Evolve IP Unified Communications vs. Vonage Business Communications

For small locations, it's perfect but maybe not for larger locations with more then 50 people. It would depend on your bandwidth availability and what type of redundancy you have in place.

Vonage Business Communications excels in scenarios requiring seamless remote work, such as virtual teams and remote workers. It's also ideal for businesses needing reliable disaster recovery solutions. However, it may be less appropriate for very small businesses with minimal communication needs or those with limited budgets, as the comprehensive features might be more than necessary.

• Unified Communications
• Centralized management of a distributed phone system
• Training

Incentivized

• Eliminates physical phone consoles that can be pricey and unnecessary for staff.
• Has a companion app that allows you to use your personal cell phone to check messages or make calls.
• The desktop application is easy to use and has a number of customizable settings so that the app can be minimized but alert you of incoming calls.

Incentivized

• There are so many ways they need to improve. I can't list them all.
• First off, their tech support is the worst I've ever seen. They generally break something on at least half the tickets we submit. New accounts always have some kind of issue and it is amazing when one works 100%. Response times were terrible too. It could take 2-8 days just to get a new account setup.
• Reporting is inaccurate. Even trying to get it configured with their support team was a hassle and didn't work and wasn't even our data.
• Billing had mistakes often and there could be 3 SKUs for the same item. Same item number, description has the same words in a different order.
• Admin features are lacking. We can't even change the physical phone on an account. We can't create new accounts. Very limited options.
• The admin portal info is inaccurate. Some accounts show no phone associated even though they have one that is working on their account.
• There are times that randomly something stops working and not even the tier 1 support can fix it - a checkbox could "uncheck" itself magically and neither we nor the tier 1 tech can check the box again.
• When we ask to have licenses removed, they don't remove all the licenses. Then, when we re-use that DID (which is what the account is tied to) for a new user, the license applies to them - for instance, call recording. And we didn't ask for call recording on that new user.
• UC-One crashes all the time. It frustrates our users and has a few commonly seen issues.

Incentivized

• Relies on internet connectivity (no separate trunk like an on-prem system).
• Phones can be on the expensive side if you purchase through the Vonage store, especially conference phones. Thankfully Vonage is so flexible and is compatible with phones purchased from other places.

Incentivized

I think it will be renewed as overall it is a midrange product that mostly does what we need it to

Incentivized

I thought it had very practical and useful usability. It has a clean and simple interface with large fonts that make it easy to read. It isn't particularly difficult, although figuring out some operations may be a bit challenging. For the most part though, it isn't very difficult to use

Incentivized

Support? If I could do everything myself with the time I don't have, I would do it better than their support. I don't like saying it that way, but it is the truth. We hired someone from another company that also used Evolve IP and when they found out that is what we used here, he expressed all of the same complaints and stories that we had.

Incentivized

Sometimes there is a disconnect between support and customer success. We had an issue where the support team was automatically assigning numbers to our extensions without informing us. This was something that was not communicated to our account manager. I would just recommend to pay attention to your account when changes are made.

Incentivized

Evolve is worse than Dialpad, Vonage, RingCentral, Genesys, MS Teams, 8x8, and any other system I've dealt with. These mentioned all have better features, work well, are simple to use and admin, and some of them cost less.

Incentivized

I haven't used anything else too closely related but Skype for Business has a lot of the same issues. Vonage's abilities and pros way outweigh the cons. I don't think I have heard of more viable software to fit our needs in the market right now. It has become essential to my workflow.

Incentivized

• Cost and time savings over supporting and maintaining on-premise PBX equipment.
• Increased flexibility for employees to stay connected from a variety of locations.
• Increased productivity in our phone room by allowing the use of a soft-client that can integrate into our workflows via features such as click-to-dial.

Incentivized

• Cut down phone hardware expense since the soft phone is free and easier to use.
• Text is becoming a more important and effective way to reach clients. Some will not answer a call or accept voicemail but respond quickly to text messages.
• Allows me to work from anywhere with smart phone app saving hours at work.