Google Voice for business: Features, pros and cons, pricing, and FAQs

If you already use the Google Voice consumer plan, you may be interested in it for your small business. However, Google Voice’s free plan wasn’t made for businesses. You’ll have to upgrade to Google Voice for business, a paid plan, to use it effectively.

This is a comprehensive guide on what Google Voice for business is, including:

• How it works
• The pros and cons
• How it differs from Google Voice for personal use

We’ll also provide a comparison chart for Google Voice’s free and business plans. If you decide the business plan isn’t the right fit for you and your business, we’ll offer a Google Voice alternative that may be better suited to your needs.

Google Voice for business features, plans, and pricing

Google Voice for Google Workspace is a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone service that allows you to make and receive business-related calls and messages. This means it uses your internet connection to transmit calls and messages.

To use Google Voice, you need a smartphone, tablet, or computer with internet access. It works via WiFi or a data plan. There are two ways to get a business number through Google Voice for business: get a Google phone number or port your existing number. You can then forward calls from that number to any other phone number you own — whether it’s your personal cell phone number, office landline, or home phone. Given you have to link Google Voice to another number, you’ll need to keep your existing service on top of paying for Google Voice and Google Workspace.

Key features

The basic Google Voice plan for business ($10 per user per month) comes with the following features:

• Calls to the US: You can make unlimited calls and texts in the US. But if you’re outside the US, you won’t be able to text at all. Plus, if you send too many texts within a short period of time, Google Voice may restrict you from sending more.
• Call forwarding: You shouldn’t be using your personal cell phone number for your business for many reasons — one being the complete lack of privacy. Google Voice allows your business phone number to be forwarded to your cell phone with its VoIP call forwarding service.
• Set business hours: You can also configure Google Voice for business so your phone only rings during specific hours. That means you can send callers straight to voicemail so you and your team don’t get calls through the night.
• Numbers outside your service area: If you serve clients in a specific area but don’t have a local phone number for that region, you can use Google Voice for business to get a local phone number in that state or city. However, you can’t get or port toll-free numbers at all.
• Voicemail transcripts: If you can’t get to the phone before it stops ringing, Google Voice transcribes the caller’s voicemail for you to read later. Keep in mind these don’t show up under the ‘phone call tab’ — Google Voice separates calls, texts, and messages into different inboxes, making it more difficult to catch up on conversations.

Other features are available on more expensive plans. If you upgrade to the next highest tier ($20 per user per month), you can access:

• On-demand call recording
• Auto-attendants to answer and route calls automatically to the appropriate team member or department
• Desk phone compatibility
• eDiscovery (search and export your saved communications data)
• Ring groups so your team can share responsibility for incoming calls by ringing multiple numbers simultaneously or in sequences

Google Voice for business pricing 

Google Voice for business has two cost considerations: the plan itself and the Google Workspace subscription.

Google Workspace costs at least $7 per user per month, and you must be an active subscriber before you can use Google Voice.

A Google Voice plan starts at $10 per user per month. However, you’ll have to pay more if you can’t access the features you need on the basic plan.

Here’s a quick glimpse of all three Google Voice pricing plans:

• Starter: $10 per user per month (max of 10 users) to get or port a local phone number and make calls and texts in the US
• Standard: $20 per user per month for ‘unlimited’ users (max of 50 before paying extra) and to unlock auto-attendants and on-demand call recording
• Premier: $30 per user per month for ‘unlimited’ users (max of 50 before paying extra) and to access automatic call recording and the ability to export your Voice data to BigQuery

And here’s a side-by-side comparison:

How to set up Google Voice for business

Setting up Google Voice for business is a straightforward process that involves adding Google Voice to your Google Workspace account and configuring your phone settings. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Add the Google Workspace app. If you don’t already have a Google Workspace account, go to the Google Workspace website and sign up for one.
2. Add Voice. In the Google Workspace admin console, go to Apps, Google Workspace, Google Voice, and click to enable it for your organization. Ensure you assign Google Voice licenses to the users who will need access. You can do this under Billing,  Subscriptions, and Google Voice.
3. Select a subscription. Choose a plan (Starter, Standard, or Premier) and purchase the subscription. You’ll be charged per user per month. For example, if you have six users, you’re charged $60 each month on the Starter plan (plus at least $42 per month for Google Workspace).
4. Configure phone numbers. Click on Get Started in the admin console and set up users’ locations to assign local numbers and comply with regulations. Then assign numbers to users and port a number if needed.
5. Set up call routing and auto attendants. In Google Voice settings, set up ring groups and auto attendants to direct inbound calls to the right rep or department.

How to get a Google phone number for business in 5 steps

Getting a Google phone number for business is more complex than getting one for personal use. Business owners need to sign up and pay for two different services — Google Workspace and Google Voice — and navigate the many limitations of the Google Voice app.

Here’s how to get a new number with Google Voice.

1. Sign up for a Google Workspace account.
2. Choose a Google Voice business plan.
3. Select a Google phone number for business.
4. Verify an existing phone number.
5. Sign in to the Google Voice app.

If you’re looking for a simpler setup with a more business-friendly phone solution, here’s how you can get a phone number with OpenPhone.

How to get a business phone number with OpenPhone

Getting a Google phone number for business isn’t an intuitive process. But setting up a business phone number with OpenPhone is — and you can rest assured you’re getting the phone features your company needs to work efficiently.

Follow these steps to get your new number fast:

1. 1. Head to the signup page to try OpenPhone for free with a seven-day trial.
   2. Enter your email address and tap Continue. You’ll receive a six-digit code in your email to enter into the following screen.
   3. Receive an automatically assigned number or tap Pick a different number to choose a local US, Canadian, or toll-free number.
   4. Verify your account with an existing phone number.
   5. Enter your credit card information. You won’t be charged until day seven of your free trial and can cancel anytime. (A $1 hold will be made on your card. This temporary hold is a security check during our signup process. This is not an actual charge, and you will see the $1 hold removed from your card within a few days.)

Pros and cons of using Google Voice for business

Still on the fence about whether you should use Google Voice? Here are some key pros and cons to consider:

Pros

• Free calls to the US
• Split responsibility for incoming calls with ring groups
• Free number porting
• Google Workspace app integrations

Cons

• One Google Voice phone number per user
• Google Workspace purchase required
• No desktop app 
• Limited third-party integrations
• No team collaboration features
• Lack of automations
• No room for growing businesses
• Texting unavailable outside the US
• More difficult to catch up on conversations
• Call recording isn’t available on the base plan

Google Voice pros

Google Voice is a VoIP solution with an affordable pricing model. It’s also heavily advertised online, which is why it’s one of the first virtual phone service providers small business owners consider.

There are four clear pros to using Google Voice for business:

1. Free calls to the US

Google Voice for business lets you make unlimited outbound calls to contacts in the US. However, you can’t make unlimited calls to nearby countries like Canada unless you have a US or Canadian number. You also can’t use toll-free numbers with Google Voice for your business, even if you already own them.

2. Split responsibility for incoming calls with ring groups

Since Google Voice for business lets you forward calls to other devices, you can share responsibility with your team to answer incoming calls, depending on individual availability. Keep in mind, Google Voice’s ring groups feature is only available on the second tier or higher ($20 per user per month). 

3. Free number porting

You can port existing local numbers into Google Voice for free. Just keep in mind you can’t port toll-free numbers.

Plus, you can’t move a number from one Google Workspace account to another. You also can’t port numbers associated with consumer Gmail addresses, mobile numbers in the EU, or numbers outside the Google Voice coverage area.

4. Workspace app integrations

Google Voice for business integrates with other Google apps, including Google Calendar, Google Meet, Google Drive, and Gmail. You can’t integrate with other apps in your tech stack at all.

Google Voice cons

Google Voice for business provides a few helpful business features for growing brands. Unfortunately, they come with several limitations that may prevent you from keeping team members on the same page or scaling up. 

Let’s take a look at the cons of Google Voice for business:

1. One Google Voice phone number per user 

Your Google Voice account can only have one phone number. If you need multiple phone numbers for every member of your team (e.g., if you serve multiple states and want to appear local to various clients), you should choose a Google Voice alternative.

Plus, Google Voice for business isn’t available worldwide. Google Voice for Google Workspace is only available in:

• Belgium
• Canada
• Denmark
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Portugal
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• UK
• US (but not US territories)
  

If you’re based outside these countries and want a US number (or Canadian), OpenPhone is available to you.

2. Google Workspace purchase required 

As mentioned, you must have a Google Workspace account to use Google Voice for business. This will add an additional $7 per month to your plan (at a minimum). It may also come with features your business doesn’t need, like video attendance tracking or in-domain live streaming.

3. No desktop app 

Google Voice provides mobile and web-based apps that can be used on phones, laptops, and tablets. However, it doesn’t provide desktop apps that would let you easily switch between tools to take incoming calls.

Fortunately, this isn’t all that common. Google Voice is one of the few virtual phone systems that doesn’t offer desktop apps — more modern alternatives like OpenPhone do.

4. Limited third-party integrations

Google Voice only integrates with other Google Workspace apps, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google Meet (formerly Google Hangouts). Your phone system won’t integrate with other tools, which means you can’t automatically log call activity under the relevant contact in your CRM systems like HubSpot or connect with other third-party apps like Zapier and Slack. You also won’t be able to build a custom workaround since there’s no Google Voice API.

5. No team collaboration features

You can’t easily message your teammates using Google Voice. Instead, you have to switch to another app — Google Chat — to enable team messaging.

Plus, Google Voice for business doesn’t let coworkers team up on a conversation. You can’t use internal threads and mentions to tag people to solve problems together or easily delegate tasks.

If you want to share responsibility for incoming calls, you’ll need to upgrade to the Standard plan ($20 per user per month) to unlock ring groups. Otherwise, you’ll need to manually forward incoming calls to the owned phone numbers of other team members.

6. Lack of automations

You can’t save time on repeat messages with Google Voice for business. For example, you won’t have a way to use templates, which are pre-crafted messages that can help you answer common FAQs. Instead, you’ll have to draft responses for each customer message, which will waste time and increase your workload.

Google Voice also doesn’t offer auto-replies, making it difficult to set expectations with your customers when your team is off or temporarily unavailable. It also doesn’t let you schedule texts in advance, a feature that helps businesses stay TCPA compliant. 

Bottom line: Having the right automatic text responses in place can save you hours of work every week, but Google Voice makes that impossible. 

7. Makes it difficult for your business to scale

Google Voice’s starting plan lets you have a max of 10 users. If you need to add more, you’ll be forced to upgrade to the second tier. Even then, there’s no such thing as ‘free’ unlimited users. Adding more than 50 users requires an upfront payment to increase your number of licenses.

This could stunt your growing team and double (or even triple) your phone service costs.

​8. Texting unavailable outside the US

Google Voice’s text messages are only available to US customers.

Plus, due to the lack of integrations with Google Voice, you can’t automate specific touchpoints, such as sending someone a welcome text when they fill out a form on your website or book an appointment. Sending too many manual texts could get your bandwidth throttled or even suspended entirely. 

9. More difficult to catch up on conversations

All of your customers’ conversation histories in Google Voice, including calls, texts, and voice messages, live in separate inboxes. This means there’s no way to review all of a customer’s interactions with your brand in the same place. If your team needs to review communication, it can be far more time-consuming to get up to speed. And since Google Voice’s shared numbers don’t support texting, it’s even more difficult for your team to see the full context of customer conversations.

10. Call recording isn’t available on the base plan

Want to record calls on the base plan? Google Voice’s call recording feature is only available if you upgrade to the Standard plan, which costs $27 per user per month, including the Google Workspace subscription. Even worse, automatic call recording is only available on the highest tier plan.

11. No ways to save time following up after calls

While most modern phone systems are adding AI to help teams work faster, Google Voice is being left behind. You won’t get AI transcriptions or summaries to help your team quickly review what happened on a call without listening to the whole recording. It doesn’t offer AI call tags, so you can’t automatically label calls with helpful context like “Billing issue” or “Feedback.” 

Plus, there’s no AI agent to answer calls, collect important customer information, or log summaries in your CRM when your team is unavailable. That means more manual work — and a higher risk of missing details about your customers when it’s time to follow up.

Google Voice personal vs Google Voice for business — what’s the difference? 

Google Voice for business (also known as Google Voice for Google Workspace) is different from a Google Voice personal plan. While a Google Voice personal plan is free, it has limited features, isn’t fit for teams, isn’t available outside the US, and doesn’t allow you to have more than one Google number. You can access a secondary phone number for calling, texting, and voicemail — that’s it. It doesn’t offer any productivity or team collaboration features at all.

Unlike the consumer plan, Google Voice for business is a paid commitment that charges for every user. Once you subscribe to Google Workspace and Google Voice, you can access upgraded features for business use, like call transferring, automated attendants, and integrations with Google Calendar and Google Meet. 

Rather just read the Cliff Notes? Here’s a comparison chart between Google Voice’s business vs personal plans:

	Google Voice for Business	Google Voice for Personal
Available outside the US	️	❌
Multiple phone numbers	️	❌
SMS and MMS	US only	Personal use only (no group chats over seven people)
Unlimited calls in the US and Canada	US and Canadian numbers only	❌
Maximum number of users	10 to unlimited	1
Cost	Starts at $17 per user per month (including Google Workspace)	Starts at $0 per user per month
Porting	Free	$20 to port in and $3 to port out
Ring groups	Requires upgrade	❌
Integrations	Google apps only	❌
Separate business and personal contacts	️	❌
Voicemail transcripts	️	❌

What’s the best alternative to Google Voice? Say ‘hello’ to OpenPhone

Google Voice for business provides some basic tools for business communications. But as you can see, it doesn’t provide much room to grow.

Just to get started, you’ll need to jump through quite a few hoops. Plus, the platform itself hinders team collaboration and is better suited to smaller team use. Even if you want to connect your team to one number, you won’t have access to external integrations beyond Google Workspace apps.

That’s why hundreds of users have ported their numbers from Google Voice for business to OpenPhone.

OpenPhone is the modern business phone system built for small businesses and growing teams. Our mission is to help small businesses build meaningful customer relationships effortlessly and, in turn, cultivate better working relationships.

Here’s what our users love about OpenPhone and why they made the switch:

• Easily add new reps, locations, and departments with multiple phone numbers: Every new user on your plan comes with one free local, Canadian, or toll-free phone number. Unlike Google Voice, you can port any existing toll-free numbers as well as local numbers. You can also get as many new phone numbers across multiple area codes as your team needs as you expand. 
• Review calls quickly with AI transcriptions and summaries: OpenPhone can provide AI-generated transcripts and summaries of every call. This helps your team quickly get up to speed on customer conversations without having to listen to lengthy call recordings.
• Help callers reach the right person faster with phone menus: You can use OpenPhone’s IVR to help callers reach specific team members or departments, depending on their needs. Customers can dial from their keypad or use voice commands to select specific phone menu options. For example, if you map number one to your sales department, callers can say ‘Sales’ or press one to navigate to the right location.
• Keep call and message data wherever you need it with third-party integrations: Give your team more context and automate repetitive tasks. Unlike Google Voice, you can integrate with apps outside of Google Workspace. In addition to Zapier (which offers 7,000+ integrations) and the OpenPhone API, OpenPhone allows you to connect with platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack, and Gong.
• Always keep customer conversations easily available with call recording: With a single click, you can record any call and store it indefinitely. Or on our Premium plan, you can automatically record all calls associated with any OpenPhone number.
• Save time with texting automations: OpenPhone speeds up customer interactions with built-in text automations on local and toll-free numbers. For example, you can instantly respond to common questions with saved snippets. Heading out of the office? Use auto-replies to set expectations about your hours and when you’ll be back. You can also schedule text messages in advance so you can better reach customers in different time zones.
• Collaborate as a team to solve customer issues with shared phone numbers: You can invite multiple team members to a single OpenPhone business phone number and work together from a shared inbox. This way, you can all team up to respond to customer calls and messages at the same time. Plus, all texts, calls, and messages associated with a specific number are in one box so anyone on your team can continue the conversation.
• Never miss a call with Sona, your AI agent: Instead of sending callers to a dead-end voicemail where they don’t get answers, Sona can handle customer calls 24/7. It uses a custom greeting, asks for important information, and answers common questions like your business hours or how to book an appointment. That way, callers get the help they need, even when your team’s off the clock.

Our customers also love our reliable customer support teams, which are available to you right from the start — no upgrades required.

Check out what some former Google Voice customers had to say about making the switch from Google Voice to OpenPhone:

“I decided it was worth paying a small amount for a more business-oriented solution. Google has no real-time help available, only a bunch of previously asked questions with answers. I was sick of searching the internet for a way to fix problems with Google Voice.”

“I am porting away [from Google Voice] because we get too many dropped calls, poor connections and are unable to have multiple greetings (after hours).”

“The main reason for switching is to allow more than one person to pick up calls on their mobile devices and respond to voice mail or text messages. Google only allows one mobile number to be tied to a Google Voice account.”

“I run a law office specializing in family law. We switched from Google Voice to OpenPhone, and I recommend OpenPhone to other law firms above all other phone platforms. In our tech stack, it is one of the most important items.” – Reddit

So, how much is OpenPhone? Plans start at just $15 per user per month.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of how OpenPhone measures up against Google Voice for business:

​Switch from Google Voice for business to OpenPhone

Google Voice is an affordable VoIP service for small businesses. Unfortunately, the setup is rather rigorous, it hinders team collaboration, and it lacks external integrations.

OpenPhone is the Google Voice alternative that’s easy to set up, strengthens team and client communication, and offers thousands of integrations through Zapier and Make. Plus, OpenPhone offers a number of advanced features Google Voice does not, such as auto-replies, snippets, and shared phone numbers.

Ready to make the switch from Google Voice for business to OpenPhone? Sign up for an OpenPhone business phone number and get a seven-day free trial today.

FAQs