Upfirst vs RingCentral: Which is best? (2025)

Both RingCentral and Upfirst offer AI receptionists that help businesses stop missing calls. But they come from very different starting points: Upfirst was built as a dedicated AI receptionist, while RingCentral is first and foremost a phone system, with AI answering layered on as an add-on.

I’ll try to be self-aware here: we make Upfirst, so I obviously have a perspective. But I also recognize where RingCentral is ahead. At the time of this writing, their analytics are more advanced than ours, and closing that gap is a top priority for our roadmap.

If you’re deciding between the two, the real differences come down to pricing, control, support, and how much you want your receptionist to actually do.

Pricing: per-call vs per-minute

Upfirst keeps pricing simple. The Starter plan is $24.95/month for 30 calls. Every plan includes the full feature set—call transfers, appointment scheduling, texting, spam blocking, and more. When you go over your plan, you’re charged per call ($1.50, $1, or $0.75 depending on tier). That means your costs scale in a predictable way as your business grows, and you can calculate exactly what an additional call will cost you.

RingCentral looks straightforward at first glance: $59/month for 100 minutes. But when I signed up, the invoice told a different story: a $39 AI receptionist license plus a $30 phone line, which came to $78.09 with taxes and fees. Once you use up your included minutes, you’ll pay $0.50 per minute. With the average call lasting three minutes, that’s only about 30–33 calls before overages begin.

This difference matters if you’re trying to budget. With Upfirst, you’re charged for calls. With RingCentral, you’re charged for minutes—plus the hidden phone line cost. If your calls run long, the per-minute model can get expensive quickly. If you just want clarity and predictability, Upfirst’s structure is easier to work with.

Support: easy chat vs phone tree

When I signed up for RingCentral, I couldn’t get into my account. To resolve it, I had to call support, navigate a long phone tree, and wait on hold. It was frustrating.

At Upfirst, we’ve tried to design the opposite experience. You can reach us by chat in seconds, and our whole team treats customer support as a first-class priority. It’s a small thing until you need it—but when you do, speed and simplicity matter.

Message taking: customizable vs generic

One of the most important jobs of a receptionist is gathering the right information from callers.

Upfirst gives you total control over what gets collected. You can tell the AI to always ask for name and phone number, then add specific questions depending on your business: accident date for a law firm, property address for a contractor, or pet details for a vet. All of this shows up in your call summaries so your team has the context they need before following up.

RingCentral doesn’t give you that same flexibility. You can set up a knowledge base and a greeting, but you can’t define structured fields or force the AI to collect certain details. As a result, messages tend to be more generic—fine if you only need callbacks, but limiting if your business requires detailed intake.

If you need more than “Jane called, please return her call,” Upfirst is the stronger option.

Call transfers: flexible vs limited

RingCentral lets you transfer calls based on name, which works fine if you have a small team.

Upfirst goes further: you can transfer based on name or based on rules. For example, you could say, “Transfer the call if they want a quote,” or “Transfer sales leads to Sarah, but service calls to Joe.” That way you’re not just routing calls—you’re routing them intelligently.

Scheduling: integrated vs link-only

For service businesses, a receptionist isn’t just about answering calls—it’s about getting appointments on the calendar.

Upfirst integrates directly with Google Calendar, Outlook, and Clio (with more integrations planned). That means the AI can actually check availability during the call and confirm a time, without you having to do a thing. If a client wants to reschedule, the AI can handle that too.

RingCentral, on the other hand, can only text the caller a scheduling link. The receptionist doesn’t know your calendar and can’t confirm availability. That puts the burden back on the customer to click the link, find a time, and finish the booking themselves.

The difference is real: with Upfirst, the booking is done by the time you see the call summary. With RingCentral, it’s another step you or your customer have to take later.

Notifications: granular vs basic

Every answering service notifies you when a call comes in, but how those notifications work makes a big difference in day-to-day use.

Upfirst gives you conditional rules. You can say, “Text me only if it’s an emergency, but email me every call summary,” or “Notify Amy for sales leads and Joe for service calls.” You can also send notifications to multiple people in different formats.

RingCentral is much more basic. You’ll get notified, but you can’t set conditions or route notifications differently depending on the caller or context.

If you like control and want to cut down on noise, Upfirst’s approach is more powerful. If you just want a single alert every time, RingCentral does the job.

Voices and languages: wide variety vs limited

How your receptionist sounds is part of how professional your business feels to customers.

Upfirst offers over 20 natural-sounding voices, ranging from friendly and casual to more formal. It also supports more than 90 languages, from Spanish and French to Russian, Italian, Bulgarian, and many more.

RingCentral gives you four voices. They’re serviceable, but there’s little variety if you want to tailor the tone. Language support is limited to English, Spanish, and French.

For businesses that need to project a specific style—or that serve a diverse customer base—Upfirst’s flexibility is a big advantage.

Spam and call filtering

Spam calls are a fact of life for small businesses, and they waste time and money if your receptionist treats them like real leads.

Upfirst includes built-in spam blocking and call filtering. That means obvious robocalls and junk numbers never reach you, and you’re not paying for notifications you don’t need.

RingCentral doesn’t bundle spam filtering into the AI receptionist feature. If you’re using their system, you’ll have to handle those calls another way.

For businesses that get a high volume of unwanted calls, this can be a deal-breaker.

Testing your receptionist: calls vs chat

When you’re setting up a new receptionist, testing is key. You want to see how it responds to different scenarios before real customers call in.

Upfirst makes this easy: you can place unlimited test calls without using up your plan. Want to see how it handles a complex intake? Just call in. Want to tweak your greeting? Test it again. There’s no penalty.

RingCentral offers a unique option: you can test by chat instead of calling. That’s useful if you’re in a quiet environment where you can’t make phone calls. But if you want to test real call flows, you’ll burn through your minutes quickly since test calls aren’t unlimited.

If you want unlimited real-world testing, Upfirst is more forgiving.

Ecosystem: receptionist vs phone system

This is where the biggest difference lies.

Upfirst is a dedicated AI receptionist. It doesn’t try to be your whole phone system—it just answers, qualifies, schedules, and routes calls. And because of that, you can use it with any phone provider. Many businesses even forward their RingCentral numbers into Upfirst to get the best of both worlds: a robust phone system plus a receptionist that can actually handle calls intelligently.

RingCentral is a full phone system first. If you need extensions for a large team, direct phone numbers, and voicemail boxes, that’s where it shines. The AI receptionist is an add-on, not the centerpiece, and that shows in the limited features.

If you’re choosing based on the strength of the AI receptionist itself, Upfirst is the stronger option. If your main priority is buying a unified phone system for a large team, RingCentral is the safer bet.

RingCentral vs Upfirst: Which should you choose?

If you mainly need a phone system and don’t plan to lean heavily on AI receptionist features, RingCentral is a convenient all-in-one solution.

If you want a dedicated AI receptionist—one that can customize scripts, take detailed messages, book directly into your calendar, notify the right people, and serve multilingual customers—Upfirst is the clear choice.

Both will stop you from missing calls. RingCentral may have an edge today with analytics, but Upfirst is designed from the ground up to be a smarter receptionist, and it’s improving quickly.

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