monitoring with wallboards, and drag-and-drop custom reporting templates. The RingSense Sales Intelligence add-on evaluates customer sentiment, identifies trending topics in customer conversations, and monitors competitor mentions. This makes RingEX an excellent platform for businesses looking to improve agent performance, CSAT scores, and the overall customer experience.

RingCentral Is Not Right For

• Small In-House Teams: In addition to advanced voice calling features and AI analytics, RingCentral RingEX is known for its superior Unified Communications tools. While RingCentral’s advanced team chat messaging and video calling capabilities are perfect for remote or hybrid teams, these features aren’t necessary for smaller in-house teams–and their accompanying learning curve may overwhelm end users.
• Digital Customer Communication: Unlike Nextiva, RingCentral RingEX does not provide website chat, social media messaging, and online reputation management–automatically ruling out digital-first businesses. While these capabilities are included in RingCX, RingCentral’s contact center platform, RingEX is primarily a business phone system with built-in UC tools.

Nextiva Is Best For

• Digital-First Contact Centers: Nextiva Small Business is best for digital-first contact centers that connect with customers via website chat, social media messaging, email, and messaging applications like WhatsApp. Nextiva differentiates itself from competitors by including multiple digital channels in its most affordable plans–including the ability to communicate with customers via video chat.
• Scalability: With plans specifically designed for digital-only, voice-first, and omnichannel contact centers, Nextiva offers a high level of scalability rarely seen in the Unified Communications space. It’s an excellent choice for teams looking for a customer experience solution that evolves alongside their business and lets them add communication channels and advanced features as needed instead of in bulk.
• Reputation Management: All Nextiva Small Business plans include robust reputation management capabilities across key online review platforms and social media, making Nextiva an excellent choice for e-commerce businesses and in-store retailers looking to expand their customer base via digital engagement.

Nextiva Is Not Right For

• Extensive Third-Party Integrations: While Nextiva Small Business integrates with many social media platforms and online review sites, it offers hardly any third-party business software integrations. While Microsoft Teams integration is included in the two most expensive plans, CRM platform integrations and API access require paid add-ons–even for Power Suite users. Businesses needing extensive third-party integrations, or even those looking to streamline a moderate tech stack to a single platform, should look elsewhere.
• Advanced Voice Calling Features: Nextiva may be an excellent option for digital-first customer service and support teams, but its limited voice calling capabilities make it a poor choice for businesses that primarily connect with customers via phone. Essential voice features like toll-free calling, call recording, call queuing, and voice analytics are restricted to the two most expensive plans. Call transcription, automated call summaries, skills-based routing, and multi-level IVR all require paid add-ons or come with usage-based charges.

RingCentral and Nextiva Alternatives

Although RingCentral and Nextiva offer competitive UCaaS and Customer Experience platforms, they may not be the best fit for your business. Popular RingCentral alternatives like 8x8 and Vonage offer better international calling capabilities and greater scalability, while top Nextiva alternatives like Ooma and Zoom Phone provide more extensive voice calling. Additional alternatives to Nextiva and RingCentral include Dialpad, Avaya, Grasshopper, and GoTo Connect.