8×8 Review: X-Series Work VoIP Plans, Prices and Benefits

8×8 is one of the largest and most reputable business VoIP phone system providers, with over 2.5 million business users and customers like Netsuite and McDonalds using its Software-as-a-Service app for voice, chat, and video communication solutions.

Pairing industry-leading communication features with unlimited domestic and international calling, the ability to add as many users as you want (for a price), and real-time analytics, 8×8 has earned many fans. That includes us at Expert Market, with 8×8 being our top pick for unlimited calling and competing with RingCentral as our top-rated VoIP full-stop.

We’ve thoroughly tested the 8×8 platform and in this 8×8 review, we’ll discuss all its relative benefits and drawbacks we discovered. Plus, we take a look at 8×8’s pricing structure and what businesses 8×8’s app is best suited to from large multinationals to small businesses.

8×8 Review: Getting Started With 8×8

To get started with 8×8, you need to log in to its Application Panel using your user account. Here, you’ll find four core tools at your disposal.

• Admin Console: A selection of settings to manage your 8×8 service, including various user permissions and telephony features.
• Knowledge Base: Methods of troubleshooting and contacting customer support for help using 8×8 products.
• Analytics for 8×8 Work: A platform that allows you to dive into data dashboards and reporting tools based on the information from your 8×8 Work app.
• 8×8 Work: The unified communication app for voice, SMS/MMS, video conferencing, team chat and fax capabilities. You can either use it in a web browser via the Application Panel, download the 8×8 Work app onto your laptop/PC or download the mobile application onto your smartphone. Previously, it was called the X-Series, though it does retain the X-branding in the form of its different plan names: X2, X4, X6 and X8

8×8 Review: What Do You Get With 8×8?

Once logged into 8×8, there are many facets to its eXperience Communications Platform to get to grips with, some of which are included in its lowest-cost plans ideal for smaller businesses and others that are add-ons, designed for larger-scale organisations.

Primarily, all businesses will be using the 8×8 Work application and this is where we’ll be focusing our review, starting with its VoIP Cloud Phone System features for call management and staff training. We’ll then dive into its unified communication features for internal staff comms and then …

VoIP Cloud Phone System

The eXperience Communications Platform, via the 8×8 Work app, provides a powerful and modern interface that we found incredibly easy to use as a phone system. Designed to enable better inter-business communication and customer experience, it has plenty of call management and training features to enable just that.

The system’s key features include:

• Unlimited calling: Unlimited calling, SMS, and fax, supporting calls to and from up to 48 countries. We found calling remained crisp, even across international numbers.
• Easy call handling: Efficiently process high volumes of calls with the operator switchboard. Each user can use call forwarding, transfer, waiting, and parking to manage their calls appropriately. Set up ring groups and call queues to make sure calls aren’t missed – and if they are, voicemails can be accessed via your desk phone, computer, or smartphone.

• Advanced training features: 8×8 provides call recording and storage, call monitoring and, most noteworthy of the lot, call whisper and call barge features. These latter two tools allow managers to join ongoing calls as participants or communicate discreetly with team members during live calls. Of the VoIP providers we’ve tested, only matched by RingCentral Premium and Vonage Max could also offer these two features.
• Enhanced customer experience: Multilevel auto attendant directs your callers to the right place, while on-hold music keeps them entertained.
• Accessible hybrid or remote working: your team can work from anywhere with 8×8’s feature-rich mobile and desktop apps on their devices.
• Comprehensive analytics: Select from reporting options to get insights into the metrics that matter to you. The performance and usage information dashboards are intuitive to use, offering large detailed data to assess employee and company-wide calling over time. This is all found in the reporting section of 8×8’s Application panel, as seen below, and you can even export the data if needed.

• Simple administration: access user provisioning, system configuration, and management settings via a single interface.
• Secure voice: industry standard TLS/SRTP encryption ensures that your calls remain private.

Of course, it’s worth remembering that the full breadth of these features won’t be available on every 8×8 eXperience package. The sophistication of your system will depend on which pricing tier you plump for.

Internal Communication Tools

8×8 eXperience also includes unified communications functions – most notably video conferencing and team chat.

Video conferencing

Compared to other systems, 8×8 eXperience offers a super generous video conferencing package. You can run as many HD video calls as you need and, depending on the price plan you choose, invite up to 500 participants. In comparison, lots of other providers limit you to a certain number of video calls per month, and/or cap your calls at around 250 participants.

The key features of 8×8’s video conferencing include:

• Moderation controls including meeting lock,
• The ability to record meetings and save them to the cloud
• Access via desktop and mobile
• The ability to invite people from outside the business using a browser link
• Meeting screens that can be customised with your own branding
• Secure end-to-end encryption

Team chat

8×8’s team chat platform comes with the features you’d expect from a modern messaging platform, including:

• One-to-one instant messaging
• Private, invite-only, and public group chat rooms
• Document and file sharing in one-to-one chats and group chats
• One-click voice or video calls
• Mobile access via the 8×8 Work app

8×8’s team chat also comes with a few business-minded features that you may not find on general consumer chat tools:

• Integration with your global directory to automatically add all your staff
• Integration with other popular chat platforms, such as Slack and Skype
• The ability to reply to messages directly from your smartphone notification screen, without having to open the app

Customer Support

When we tested 8×8’s customer support options, we were thoroughly impressed at their extent. Offering complete coverage including 24/7 live support, a user forum, and a thorough knowledge base, we think it’s an outstanding range of options to get help when you need it.

Especially via its quick access to live support via chat and phone, where we had minimal wait time to get talking to an agent. Equally, using its helpful guidance, we could sort out any problems ourselves.

Hardware via 8×8 or Third-party

8×8 has 64 pieces of hardware it can provide its customers directly, including conference phones, cordless phones, desk phones, headsets and standard ATAS VoIP adapters. These would need to be purchased as either a one-time payment or as part of a financing program over a 24 to 60-month contract. To get an exact quote, you’ll need to contact 8×8’s sales team directly.

However, should you already have existing phone hardware, our testing found that 8×8 is highly compatible with third-party hardware too. In other words, you should be able to integrate it with whatever models you have at the moment. This will inevitably vary depending on the age and type of equipment you have, so do check 8×8’s compatible phones list for more details.

Software Integrations

8×8 is a strong option for software integrations, supporting interplay between at least 68 applications at the time of writing, including CRMs, external video conferencing and via 8×8’s iOS/Android apps. You can read the full list on 8×8’s website but here are a few software worth pointing out:

• CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho and more
• Microsoft Teams
• Google Workspace
• Slack

Despite still scoring highly during our testing in this area, 8×8 does fall slightly short compared to RingCentral Premium. That’s down to 8×8 lacking live chat integration, such as with applications like WhatsApp, which could impact businesses that rely on this form of communication integration

8×8 Review: Other Tools

While the features described above are 8×8’s core functionality, there is another software that 8×8 provides besides its Work platform, which could be even more powerful depending on your requirements.

Contact Centre Software

8×8’s unique Call Centre Software (CCS) simultaneously increases business productivity and enhances the customer experience. It is essentially a specialised suite of tools for handling customer interactions and, as the name implies, contact centre operations, beyond those available in 8×8’s Work application.

Key features include:

• Multi-channel compatibility – the web is the first point of contact for most customers. 8×8’s CCS allows you to easily integrate telephony, email and web chat channels to streamline the sales process and boost conversion
• Smart routing – skills-based routing matches callers with the agent who can best meet their needs. Qued callback allows waiting callers to opt-out of the queue without losing their place in line
• Reporting and monitoring – spot trends and monitor employee performance against key metrics
• Agent tools – arm yourself with important customer information before answering calls to provide a personalised service. Centralise knowledge with an FAQ knowledge base
• CRM integration – CCS is compatible with a number of major CRM platforms, including Zendesk, NetSuite and Salesforce
• Disaster recovery – duplicate your business operations and continue taking calls in the event of natural disaster, regional pandemic, or human-error-related outage

8×8 Review: How Much Does 8×8 Cost?

While exact pricing is difficult to judge since its prices are kept private, 8×8’s starter packages are reasonably priced from our experience.

8×8 offers several plans overall – namely, Express, X2, X4, X6 and X8 – with our favourite being for most businesses being its X4 plan. It balances cost (around £35/mth per user from our testing) with a wide range of communication features from SMS and MMS to audio/video conferencing for up to 500 participants and even internet fax.

However, it has to be said that the X6 and X8 packages can be expensive. These packages do come with extensive contact and call centre features, so you do get plenty of bang for your buck.

Despite 8×8’s strengths, each plan’s pricing is not clear – you’ll need to contact 8×8’s sales team directly to get a quote for your business – and potentially high from our experience, which may be a consideration for smaller businesses or startups.

Let’s take a look at its packages and prices from our experience. These prices are rough estimates and will inevitably vary in actuality, given that 8×8 now employs a bespoke pricing structure.

So, how do these figures compare to the pricing offered by 8×8’s competitors? Let’s compare:

As you can see, 8×8 eXperience is not the cheapest VoIP phone system out there. However, it is a very comprehensive system that offers a generous array of features that will empower you to scale up your business.

8×8 Review: What Businesses Is 8×8 Best Suited To?

To help summarise what businesses we think 8×8 could be most useful for, we’ve created the below table. Have a read through it to see if your organisation is a contender.

How We Reviewed 8×8