RingCentral
According to RingCentral, their service is designed to ‘Free your teams to connect on one global platform—with the devices they love.’
OnRelay
OnRelay is a mobile business phone system focused on advanced cellular call management for calls to and from your main company number.
Background
Similarly to OnRelay, RingCentral was a pioneer in converging fixed and mobile business phone systems utilizing cloud based services. RingCentral started out with a call forwarding service that allowed any type phone to receive calls to a company phone number. OnRelay started out mobilizing large enterprise PBX systems from the likes of Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens using early smartphones from Blackberry, Microsoft and Nokia.
Any Device vs Mobile First
RingCentral has since done well staying true to their ‘any device’ vision. They have become a leader in unified communications where their business phone service can be seamlessly accessed from any type device. OnRelay vision to the contrary remains ‘mobile-first’ entirely focused on delivering a mobile business phone system where a smartphone app is the only device a user needs to access for an advanced business phone service. It follows that RingCentral has more advanced integration with other computer applications and services than OnRelay, whereas OnRelay has more advanced functionality for call distribution within mobile teams such as queues, parallel ring groups and live operator functionality.
VoIP App vs Cell Minutes
The underlying mobile technologies used by RingCentral and OnRelay for wireless access are also very different. Over cell networks, OnRelay relies on standard wireless carrier cell minutes, whereas RingCentral uses the wireless carrier data plan with its proprietary VoIP app. Both solutions support WiFi calls, albeit again OnRelay uses the standard smartphone WiFi calling feature, whereas RingCentral naturally uses its proprietary VoIP app with WiFI as well. Over public cell networks, OnRelay considers standard wireless voice minutes as superior to VoIP for delivering business calls with respect to voice quality, coverage and call setup reliability. A distinction most people that have struggled to use VoIP apps for important calls while e.g. driving a car can relate to. More details about these important distinctions here.
Feature Comparison
Please find a high level comparison of respective mobile app business call features below:
| RingCentral | OnRelay | |
|---|---|---|
| Main Company Numbers | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi Site Systems | ✓ | ✓ |
| Global Service | ✓ | ✓ |
| Direct Public Numbers (DIDs) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Advanced Visual Voice Mail | ✓ | ✓ |
| Auto Attendants | ✓ | ✓ |
| Working Hours | ✓ | ✓ |
| Do Not Disturb | ✓ | ✓ |
| Text Messaging | ✓ | ✓ |
| Group Instant Messaging | ✓ | ✓ |
| Extension Dialing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Call Transfer | ✓ | ✓ |
| Overflow Call Routing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Call Queues | ✓ | ✓ |
| Wireless Video Call | ✓ | |
| Who Answered Queue Call | ✓ | |
| Parallel Ring Groups | ✓ | |
| Live Operator / Receptionist | ✓ | |
| Device Ring Control (Both or Cell or Landline) | ✓ | |
| Extension Forwarding | ✓ | |
| Freetext Shared Presence | ✓ | |
| Group Sign In / Out | ✓ | |
| Called Group Display | ✓ | |
| Shared Group Voice Mail | ✓ | |
| Shared Company Voice Mail | ✓ | |
| Carrier Voice Mail Detection | ✓ | |
| Standard Carrier WiFi Calls | ✓ | |
| Supervisor Colleague Availability Override | ✓ | |
| Supervisor Disable Colleague | ✓ |