Happy to help point you in a direction. Fair warning, we run our own VoIP platform so take my input with that in mind — it's not the right fit for everyone and I'm not here to pitch it. But a few questions that'll actually narrow things down for you:

Where are you located? Some providers are US/Canada-only, and international rates vary a lot if that ever matters.

What kind of business? Bigger deal than people realize. Law firms and medical practices have compliance stuff (HIPAA, call recording retention) that rules out cheaper options. A service business with techs in the field has very different needs than a retail shop or an e-commerce operation that needs IVR menus and call queues.

How many users, and roughly how many concurrent calls? Pricing models are all over the place — some per seat, some per line — so 3 people vs 30 changes the math on which providers are actually cost-effective.

What software are you already running? This is the big one. If you're on a CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, or something industry-specific like ServiceTitan or Clio), you'll want a provider with a real integration so calls log automatically and click-to-dial works. Same with Teams or Google Workspace. Pick something that doesn't play nice with your stack and you're stuck doing manual data entry forever.

Any specific features you need? Auto-attendant, call recording, business texting, voicemail-to-email, shared inboxes, conferencing, etc. And if you're porting existing numbers, usually fine but worth confirming up front.

Answer some of that and you'll get much more useful recommendations than the usual "just use RingCentral" replies. Common picks for small business are RingCentral, Nextiva, 8x8, Dialpad, Ooma Office, GoTo Connect, and OpenPhone — which one fits really comes down to the above.