Australian buyer’s guide
Everyone publishes a top ten. We scored one: every platform an Australian business can realistically buy, priced month to month rather than at the contract rate they advertise, and marked on who answers the support line, where the recordings live and whether the AI does anything. Two finished well clear of the other eight.
The 2026 ranking
Australian-built, AI answering on every plan, handsets and nbn on the same bill.
Owns its own network and softswitch, with dialler, wallboards and AI agents built in.
The best-known AI-first platform, run out of San Ramon with a Sydney region.
Zoom Phone, 8x8, Telstra, Teams Phone, GoTo and Optus fill out the table. See every score →
No email, no phone number, no “a consultant will be in touch”. It runs in your browser, uses the same scorecard as the table below, and you can see exactly which answers moved which score.
Same criteria, same weightings, same week. Where a provider wouldn’t confirm something publicly, we’ve said so rather than guessed.
| Provider | Month to month | On a contract | Built in | Support | Data held | AI agents | Handsets & nbn | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Uniden Voice over CloudWinnerAustralian-built, AI answering on every plan, handsets and nbn on the same bill. |
$34.90per user / month, no commitment |
$28.3019% less, locked in | Australia | Australia | Australia | ✓ | ✓ | 95/100 |
VOCPhoneRunner-upOwns its own network and softswitch, with dialler, wallboards and AI agents built in. |
$34.90per user / month, no commitment |
$28.3019% less, locked in | Australia | Australia | Australia | ✓ | ✓ | 92/100 |
DialpadThe best-known AI-first platform, run out of San Ramon with a Sydney region. |
$45.00per user / month, Connect Standard |
Cheaper on a 12-month termrate not published |
United States | Partner | Australia | ✓ | ✗ | 80/100 |
AircallSuperb integration library, French-owned, and the priciest seat in this table. |
$60.80per user / month, minimum three licences |
$45.6025% less, locked in | France | Partner | Unconfirmed | Partial | ✗ | 78/100 |
Zoom PhoneCheap, competent and bolted onto the video product your team already opens. |
$36.48 *per user / month, regional unlimited |
Cheaper on a 12-month termrate not published |
United States | Partner | Australia | Partial | ✗ | 76/100 |
8x8Deep contact-centre capability from a US vendor that won’t tell you the price. |
Not offered | $57.00 *36-month term only |
United States | Partner | Australia | Partial | Partial | 75/100 |
Telstra Business Cloud CallingAustralia’s biggest network reselling somebody else’s calling platform. |
Not offered | $60.0024-36 month term only |
AU, resold | Australia | Australia | Partial | Partial | 74/100 |
Microsoft Teams PhoneThree separate licences and a carrier, stacked up to make an app your team already has ring. |
$39.48 *per user / month, Teams Phone with domestic calling |
$32.9017% less, locked in | United States | Partner | Australia | Partial | Partial | 72/100 |
GoTo ConnectA tidy US small-business platform with a good IVR builder and no Australian story. |
$51.70 *per user / month, indicative AUD |
$39.5024% less, locked in | United States | Partner | Unconfirmed | Partial | ✗ | 71/100 |
Optus Powered by RingCentralA capable American platform, resold locally, on a three-year term. |
Not offered | $55.9936-month term only |
AU, resold | Australia | Australia | Partial | Partial | 70/100 |
All prices are month to month, in AUD per user per month, excluding GST, verified September 2026. That’s deliberate and it’s not how most of these providers quote themselves: the figure in their advertising is usually the discounted rate you get for signing up for a year, which is a different product to the one you can walk away from. The second column shows that rate where it exists. Entry seat shown: every provider here sells dearer tiers. Aircall requires a minimum of three licences, so its real floor is $182.40 a month. Telstra, Optus and 8x8 are sold on multi-year terms and don’t publish a month-to-month rate at all.
* Read these before you compare the numbers:
That result surprised us less the longer we looked at it. Microsoft, Zoom and 8x8 write better software than anybody in Australia. They also don’t own the phone line, the handset, the support queue or the bill, and in a phone system that turns out to matter more than a slicker settings page.
Uniden Voice over Cloud
The most complete package an Australian business can buy right now.
Best for: Any Australian business from a sole trader to a 1,000-seat government department that wants one supplier for phones, internet and support.
VOCPhone
The one to shortlist if the phone is a sales tool, not just a phone.
Best for: Sales teams, trades businesses and contact centres that measure the phone in booked jobs and closed deals.
None of them are features you’ll find on a comparison chart, which is probably why the comparison charts keep getting this wrong.
In 2025 an AI agent could take a message. In 2026 the good ones answer in an Australian voice, understand what the caller means rather than which key they pressed, book the job into the calendar and write the note into the CRM. Our top two and Dialpad ship that on standard plans. The other seven sell a thinner version of it, as a tier, or not at all.
Ask where the recordings live and where the company is, and the field separates fast. Two of these ten are built in Australia. Microsoft, Zoom, 8x8 and Dialpad all have Australian regions and American head offices. Aircall and GoTo wouldn’t confirm Australian residency to us at all. Telstra and Optus are Australian companies reselling platforms they didn’t write.
Zoom, Dialpad, Aircall, GoTo and Teams Phone sell software and leave the carriage, the handsets and the internet to somebody else. When a call drops you get to run the argument between three vendors yourself. The Australian two sell voice, nbn and hardware on one bill with one support number.
Almost every price in this market is quoted at the annual-commitment rate, because it’s the smaller number, and the walk-away rate is a click further in. Aircall is $45.60 a seat on a year and $60.80 without one. Telstra, Optus and 8x8 won’t quote a month-to-month rate at all. We show both columns for everybody, and on both of them the two Australian platforms come out cheapest: $34.90 month to month, $28.30 on a twelve-month term.
Entry seat, in AUD, excluding GST, verified September 2026, and quoted month to month throughout. Where a provider offers a cheaper rate for signing a contract, the card says what that rate is, so you can decide whether the discount is worth the term.
Australia · support from Australia
$34.90 /user/mo
Month to month. $28.30 if you sign for a year
Bundles from $84.90/mo for three users on a 12-month term
Australia · support from Australia
$34.90 /user/mo
Month to month. $28.30 if you sign for a year
Price-match guarantee on any comparable quote, either way
United States · support from Partner
$45.00 /user/mo
Month to month. Cheaper on a 12-month term, rate not published
Contact-centre tiers cost substantially more
France · support from Partner
$60.80 /user/mo
Month to month. $45.60 if you sign for a year
Floor price is effectively $180/mo
United States · support from Partner
$36.48 /user/mo
Month to month. Cheaper on a 12-month term, rate not published
A metered tier sits below this and a global tier above it
Priced as an add-on to a Zoom Workplace licence, not as a standalone system.
United States · support from Partner
$57.00 /user/mo
36-month term only
No published price list; every number is negotiated
8x8 stopped publishing prices, so this is an indicative Australian quote rather than a list rate.
AU, resold · support from Australia
$60.00 /user/mo
24-36 month term only
Priced as part of a wider Telstra account
United States · support from Partner
$39.48 /user/mo
Month to month. $32.90 if you sign for a year
Plus a Microsoft 365 licence from $10.50, which is a separate line item
The $12.60 to $15 figure quoted everywhere is Teams Phone Standard, which is the PBX layer and can’t ring a phone number on its own. Three things have to stack up before it does: a Microsoft 365 licence (Business Basic $10.50, Standard $21.00, Premium $32.90, or E5 which bundles Teams Phone), the Teams Phone Standard licence at $15.00, and then carriage. Microsoft’s own domestic calling bundle is $32.90 all in for the PBX plus 1,200 outbound minutes, Telstra Operator Connect is about $18.00 a line on top of the $15.00 licence, and Direct Routing needs a session border controller at $300 to $1,200 a month before you count SIP channels. We list the $32.90 bundle because it’s the cheapest path that actually makes a call.
United States · support from Partner
$51.70 /user/mo
Month to month. $39.50 if you sign for a year
Priced in USD and converted; ask for an AUD quote in writing
Listed in US dollars, so what you pay moves with the exchange rate.
AU, resold · support from Australia
$55.99 /user/mo
36-month term only
Device repayment plans add to the monthly figure
Worked example for five people over three years at the month-to-month rate: Uniden and VOCPhone $6,282 each, or $5,094 on a twelve-month term. Zoom Phone $6,566, Teams Phone $7,106, Dialpad $8,100, GoTo Connect $9,306, Optus $10,078, 8x8 $10,260, Telstra $10,800, Aircall $10,944. Handsets, numbers and call packs sit on top of every one of them, and the Teams Phone figure still excludes the Microsoft 365 licence each of those five people needs, which adds $1,890 to $5,922 again over the same period at Microsoft’s annual-term rates, and more again if you want that month to month too.
Four Australian businesses that moved, what broke first, and what changed after. Sourced from the providers and published with the names attached.
Organic retail
A Sydney health-food store stopped running its business line off a personal mobile, and got its owner back out of the shop.
Network distribution
A Hexatronic Group company spent years asking callers to hang up and dial another state. One platform ended that overnight.
Auto repair
A workshop lost its number when its previous provider disconnected the service. It was taking calls again before lunch.
Take these to every provider you shortlist. The answers separate the platforms far more reliably than the feature list on the brochure.
Answering is the easy part. Ask whether the agent books into your calendar, writes the note into your CRM and hands to a human without making the caller repeat themselves.
Where are recordings stored, who can access them, and what time zone is the person who answers when something breaks at 4pm on a Friday?
Desk phone, mobile and laptop should share extensions, transfers and call flows, and you should be able to move a live call between them without hanging up.
Click to dial, screen pop, automatic call logging. Native connectors for Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho and Xero save hours a week that nobody budgets for.
Not four nines on a slide. What physically happens to an inbound call at the moment the fibre outside gets cut, and how long before it happens.
Live queue wallboards, abandonment rates, answer times by team. If you can’t see where calls are being lost you can’t stop losing them.
After hours, public holidays, on-call rotations. If every change is a support ticket, you’ll stop making changes and the system will slowly stop fitting.
Ask what invoice two looks like. Setup, porting, number blocks, call packs and recording storage are where a cheap seat quietly stops being cheap.
Pricing checks, industry shifts and the things vendors would rather you didn’t ask about. Written for people buying a phone system, not for people selling one.
The last ISDN and PSTN services are being switched off. If nobody has called you about it yet, that’s not a good sign.
Twelve months ago an AI answering your phone was a party trick. In 2026 it books the job, writes the note and hands over cleanly.
We priced the same five-person business across ten platforms, month to month rather than at the contract rate they advertise. Doing that changes the order of the table.
If a comparison site won’t show you its working, the ranking is an advertisement. Here’s ours.
| Features | 25% | Call flow, IVR, queues, recording, video, SMS, presence |
| Value for money | 20% | Entry seat, what is included, setup, porting, invoice two |
| Australian footprint | 20% | Where it’s built, hosted and supported, and who owns it |
| AI capability | 15% | Voice quality, intent handling, booking, CRM write-back |
| Ease of setup | 10% | Time to first call, self-service changes, onboarding |
| Reliability | 10% | Uptime record, outage failover, support response |
Weights were fixed before scoring and haven’t moved since. A provider that won’t confirm something publicly scores as unconfirmed, not as a zero and not as a pass.
We built the scorecard and set the weights before any provider saw them, and we publish enough of the method that you can disagree with it.
Our advice is the same as it would be on any review site: shortlist two or three, get written quotes, and ask all of them the eight questions above.
On our 42-point scorecard Uniden Voice over Cloud finished first with 95 out of 100 and VOCPhone second with 92, ahead of Dialpad, Aircall, Zoom Phone, 8x8, Telstra, Microsoft Teams Phone, GoTo Connect and Optus. Both are Australian built, hold call data onshore, include AI voice agents and sell handsets and nbn on the same bill. The global platforms score well on software and badly on everything that involves an Australian phone line.
Month to month, with Australian calls included, expect $35 to $45 per user per month before GST. Uniden Voice over Cloud and VOCPhone are the cheapest on our table at $34.90, or $28.30 each on a twelve-month term. Zoom Phone is $36.48, Microsoft Teams Phone $39.48 once you add the calling it needs, and Dialpad $45.00. GoTo Connect, Optus, 8x8, Telstra and Aircall run from $51.70 to $60.80. Most of those numbers are higher than the ones you’ll see advertised, because the advertised figure is usually the contract rate. Add handsets at roughly $180 to $250 once, and porting if your provider charges for it.
No. Every provider here has iOS, Android and desktop apps, and most businesses start on apps only and add handsets later. Reception desks, warehouses and anywhere with shared staff still benefit from a physical phone, and only four of the ten will actually sell you one: Uniden, VOCPhone, Telstra and Optus. The rest expect you to source hardware yourself and support it yourself.
Yes. Number portability is a regulated right in Australia and every provider in this comparison will port a working service, though with Microsoft Teams Phone the port is handled by whichever carrier you put underneath it rather than by Microsoft. Simple single-number ports usually clear in a few business days. Complex ports across multiple carriers and number blocks take longer, almost always because of paperwork rather than technology.
That depends entirely on the provider. The better systems detect the outage and route inbound calls straight to nominated mobiles, so callers never know. Weaker ones send everything to voicemail. It’s the single question most buyers forget to ask, and the one that costs the most when it’s answered badly.
For a business that misses calls, yes, and the maths isn’t subtle. A tradesperson who misses four calls a week and converts one in three is losing roughly one job a week. An AI agent that answers, qualifies and books costs far less than that. For a business whose phone rings twice a day, it’s a nice-to-have.
If you hold health, financial or government information, yes, and your obligations under the Privacy Act 1988 don’t stop at the phone system. Recordings of customer calls are personal information. Providers that host and process in Australia make that conversation short; providers that can’t tell you where the data sits make it long.
Because the headline number on a pricing page is almost always the contract rate, and we lead with the month-to-month one. Aircall advertises $45.60 a seat, which is the price for committing to a year; walk away and it is $60.80. Uniden Voice over Cloud and VOCPhone are $28.30 on a twelve-month term and $34.90 without one. Dialpad and Zoom Phone discount for a term too but publish no Australian figure we would stand behind, so we show the month-to-month price and say a cheaper rate exists rather than invent one. Telstra, Optus and 8x8 sell only on multi-year terms and publish no month-to-month rate at all. Both columns are in the table so you can compare whichever one matches how you want to buy.
We set the scorecard, the weights and the scores before any commercial conversation, and the whole method is published on this page. You should check the numbers against the providers directly and get your own quotes.
Both finished clear of the field, both are Australian, and both will give you a written quote without a sales process attached. Fifteen minutes now beats three years on the wrong platform.
Not sure which? Answer the four questions.