An In-Depth Ooma Review — Everything You Need to Know in 2024

Why Trust Tech Report

Tech Report is one of the oldest hardware, news, and tech review sites on the internet. We write helpful technology guides, unbiased product reviews, and report on the latest tech and crypto news. We maintain editorial independence and consider content quality and factual accuracy to be non-negotiable.

In today’s digitally connected world, choosing the right VoIP service is crucial for seamless communication, whether it’s for personal or professional use. This Ooma review aims to delve deep into one such service that has been gaining traction among users seeking reliability and quality.

Ooma promises to offer an excellent VoIP experience, combining affordability with top-notch features that cater to both homes and businesses. Over the years, the company has bragged about its ease of use and crystal-clear call quality, but does it truly live up to these claims?

Our comprehensive Ooma VoIP review will dissect Ooma’s offerings, from setup to daily use, to give you an informed perspective before making your choice. If you’ve been on the fence about investing in this VoIP platform, read on to see if Ooma is the right fit for your business or individual needs.

What is Ooma and How Does Ooma Work?

Over time, the company has diversified its portfolio, introducing business solutions, advanced features, and international calling plans, all the while maintaining a competitive edge in terms of pricing and quality.

The hallmark of Ooma’s service is its unique combination of hardware and software. While many VoIP services rely purely on software or mobile apps to connect users, Ooma provides a physical device – the Ooma Telo – that connects to a user’s internet router.

Ooma’s operation hinges on the conversion of voice data into digital packets, which are then transmitted over the Internet. When you place a call using Ooma, your voice is captured, converted into data packets, and sent over the internet to the desired destination.

If the recipient is on a traditional phone line, Ooma’s service will convert these digital packets back into an analog signal for the recipient’s phone. On the other hand, if both parties are using Ooma, the communication remains digital, often resulting in clearer sound quality.

We found that setting up Ooma is fairly straightforward, too. Once you acquire the Ooma Telo device, it’s simply a matter of connecting it to the internet router and to a traditional phone handset. After the initial setup process, which involves registering the device and choosing a phone number, the system is ready for use.

Who is Ooma Best For?

Ooma has tailored its services to appeal to a wide demographic, but there are particular sectors that can take advantage of the exceptional benefits of what Ooma offers. For homeowners, Ooma presents an exciting alternative to conventional landline services.

This makes sense, as many people are seeking ways to reduce monthly expenditures without compromising on the clarity and reliability of calls. The Ooma’s Telo device has become a favorite for these individuals, allowing them to make free domestic calls and eliminating the looming shadow of hefty phone bills.

On the business front, especially among small to medium enterprises, Ooma’s business suite is making significant inroads. Ooma Office ensures that businesses can have dependable communication channels without getting bogged down by intricate installations or inflated monthly charges.

With features like a virtual receptionist and conference bridges, it’s clear why many growing businesses are adopting Ooma as their primary communication tool. The rise of remote work has also seen a parallel increase in Ooma’s appeal.

In present times, we’ve witnessed a surge in professionals operating from diverse locations outside traditional office spaces. For them, Ooma’s crystal-clear call quality, complemented by features such as voicemail and call forwarding, acts as a bridge, ensuring they’re never out of touch with their teams or clients.

Furthermore, in an age where international communication is often a necessity, Ooma has made a name for itself with domestic calls, but it doesn’t fall short on the international front either. Offering competitive rates, it’s become a lifeline for those with families in distant lands or businesses with a global clientele.

Is Ooma Good? The Key Pros and Cons

Now for the all-important question – is Ooma any good? From our testing, we think so, and to back up these claims, we’ve listed some of the key pros, as well as some cons below:

How Much Does the Ooma Phone Service Cost?

Ooma has a good range of affordable plans for both business and residential use, making it an ideal choice for either. Below, we’ll run through each plan, including the key features, pricing, and other important aspects.

It’s worth noting that as of the time of writing, Ooma doesn’t offer any free trials, which we found to be a little disappointing, but it’s not uncommon for VoIP providers. However, you do get a useful 30-day money-back guarantee, which gives you ample time to decide whether they’re the right solution for you.

1. Ooma Telo (Residential Plan)

Ooma Telo offers users a home phone service with exceptional clarity, reliability, and an assortment of features like voicemail, caller ID, call-waiting, and 911 service. It’s designed with simplicity in mind, so you’ll be set up quickly.

After purchasing the Ooma Telo device, you’ll also enjoy a low monthly fee, primarily for taxes.

With this service, you can opt for either the Basic plan or the Premier option, with the latter including features such as a Telemarketing Blocker, a free second number, Voicemail monitoring, and much more.

The main difference is the $9.99/month you have to pay for the service, whereas the basic plan is just a one-off purchase cost.

2. Ooma Office (Business Plan)

Ooma Office is tailored for small businesses, providing them with a professional phone system without the hefty price tag. Features include a virtual receptionist, extension dialing, call transfer, music on hold, and conference bridges.

This plan is designed to scale as your business grows, allowing you to add users or additional lines seamlessly, as and when you need them.

Within the business plans, there are three separate options to choose from. Each one increases the number of advanced features you get, for example, the Pro plan offers Video Conferences for up to 25 people, a feature that isn’t available on the Essentials plan.

On the flip side, you get Hot Desking and Video Conferencing for up to 100 participants on the Pro Plus plan, so it really depends on the size of your business.

3. Ooma Enterprise

For larger organizations, Ooma Enterprise offers a cloud-based unified communication solution. This includes call center features, advanced analytics, API integrations, and enhanced support, ensuring the business stays connected, efficient, and agile.

However, to get this plan, you have to reach out to the Ooma sales team and discuss your requirements. This can be quite useful, as it allows you to tailor a plan to your own business requirements, such as team size, necessary features, and so on.

Reviewing of Ooma Business’ Core Features

Now it’s time to take a closer look at the core features of Ooma and what makes it one of the top VoIP providers right now. In this section, we’ll evaluate important aspects like the call quality, ease of use, and other findings from our testing.

Crystal-Clear Call Quality and Advanced Voice Compression

Ooma’s impeccable call quality sets it apart from many other VoIP services we’ve come across. It ensures that conversations have minimal background noise and are devoid of distortions typically found in VoIP calls. Whether we were making local or international calls, the voice clarity remained consistent.

Overall, it’s evident that Ooma invests heavily in its infrastructure and uses advanced technology to prioritize call clarity. Such clear communication is invaluable, especially in professional settings where clarity and accuracy are paramount.

Another feature that genuinely impressed us with Ooma was its ability to maintain call quality even when the internet was at peak usage. Ooma’s advanced voice compression technology optimizes voice data to use less bandwidth, ensuring the call remains uninterrupted and clear.

We were really impressed and feel this demonstrates Ooma’s commitment to offering a seamless communication experience and understanding real-world scenarios where bandwidth can be a limiting factor.

HD Voice

For businesses that rely heavily on calls as their main form of communication, having a good setup is essential. We found that even on slower internet, Ooma was still giving crisp audio and even limited background noise for the optimal call setup.

Affordable International Calling

International calls have historically been a costly affair, but Ooma disrupts this narrative. The affordable rates offered are competitive, making it feasible for regular overseas calls. Below is a list of the current rate of international calls with Ooma for a select group of popular locations.

During our tests, not only was the connection stable, but we were also pleasantly surprised by the affordability of the entire experience.

This comes in handy for businesses that rely on a remote workforce, as it’s pretty common in today’s market to have teams spread across the globe – and Ooma, as one of the cheapest VoIP phone services, makes it easy to stay in touch with them with ease.

Advanced Security and Privacy

In an age where data privacy and security are of paramount importance, Ooma’s approach is reassuring. Each call is secure, backed by advanced encryption protocols that are in place. This commitment to user privacy and security ensures that personal and professional conversations remain confidential.

Some of the key security features of Ooma include:

• Automatic Arm and Disarm, where your system automatically arms and disarms based on your GPS location
• Remote 911, where you can call 911 from anywhere as if you were at home and automatically transmit your home address to emergency responders
• Instant Alerts, where you can access real-time alerts on your mobile device to check the status of your home 24/7 from anywhere

Mobile Apps

Ooma’s forward-thinking approach is evident in its integration capabilities with smart home devices. Mobile apps, while not a necessity, add a layer of innovation and convenience to the Ooma ecosystem.

Being able to configure specific actions, like lights flashing for certain contacts, brings a fun and modern touch to traditional communication.

We found the apps to be a true extension of the Ooma experience, not a dumbed-down version for mobile users. You can still access all the key features like Voicemail Monitoring and crystal-clear audio, so we were suitably impressed.

Virtual Receptionist

Arguably one of the most impactful features for businesses, Ooma Office’s virtual receptionist operates as an automated yet highly customizable front desk. Depending on the time of day or week, businesses can program the receptionist to provide different responses or menu options.

This ensures that callers always receive relevant information, whether that’s operation hours, current promotions, or the correct extension for their inquiries. It streamlines call handling and presents a professional image to callers, even if the business doesn’t have a dedicated human receptionist.

Extension Dialing and Overhead Paging

Internal communication is vastly streamlined with extension dialing. By assigning unique extensions to employees or departments, businesses can foster quicker connections without the hassles of dialing full numbers.

This setup reduces the time employees spend connecting with colleagues, enabling more efficient collaboration and potentially quicker resolution of customer inquiries.

In larger establishments or premises like warehouses and factories, instant communication is crucial. The overhead paging feature in Ooma Office allows businesses to broadcast announcements or alerts to all extensions, ensuring that critical information is promptly disseminated to all necessary parties.

Multi-Ring

With Ooma’s multi-ring feature, calls can be directed to ring simultaneously on different devices. For employees always on the move, this means their mobiles, office phones, or even home phones can ring at once, increasing the chances of picking up and reducing missed call rates.

It’s a blend of mobility and accessibility designed for the modern worker.

Call Park and Transfer

Especially in busy office environments, there are times when calls must be briefly held or transferred. The Call Park and Retrieve feature allows a user to ‘park’ an active call and then retrieve it from any extension within the business.

It’s an invaluable tool for reception areas or when a caller needs to be connected with a specific department not immediately available. Beyond this, efficiently redirecting calls is a cornerstone of good customer service.

With Ooma Office, not only can calls be transferred internally to different extensions, but they can also be directed externally. Whether it’s connecting a client with a field representative or redirecting to a partner firm, the process is seamless, keeping disruptions to a minimum for the caller.

Music on Hold

A touch that often goes unnoticed until it’s absent, Music on Hold ensures callers aren’t met with eerie silence when waiting. Ooma Office allows businesses to customize this feature with music or promotional messages, turning wait times into potential branding or marketing moments.

It’s a subtle but effective way of enhancing customer experience.

Conference Bridge

Modern businesses often operate in dispersed settings, with stakeholders scattered geographically. Ooma Office’s Conference Bridge feature brings teams together, facilitating group discussions without the constraints of location. With clear voice quality and reliable connections, it’s a virtual boardroom at one’s fingertips.

Voicemail-to-Email Forwarding

In a digital age, immediate accessibility to messages isn’t just a convenience but often a necessity. When voicemails are automatically forwarded as audio attachments to email, it ensures that you can access, archive, and respond to them even when away from the office phone.

It’s a merging of traditional voice communication with modern digital workflows.

Call Logs and Reporting

Knowledge is power, and in business, understanding communication patterns can provide invaluable insights. Ooma Office’s detailed call logs and reporting tools give a clear picture of call volumes, durations, and patterns.

This data can guide staffing decisions, highlight peak call times, and even inform customer service strategies.

Ooma’s Interface and Compatibility

Ooma has a fleet of excellent apps for all major devices, including Android, iOS, Windows, and MacOS. This means you can use all the benefits of VoIP from anywhere in the world across all of your devices.

Its phone system is a hit among small and less tech-savvy business owners with its straightforward setup and customization. With the drop-down menu, business administrators can craft custom greetings, offer multilingual menu options, and switch between business and after-hours modes with the virtual receptionist.

The mobile apps for Ooma are essentially an extension of the already excellent web service, with the Android app, in particular, acting as a real asset to businesses. We were so impressed that we placed it top of the list of the best VoIP mobile apps on the market.

Ooma Office Pro and Ooma Office Pro Plus also include a convenient desktop app so you can use your business phone system right from your computer. It’s a shame that none of the other plans offer this feature, as it would be incredibly convenient, but it shouldn’t be a major issue for users.

The complementary iOS and Android mobile apps, available with every Ooma business plan, maintain a consistent and familiar design akin to standard operating systems. This ensures even first-time users find it a breeze to navigate.

Both apps are essentially an extension of the Ooma desktop setup, and you’ll struggle to find any real differences between the two. Functions like making and receiving calls, transitioning between devices, blocking unwanted calls, and initiating automatic call recordings are both intuitive and swift.

Plus, features like auto-transcribed voicemails allow you to swiftly sift through messages and even play them at 1.5x or 2x speed for efficient and precise information gathering.

What Integrations Does Ooma Support?

Ooma, as a leading VoIP service provider, offers a ton of integrations to enhance the utility and versatility of its services. Through these, Ooma ensures that its platform can seamlessly fit into the existing workflows of businesses, thus enhancing efficiency and productivity.

Here’s a brief overview of the types of integrations that Ooma supports:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Ooma can integrate with the top CRM solutions, including Salesforce, and Zoho, amongst others, ensuring that sales and support teams can make calls directly from the software, log call data automatically, and maintain updated customer records.
• Productivity Suites: This VoIP service also supports integration with popular productivity suites like Microsoft Office 365 or Google Workspace. Allowing you to sync your contacts, schedule calls directly from your calendar apps, or even access voicemails and call recordings from cloud storage seamlessly.
• APIs for Custom Integrations: Advanced users or businesses with specific needs can leverage Ooma’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). These allow businesses to create custom integrations, ensuring Ooma fits perfectly within any unique ecosystem or workflow.

Sadly, there’s no Zapier support on offer with Ooma like you’d find with other top VoIP providers such as Vonage, so you’re a little limited in what you can link with. However, CRMs are the main integration you’ll need with VoIP software, as they enable you to seamlessly connect with your customer database.

How Does Ooma Compare to Other Top VoIPs?

If you’re still unsure of whether Ooma is the best VoIP service for your own individual or business needs, then you can compare it to the other top providers by using our useful table below:

Whilst we believe Ooma is best suited for Residential use, it still functions very well as a business VoIP provider, making it an excellent all-around option. It doesn’t handle large businesses as well as Vonage, but it can still be used across businesses of most sizes.

Check out our full detailed overview for more information on the top VoIP providers on the market.

How Good is Ooma? What Do Other Ooma Reviews Say?

Ooma is a well-respected name within the VoIP world, and this extends beyond our own hands-on testing of the service. Popular review sites, such as Trustpilot, G2, and even Reddit, are all full of positive reviews on Ooma and the services they offer.

In this section, we’re going to explore some of the common reviews from actual everyday users of Ooma by looking at the overall take of the service on these sites, so you can see if it lives up to the hype and get an alternative perspective.

This user, and many others, have had Ooma by their side for many years and heaped praise on the provider for its reliability, in particular, they praised the fact that Ooma works with pretty much any phone you have, so you can keep your current setup, which saves vital costs.

Other users backed up our claims that whilst Ooma may not be as suitable for large businesses as providers like Vonage, it really shows its expertise as one of the leading VoIP services for small business use.

They also praised the low-cost plans and ease of use, two essential components of any good VoIP provider. However, the expertise of the customer support team was brought into the equation.

Our Other VoIP Guides

If you’re enjoying this review of Ooma or simply want to keep updated with all things VoIP, then check out our other articles by clicking any of the links below. We frequently review all the leading providers, give detailed insights, and offer various guides on how to get the best out of your VoIP system:

• The Best VoIP Services Compared and Reviewed
• What is VoIP? The Definitive Guide to VoIP
• Best Residential VoIP Services Reviewed
• Cheapest VoIP Phone Service Providers for Business and Personal Use
• Best Free VoIP Phone Number Solutions Reviewed
• Best Mobile VoIP Apps Compared
• The Best VoIPs for Small Businesses

Why You Can Trust Our Ooma VoIP Review

If you’re wondering about the reliability of our review on Ooma, let’s walk you through our comprehensive evaluation process. We’ve undertaken rigorous hands-on testing of this VoIP service, testing the quality of its calls and the international coverage on offer.

We also explored other vital features like Voicemail Monitoring or Video Conferencing. This in-depth testing allows us to pinpoint Ooma’s strengths and identify areas that might benefit from enhancements.

Furthermore, we delved deep into its interface to gauge its user-friendliness and determine if it’s intuitive for beginners and experienced VoIP users. Plus, in addition to our firsthand experience, we sought out insights from other Ooma users.

We analyzed user reviews on esteemed platforms like G2, Trustpilot, and Reddit, incorporating the feedback of verified Ooma customers into our review so that you can have a different angle.

Our expertise doesn’t stop with Ooma, either. We’ve reviewed many of the top VoIP providers like Vonage, Phone.com, and RingCentral. This experience equips us with a robust benchmark, ensuring a fair comparison of Ooma against its competitors in the market.

How to Use Ooma — A Step-By-Step Guide

Setting up a VoIP system like Ooma can seem daunting at first, but in our experience, it’s a straightforward process. Let’s delve into a step-by-step guide to ensure a smooth setup and optimal use of the Ooma VoIP system:

Step 1 – Unboxing and Understanding Components

Upon receiving your Ooma package, the first thing you’ll want to do is unbox and familiarize yourself with the components. In our experience, identifying and understanding each part in advance makes the setup smoother.

Step 2 – Connecting to the Internet

Before connecting your Ooma device, ensure you have a stable internet connection:

1. Connect one end of the provided Ethernet cable to the “INTERNET” port on the Ooma device
2. Connect the other end to an open port on your modem or router

Step 3 – Connecting Your Phone

Once connected to the internet:

1. Plug your regular home phone into the “PHONE” port on the Ooma device using a phone cable
2. Power up the Ooma device by connecting the provided AC adapter

Step 4 – Activation

Before using the service, you’ll need to activate your Ooma device. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to the Ooma activation webpage on a computer or mobile device
2. Enter the activation code provided in your Ooma package
3. Follow the on-screen instructions. In our experience, this is the step where you’ll set up your account details and choose your service plan

Step 5 – Customizing Your Settings

Once activated, log in to the Ooma dashboard. Here you can set up features like voicemail, call forwarding, and specific ring patterns. As we went over in our Ooma review, in our experience, the dashboard is intuitive, making customization easy and efficient.

Step 6 – Testing

It’s essential to test your setup to ensure everything works correctly. So make sure to do the following:

1. Make an outgoing call to a friend or family member
2. Ask someone to call you to check incoming calls
3. Test voicemail by leaving a message

Step 7 – Exploring Advanced Features

Ooma offers a plethora of advanced features, including:

1. Virtual Receptionist, which helps you manage incoming calls efficiently
2. Ooma Mobile App to make or receive calls on the go. In our experience, this app is especially beneficial for business users
3. Integration with Smart Devices like Amazon Echo or smart security systems

Ooma Review Conclusion — Is Ooma Worth It?

Ooma is, without a doubt, one of the top VoIP providers on the market for both residential and business usage, making it a great all-around option. It also has some cutting-edge features that make it stand out in a crowded market space like excellent video conferencing features for up to 100 users in the Office plans.

It even offers Ring Groups and a useful Virtual Receptionist. It doesn’t work as well for large businesses as Vonage does, but its versatility as a residential and small business VoIP service makes it a standout option for a large number of people.

It also offers reasonably priced plans, and as we discovered in our testing, it has a lot of advanced features that make it stand out, so you’re getting seriously competitive value for money.

Ooma App Review FAQs