Aptela ushers in a high level of service and support as it clears the hump to round out our top five offerings for business VoIP. This company focuses on a different type of service with a stronger focus on providing their customers with positive experiences. We were quite impressed with this service as a whole and the drastic differences it had from our lower-ranked companies.
Aptela hosts their services, allowing your data and management to reside in the cloud. This improves the security of the overall process as well as the convenience; you won’t have to worry about your VoIP service going down with local outages, nor will you have to manage an old, analog PBX on site.
On Aptela’s website they strive to educate prospective customers in the benefits of choosing business VoIP services rather than traditional landlines. With the standard unlimited VoIP plan, you can get unlimited minutes for nationwide and long-distance calling. The pricing for this extensive plan is quite competitive. Unfortunately, unlimited extensions are not offered as part of any of Aptela's packages, so you will have to pay an additional monthly fee for each user you wish to add. Aptela defines a “user” as any physical device that is on the receiving end of the VoIP service, including phones, fax machines and computers.
Aptela provides many great features, but they (rightfully) boast the most about the perks offered through their hosted services. These hosted services make it easier than ever to add new employees to your plan or move your personnel to different offices. The layout of the management system enables you to more easily predict and accommodate growth externally and internally. Additionally, because the service is hosted by the provider, keeping your phone system technologically up to date is their responsibility, and you gain all the benefits of hands-off maintenance.
A business VoIP service can't be all things to all people. Each has unique features, and each lacks features that others offer. Aptela is no different, and they lack toll free numbers and a mobile app interface. Although they offer almost every other standard feature, in addition to a few unique ones, the lack of these features leaves a gaping hole in their product offering.
Like any VoIP service, Aptela’s goal is to make using their product as easy as possible. To that end, the VoIP unlimited plan gives you access to training webinars on how to improve the communication infrastructure of your company as well as new uses for your VoIP services you may not have thought of. In addition to these video tutorials, you can also search through an extensive knowledge base with detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to complete specific tasks. We felt the support portal for users was quite effective and useful. Not only were guides easy to find, but they were also easy to understand and follow.
Aptela offers a competitive series of features, services and pricing which helped earn their rank on our TopTenREVIEWS lineup. The company focuses strongly on the level of support they offer, and this can ultimately influence your success in using a business VoIP service. Despite this strong, customer-based stance, the services are not as comprehensive as some of the higher-ranked products we looked at.
