Nextiva Review – The Good and the Bad From Our Testing of This VoIP Service in 2024

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If you’re looking to you move up from Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS), you’re in the right place. Our Nextiva review takes you through one of the most popular Internet-based calling systems today. For this review, we tested the Nextiva phone system, evaluated its other business offerings, and took a cold, hard look at the quality of Nextiva support.

Among other findings, the Essential package includes video calling and toll-free numbers – features that usually cost extra and are only available in more premium plans. On the other hand, Nextiva does not have an app marketplace, choosing to bundle a few select integrations with its phone system instead.

Read on to know if Nextiva is the right choice for your business communication needs and discover some of the other alternatives that can get the job done.

What is Nextiva Inc?

Nextiva’s core products include internal phone systems and customer communication. You can set up both inbound and outbound calling through its Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, which powers most of the company’s other offerings. To strengthen your business’s online presence, you can also make use of Nextiva’s social media and reputation management tools.

As we’ll explore in our review of Nextiva, it has a suite of built-in apps and tools that you can pepper across the communication experience, including tools for sales, automation, and analytics. Over the years, Nextiva has built a strong reputation for itself in the market and is trusted by a number of Fortune 500 companies, including Cisco, Panasonic, Amazon, and more.

US News voted Nextiva the “Best Business Phone System” four years in a row. It strengthened its portfolio through smart acquisitions – in 2023, it picked up AI company Simplify360 for its customer experience management capabilities.

Unlike other companies of its size (think Vonage or 8×8), Nextiva Inc. is a private company and is not publicly traded on the stock exchange.

How Does Nextiva Work?

Nextiva works using Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP technology that converts the analog signals of our voice into a digital format so that it can travel across the internet to reach the call recipient. On the receiver’s end, the signal is converted back to analog, so it appears just like any other telephone call.

During our Nextiva review and test, we found that Nextiva offers high-definition VoIP that’s specifically designed for business use. The service uses special codecs like G.711μ (a universal standard in audio signal processing) to compress and decompress audio with minimal to no loss of quality.

Nextiva’s functionality also allows it to change the audio experience as per your available network. Keep in mind that you need an Internet connection that can guarantee at least 120 Kbps for HD audio calls., and around 2 Mbps for reliable video conferencing.

Nextiva will automatically adapt to your network and optimize VoIP calling for nearly every phone and mobile device that meets or exceeds this threshold. This brings us to the question of devices: where do you use Nextiva?

The answer is, pretty much everywhere. The VoIP service works on virtually every device via the NextivaONE app, a softphone app for remote and hybrid work. It is compatible with Windows and Linux desktops, iPhones, and Android phones, and you can switch between devices seamlessly.

Like most VoIP solutions, Nextiva supports dedicated hardware called IP phones. A wide range of desk phones available at an affordable price, and you can start renting hardware for as little as $4.60/month.

What Sets Nextiva Apart From Other VoIPs?

While we tested Nextiva’s functionalities, several features stood out compared to our experience with other VoIP services. Here is a quick rundown of the differentiators you can expect with this VoIP platform:

1. A Robust Basic Plan

Most Internet calling companies provide some sort of a basic or free VoIP plan or the other, and this applies to Nextiva as well. But what really stood out was the number of features available with the basic plan – called Essential.

It has unlimited voice and video calling; for comparison, the same tier in Vonage does not support video. It also supports a few integrations, such as Outlook and Google Contacts, which are also hard to find in basic plans with other providers. Finally, you get toll-free numbers even with this entry-level Nextiva service. A feature unavailable in similar-priced offerings by 8×8, RingCentral, and Vonage.

2. Excellent Analytics

Nextiva’s data capabilities set it apart from other VoIPs. You can gain value from its analytics features in a number of ways. Call Pop is one such functionality, where customer data intelligence “pops” up wherever there is an inbound call to your company. You will be able to see their contact details, experience analytics, lifetime value, and more.

Nextiva provides analytics insights into the customer experience. While this isn’t related to the Nextiva phone system per se, it is a handy tool for those relying on Nextiva CRM (customer relationship management).

3. No-Code Automation

The company’s VoIP call services tie in seamlessly with the rest of your business productivity systems. This is due to its automation capabilities, which are hard to find in most Voice over IP providers. In the case of Vonage, for instance, you’d have to use Zapier to set up automated workflows. Nextiva offers a simpler, more integrated experience.

For example, you can drag and drop sales leads on the pipeline, add stages, and create automated actions for every stage of the sale. In the Call Pop, as well, it will automatically recommend which tools and resources you might need during the call based on customer intelligence.

4. Extensive Hardware Offerings

Several VoIP providers – like Ooma – offer hardware to accompany their IP telephony services, but Nextiva’s catalog is particularly expansive. Interestingly, there are very few Nextiva-branded VoIP devices. Instead, the company partners with some of the US’ top telephony hardware manufacturers to offer phones and other devices to its customers at a discounted rate.  The catalog includes:

Companies of every size and in every industry are sure to find a suitable solution from this hardware catalog.

Summarizing Nextiva’s Pros and Cons

Next up in our Nextiva VoIP review we look at the advantages and disadvantages of using this Voice over IP phone service. Nextiva’s ratings on trusted portals like Business.com (9 out of 10) and Gartner Peer Insights (4.5 out of 5) suggest that the pros outweigh the cons by a significant margin. With that said, let’s dive into the positives and negatives we found in our Nextiva tests.

Overall, Nextiva offers a good balance of features for businesses of every size, but we felt it does have a strong enterprise focus. Its Enterprise plan is truly comprehensive, which is probably why companies like Netflix and Amazon count themselves among Nextiva customers.

How Much Does Nextiva Cost?

Nextiva phone plans cost between $17.95 and $37.95 per month per user, depending on the subscription and the number of employees you wish to enroll. This places the VoIP service at the slightly higher end of the spectrum when it comes to Internet telephony pricing.

For comparison, Phone.com starts at $12.74/month/user for its basic plan, Mighty Call costs $15, and Ooma and RingCentral both cost around $20.

Here is a quick look at Nextiva’s current costs for a company with a 100+ headcount.

A few observations about the pricing model from our Nextiva test. The more users you enroll, the less you pay. For example, the same Essential plan costs $23.95 if you sign up for 1-4 users per month. Nextiva charges an activation fee of $99 plus taxes for accounts of 2 users or less. Long-term agreements get an extra discount.

For instance, the Essential plan costs $22.95/month/user for a 12-month agreement. But it will cost you $17.95 when you prepay for three years.

Like most cloud-based software companies, annual plans cost significantly less than monthly ones, with up to 28% savings.

Integrations don’t have any extra costs as they’re built into the three plans. The same applies to Nextiva customer support.

Other Nextiva Offerings

In addition to the Nextiva business phone system, there’s also the Nextiva Contact Center, which has a separate pricing model. If you’re looking to build a cloud-based contact center instead of using POTS landline systems or cellphone numbers, these are your options:

You can contact Nextiva for an exact quote based on your number of agents and feature requirements. We tried doing so for our Nextiva review, and we can tell you that the pricing will start at $50-100/month/user. Importantly, there’s no setup fee involved in any of these plans.

A quick note on Nextiva hardware costs: it partners with top manufacturers like Yealink, Polly, Cisco, Blackwire, and Snom to make good VoIP hardware available at competitive rates. You can also rent IP phones starting at $4.60/month.

In terms of social media and reputation management, Nextiva offers a consolidated inbox for all your online mentions and messages, online review management, social media calendars, analytics, and more. Pricing starts at $149/month for the primary user and $99 for every additional user.

A Look at Nextiva’s Core Features

Nextiva can involve a sizable outlay for a mid-sized company with 50-100 users or more. So, what are the features you can expect from your investment? Here is a detailed rundown of all that Nextiva has to offer:

The Nextiva Phone System

The phone system has a number of useful features like:

• Unlimited calling in North America, unlimited fax, and unlimited conferencing
• Free local phone number and toll-free number
• Porting of existing numbers to Nextiva
• VoIP caller ID and Do Not Disturb mode

Auto-Attendant for Calls

The auto-attendant service deserves special mention. You can set up a custom greeting that customers will hear when they call, even if no one is available to pick up the phone right away. The attendant also has conversational AI capabilities. It uses artificial intelligence to understand what the customer is saying and, accordingly, direct them to the right agent or the menu option.

Productivity Features

In addition to the Nextiva business phone system, you can access a host of productivity features right within the app. Simply click on a contact’s name, choose the chat option, and start interacting with them via chat and file sharing.

To support productivity, Nextiva facilitates rooms where you can share ideas with team members. Rooms are essentially productivity groups where you can collaborate, share files, conduct video meetings, etc.

Some of the other productivity features available with Nextiva include:

Customer Experience Management

Nextiva makes it easier for businesses to engage with customers. It also helps gather customer data in one place where everyone can see it and act on it. These features are embedded within the Business phone system when you subscribe to a mid-tier or Enterprise-level plan.

Some of the more advanced features, like customer journey analytics, may be available at an additional fee.

During our tests, we came across a useful automation for customer experience management – automated messages. You can set up Nextiva to send an email or text to a customer at precisely the right moment on their journey, such as after a call or once they complete a survey.

Survey Tools

Nextiva has a surprisingly wide range of survey tools, given that it is mainly a Voice over IP phone service. You can keep your surveys short or make them more layered and detailed. You can choose different types of questions, and you can even send surveys to your employees.

Nextiva includes nine built-in question types. You can view survey results in real time, and save your survey templates for later use.

Contact Center Solutions

Contact center features form a big part of Nextiva’s suite of capabilities. Agents can handle both inbound and outbound calls. There’s an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) feature to automatically attend to callers until the agent is ready. Like most contact center tools, Nextiva has an auto-dialler system that lets you reach the maximum number of customers in a given period.

In addition to all of these features (which are the industry standard with most VoIP software), you’ll also get:

Online Reputation Monitoring and Management

This Nextiva feature is available separately from its VoIP call services, but connects with the softphone app so you can collaborate with your teammates. It lets you keep an eye on how your brand is doing on social media and other online platforms like Google Reviews or Amazon.

You can use Nextiva to schedule and publish posts. And you can respond to what your customers are saying online. Nextiva’s AI will analyze a review’s sentiment and come up with a suitable response automatically.

Integrations

Unlike some of the other VoIP providers, you don’t have to download or pay for integrations separately. Nextiva includes built-in integrations for popular business applications and custom Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for everything else. Enterprise and contact center customers can also make use of Software Development Kits (SDKs) to customize their apps further. Here’s the full list of integrations available with Nextiva:

Nextiva Customer Service Review

We tested that last one in closer detail. One of the questions customers often ask is, “Is Nextiva down?” To have a ready answer, Nextiva embeds its real-time systems status on the bottom of every public-facing web page. You can also visit status.nextiva.com any time to view the current status of its Voice over IP and other offerings.

For instance, it’ll also tell you if Nextiva CRM is operational and if any incident took place in the last seven days.

It’s worth noting that Nextiva’s real-time status visibility falls short of the exhaustive degree of insights we were able to get in our Vonage review. However, it does offer more information than several others like Ooma or Phone.com.

Coming back to our review of Nextiva support, we were happy to find that users have ready access to an exhaustive knowledge portal called the Nextiva Support Center. This acts as a hub for self-service as well as user training.

The portal has all the information you need to get started with the phone setup, app downloads, call flows, billing, surveys, and more. If you don’t find a solution to your problem within this knowledge repository, Nextiva offers quick links for its most commonly requested support services, such as password resets and product updates.

If self-service does not offer a resolution, you can chat with a Nextiva customer support executive right from the portal or submit a ticket explaining your issue.

Another highlight of Nextiva’s customer support is that they promise to answer 95% of all sales and support calls by the second ring. The company will do its best to ensure zero hold time during calls, which is good news for business users looking to get their communication issues resolved ASAP.

To maintain this quality of service, Nextiva sends out satisfaction surveys after every customer interaction.

How does Nextiva support stack up against the competition?

Nextiva is among the few companies to offer a universal support plan to all its customers. For example, RingCentral accounts with one user can access live phone support only between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. PT, Monday to Friday, excluding holidays. Ooma, too, is available on the phone only during limited hours of the day.

8×8 offers a comparable quality of customer support. It specifies an exact timeline of 30 minutes, 2 hours, or 4 hours – depending on the severity of your problem – in which they’ll respond.

A Quick Nextiva Alternatives Comparison

Before you can decide whether Nextiva is the right solution for you, consider alternatives like Ooma, Vonage, Phone.com, MightyCall, and RingCentral.

With advancements in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology and VoIP phone services, there are a few compelling options to choose from – often at a competitive price. Here’s how Nextiva compares to the best VoIP service providers today:

From our tests, we found that Nextiva offers an excellent package – all the features you expect, not so many bells and whistles (like fancy integrations), and solid support. Ooma comes close with its extensive international calling coverage and branded hardware offerings for both office and home VoIP use.

Is Nextiva Good? Here’s What Other Nextiva Reviews Say

In addition to our review and test, Nextiva ratings are pretty high across trusted forums like Gartner Peer Insights, G2, TrustRadius, Trustpilot, and Capterra.

On G2, it has a rating of 4.5 out of 5 with over 25000+ customer reviews. Support and pricing are some of its strengths, while the learning curve was challenging for a few users.

Nextiva ratings on Gartner are 4.5 out of 5 based on 600+ reviews. From evaluation to deployment and support, customers rate their experience positively at every step of the way.

TrustRadius scores software products on a scale of 1-10, and Nextiva stands at a strong 9.3. This is based on 88 reviews, 98% of which indicate that the customer would repurchase this VoIP service.

With over 2000 reviews on Trustpilot, Nextiva has earned a rating of 4.6 out of 5. The company is also very active on these platforms and quick to respond to both positive and negative reviews.

On Capterra, Nextiva is rated 4.4 out of 5 using information from 300+ customer reviews. Most users note that the platform is easy to use, well-designed, and value for money.

Check Out Other VoIP Guides

Choosing the right VoIP provider for your unique needs can be difficult. Check out our popular guides and resources in addition to our Nextiva review:

Why You Can Trust TechReport’s Review of Nextiva

We spent a lot of time exploring the NextivaONE app on different environments, including iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and even Linux. Cross-platform support is one of Nextiva’s strengths, and we are happy to report that regardless of your native OS, you can also take Nextiva for a test drive like us. The company offers a 7-day free trial, but only upon request.

In addition to our hands-on experience with Nextiva, we also conducted a deep dive into the product’s documentation, tutorials, and other resources. This gave us a 360-degree understanding of the learning curve and how the product would work in the long term.

To bolster the findings from our tests, we referred to past customer reviews of Nextiva on reputable forums such as G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, TrustRadius, and Gartner Peer Insights. This ensures that we bring you a balanced and unbiased perspective of how Nextiva works in real-world business use cases.

How to Get Started With Nextiva

To get started with Nextiva, visit the pricing page and choose a plan that suits your budget and team size. The interactive pricing calculator helps you toggle from 1-4 to 100+ users for a new account. You can also sign up for a monthly paid plan or an annual agreement.

Once you have subscribed, there are several ways to access the Voice over IP phone service. Simply head to the cp3.nextiva.com/Login/ page, and enter your credentials, or, download the right app for your OS. Once you have the NextivaONE app in place, here are the steps for getting started with the most popular features:

1. Setting Up a Desk Phone

When you log in to Nextiva, you will see one of the following two pages:

OR

If you see the first page, go to the user’s tab on the top menu. From there, navigate to manage users and click on the edit user button, which looks like a pencil. This will show you all your available devices. Choose the device you want, and change the credentials.

This process generates new credentials that you can now share with any user, so they can use VoIP calling on the device.

If you see the second page, click on Users, followed by Actions, and navigate to Voice Setup. This opens a pop-up window where you will see essential settings on the left. Select the phone you want and assign the VoIP number. The user is now ready to start making calls.

2. Using NextivaONE to make calls

In addition to physical phones, you can also make and receive calls from the NextivaONE app. Visit the company’s website or support portal to scan the QR code and download the app on any mobile device. The page also has links for desktop applications.

On the desktop version, NextivaONE has a really simple learning curve. The communication pane is on the left, where you’ll find your calling, messaging, and collaboration options. The extended menu is on the right, which has your calendar, contacts, storage, file sharing, and profile setting options.

By default, the app will show all your communications in one place. Use the filters to show unread communication updates, messages from different channels, or interactions with specific contents. Click on any communication to send the person a message or call them back.

On the top right corner, you will find the phone icon, which opens the dialler. You can also click on the Contacts button on the right to make calls.

3. Managing Nextiva Billing and Costs

All office manager and admin roles for Nextiva accounts have access to billing information. When you open the app or the Nextiva site, check the top of your main dashboard. Click on the billing tab to view your payment details and usage history.

Select the date range for which you want to view the billing history. Click on the Print button on the top right to generate invoices for your expense account.

4. Making a video call from Nextiva

Starting a video meeting with your teammate is a simple process. Go to contacts and open the call recipient’s contact card. You will see four buttons under their name – for calling, SMS, video, and chat. Click on the video button to jump into a meeting right away.

You can also click on the + button on the top right of your Nextiva app window to start a video meeting.

Should You Get Nextiva VoIP?

Nextiva is among the country’s top Voice over IP providers for a reason. It has a wide range of features, including unlimited calling and video, and excellent customer support. Small to mid-sized businesses looking to manage their online reputation and customer queries can do so using a centralized hub.

While Nextiva is a little more expensive than some of the alternatives, it also provides a lot of value, such as simple, zero-effort integrations and the option to lease hardware. Complementary toll-free minutes are also something that we appreciate.

The user experience is where Nextiva could likely do a little better. While the app is fast and smartly designed, it can be a little difficult to navigate for new users. Companies that want scores of integrations may find Nextiva a little lacking.

Overall, it scores major brownie points as a reliable, value-for-money VoIP service that will help you grow your business.

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