- Basis
- Month to month and on contract, AUD, ex GST
- Cheapest seat
- AUD $34.90, or $28.30 on a term
- Dearest seat
- AUD $60.80 per user per month
- Five seats, three years
- A spread of $4,662 across the ten
Comparison tables are easy to game. Everybody publishes a from price, everybody picks the tier that flatters them, and nobody shows you the invoice. So we did the boring version: one fictional but entirely ordinary Australian business, five people, one office, a 1300 number and a reception phone, priced across all ten platforms in our table.
The spread between cheapest and dearest, over three years, was $4,662 at the month-to-month rate. Getting to a like-for-like number was harder than it should have been, and not because the products are complicated. It’s because most of this market advertises one number, the contract rate, and leaves the price you pay for the freedom to leave a click further in.
The entry seat, side by side
| Provider | Month to month | On a contract | 5 users, 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uniden Voice over Cloud | $34.90 | $28.30 | $6,282 |
| VOCPhone | $34.90 | $28.30 | $6,282 |
| Zoom Phone | $36.48 | Cheaper, not published | $6,566 |
| Microsoft Teams Phone | $39.48 | $32.90 | $7,106 |
| Dialpad | $45.00 | Cheaper, not published | $8,100 |
| GoTo Connect | $51.70 | $39.50 | $9,306 |
| Optus (RingCentral) | Term only | $55.99 | $10,078 |
| 8x8 | Term only | $57.00 | $10,260 |
| Telstra | Term only | $60.00 | $10,800 |
| Aircall | $60.80 | $45.60 | $10,944 |
All figures AUD, excluding GST, entry seat. Verified September 2026 and subject to change without notice, which is a sentence every comparison site writes and every reader should take seriously. 8x8 and GoTo Connect no longer publish prices at all, so those figures are indicative Australian quotes rather than list rates, and GoTo prices in US dollars, so it moves with the exchange rate.
The advertised price almost always has a contract attached
Look at the two middle columns again. For six of the ten platforms, the number on the provider's own website is the right-hand one: the rate you get for committing to twelve months. The month-to-month rate, the one you pay if you want to be able to leave, is between 20 and 80 per cent higher and is usually one click further in.
Aircall is the clearest case we can put a figure on: $45.60 a seat on a twelve-month commitment against $60.80 month to month, a third more for the same product. Dialpad and Zoom Phone both discount for a term too, but neither publishes an Australian rate we would be comfortable printing, so our table says a cheaper term price exists without inventing one. None of this is hidden exactly. It’s just not what the pricing page leads with, and it’s not what ends up in most comparison tables.
Three more, Telstra, Optus and 8x8, don’t offer a month-to-month rate at all. Their product is a two or three-year term and that’s the only way to buy it. That’s a legitimate way to sell a phone system, but it belongs in the comparison, because a price you can’t leave isn’t the same product as a price you can.
Uniden Voice over Cloud and VOCPhone are priced identically, which is less surprising once you know they’re sister brands: $34.90 month to month, $28.30 on a twelve-month term. What is worth noticing is that they’re the cheapest seat on this table on both bases. Compare contract rates and they’re cheaper. Compare walk-away rates and they’re cheaper. There’s no basis on which choosing one of them costs you more per seat than the alternatives, which is a rare thing to be able to write about a comparison table.
The question that gets you the real number
Ask every provider: what is the month-to-month price, with no term, and what does it cost me to leave in month four? The answer to the second half is where the term hides. Some contracts bill out the remaining months in full.
The advertised Teams Phone price isn’t a phone system
This is the one that catches the most buyers, so it’s worth doing properly.
Microsoft Teams Phone is quoted almost everywhere at $12.60 to $15 per user per month. That number is real, and it buys Teams Phone Standard, which is the PBX layer. It can’t ring a phone number. Three things have to stack up before it can.
- A Microsoft 365 licence. Business Basic is $10.50, Business Standard $21.00, Business Premium $32.90. Most businesses already pay this, which is exactly why it gets left out of the comparison, but it’s a real per-user cost and the phone system doesn’t exist without it. Microsoft 365 E5 bundles Teams Phone, so E5 customers skip the next line.
- Teams Phone Standard, $15.00. The PBX itself: extensions, transfers, voicemail, call queues.
- Carriage. The part that connects to the actual telephone network, and the part with the most ways to get it wrong.
Three ways to buy the carriage
Microsoft Calling Plans. The simplest. Pay-as-you-go is $19.50, a domestic plan with 1,200 outbound minutes is $32.90, and domestic plus international is $50.90. The $32.90 bundle includes the Teams Phone licence, so it’s the cheapest path to a working phone and it’s the figure we put in the table.
Operator Connect. An Australian carrier provides the line and it appears inside the Teams admin centre. Telstra sits around $18.00 a line, on top of the $15.00 Teams Phone licence, so call it $33.00 all in.
Direct Routing. Your own SIP trunks into Teams through a session border controller. Cheapest per minute by a distance, and the only option with real flexibility, but the SBC runs $300 to $1,200 a month before you count channels or the person who configures it. Across 200 seats that amortises to single-digit dollars per user. Across ten seats it is $30 to $120 per user per month, which is why nobody small does it.
The Australian detail that decides it
Microsoft Calling Plans don’t carry 1300 or 1800 numbers in Australia. If your business has one, and a great many Australian businesses do, the cheap and simple path is closed to you. You need Operator Connect or Direct Routing, which means an Australian carrier in the picture anyway, which means you’re now paying Microsoft for a PBX and a carrier for the phone service, and running both.
So the honest range for Teams Phone is $32.90 a seat if you’ve no 1300 number and take Microsoft's calling plan, around $33.00 via Operator Connect, and genuinely cheaper than either at scale on Direct Routing. On top of that sits the Microsoft 365 licence, and the renewal calendar now has four dates on it instead of one.
None of which makes it a bad choice. For an organisation already standardised on Microsoft 365 E5, with an IT team, Teams Phone is an extremely sensible answer and the adoption cost is close to zero. It’s just not a $15 phone system, and anyone selling it as one is comparing their PBX licence against somebody else's complete platform.
Zoom Phone reads cheaper than it is
Zoom Phone has a reputation as the budget option and the reputation is out of date, at least in Australia and at least without a contract. Month to month, the regional unlimited seat is $36.48, which puts it behind both Australian platforms rather than in front of them. There’s a cheaper twelve-month rate, and there’s a cheaper metered tier that people get quoted by accident and then discover is metered.
The product itself is good: the regional unlimited tier genuinely includes Australian domestic calling, the apps are fast and the admin console is sane. But it’s sold as an add-on to a Zoom Workplace licence, so it’s a second line on a bill rather than a phone system, and there’s no handset, no nbn and no Australian support desk behind it. If your team already lives in Zoom it’s worth a look. If it does not, you’re adding a vendor and paying more than you would for a platform that also sells you the phone on the desk.
The line items that move the number
Per-seat price is the headline and rarely the whole story. Four things reliably reshape a quote once you get past the first page.
Setup and porting
Some providers charge nothing for either. Others charge $65 per number ported and a setup fee per site. On a five-seat business with six numbers, that’s a few hundred dollars once. On a fifty-seat business with three sites and a number block, it’s a real amount of money and it belongs in the comparison.
Calls
An included-calls plan and a per-minute plan can look similar at the seat level and diverge wildly at the invoice. If your team spends real time on the phone, price both against your actual minutes from last quarter rather than against an estimate.
Inbound 1300 and 1800
These are charged to you, the business, per minute, and the rate depends on whether the caller is on a landline or a mobile. A 1300 number with heavy mobile inbound is a genuine cost centre. Get the per-minute mobile rate in writing.
Recording storage
Almost always tiered, almost never in the headline price, and it creeps. Ten hours is nothing for a five-person sales team. Work out your monthly recorded minutes and price the tier you’ll actually land in by month six.
Contract length is a price
Three of the ten providers in our table expect a three-year term for their quoted rate. That isn’t a detail, it’s the difference between a bad decision you can reverse in ninety days and one you live with until 2029. A slightly higher month-to-month rate is often the cheaper option once you price the risk of being wrong.
What we would actually do
Get three written quotes. Insist that each one includes the first invoice and the second invoice separately, because the first one has the setup and the second one has the truth. Ask what happens to the rate at renewal. And take the term length seriously, because the platform that fits five people doesn’t automatically fit the fifteen you might have by the end of it.
Microsoft figures are Australian list prices, ex GST, cross-checked against Australian Microsoft partners in September 2026. Direct Routing and Operator Connect costs vary by carrier and by seat count and are given as ranges for that reason. Dialpad, Zoom Phone, Aircall and GoTo Connect don’t publish Australian list prices, so those seats are converted from published US rates and should be treated as indicative; where we couldn’t verify a term rate we’ve said so rather than printed one. 8x8 publishes nothing at all. Confirm anything you’re about to sign against a written quote.
On all-in value the Australian pair at the top of our table are still not close to the rest. At $34.90 month to month, or $28.30 on a term, Uniden Voice over Cloud includes the calls, 40-plus call-flow features, AI on the standard plan, the handset range and the nbn service, for well under what the carriers and 8x8 charge and without the second and third line items that Teams Phone needs. VOCPhone matches it on price, adds a price-match guarantee, and is the one to put beside it if the phone is a sales tool. See the full pricing comparison.
The two that topped our 2026 scorecard
Uniden Voice over Cloud scored 95/100 at $34.90 per user per month with calls, AI agents and 40+ call-flow features included. VOCPhone scored 92/100 and is the one to shortlist if the phone is a sales tool.
Questions
What is a fair price per user for a business phone system in Australia?
Between $23 and $40 per user per month, ex GST, with calls included, buys a complete modern platform in 2026. Anything under $20 is a component rather than a system and you’ll buy the rest of it separately: Microsoft Teams Phone Standard at $15 is the clearest example, because it can’t make a call without a calling plan or a carrier behind it. Above $50 you should be getting something specific for the premium, such as an enterprise SLA or bundled carriage. Above $60 you’re paying for a brand.
Why is there such a big gap between providers?
Three reasons. The Australian challengers own their own platform and network, so no licence fee flows offshore. The carriers price voice as an attachment to a larger account rather than as a product competing on its own merits. And Microsoft and Zoom sell calling as an add-on to a subscription you already pay for, which is a different product at a different margin, and which is why their advertised numbers aren’t comparable to a complete platform.
What costs turn up that were not in the quote?
Setup, number porting, additional number blocks, call recording storage above the included hours, inbound 1300 and 1800 per-minute charges, and handsets. On Microsoft Teams Phone add the Microsoft 365 licence and, if you’ve a 1300 number, a session border controller and an Australian carrier as well. Ask for a worked first invoice and a worked second invoice, because they’re rarely the same.