Nextiva vs 8x8 (2026): the transparent price versus the quote

Put Nextiva and 8x8 side by side and the first thing you notice has nothing to do with call quality or feature checklists. It is that only one of them will tell you what it costs. Nextiva publishes a clean three-tier price list that anyone can read in ten seconds. 8x8 took its per-user prices off the public web in late 2023 and now runs everything through a sales quote. That single decision shapes the entire comparison, because it changes how you buy, how fast you can move, and how much leverage you have at the table. We think it also tells you something honest about who each company is chasing.

We are not going to pretend we can quote you an exact 8x8 seat price, because 8x8 itself will not put one on a page, and every dollar figure floating around review blogs is a customer's leaked invoice from a deal we cannot see the terms of. So this comparison does something a little different from most head-to-heads. For Nextiva we use the real, current tier prices and pick apart what each one gates. For 8x8 we compare on the things it will actually commit to in writing: its feature bundles, its international calling reach, its video ceiling, its contact-center depth, and its independent review scores. Where we mention an 8x8 number we flag it as a reported estimate, never a rate. Everything here reflects June 2026 pricing and specs, and since this category reprices constantly, treat every figure as a checkpoint to confirm rather than a promise.

How we compared

We priced every plan tier we could get a firm number on, opened the desktop and mobile apps on both platforms, sat through the onboarding flows, and read the fine print that vendors bury under the headline rate. For Nextiva that meant pulling live per-seat prices straight off its pricing page and checking exactly which features switch on at each step. For 8x8, where there is no public price sheet, it meant reading the feature bundles it does describe, cross-checking its international and contact-center claims, and being upfront that any seat cost is a reported estimate rather than a quote we obtained. We did not accept marketing gloss as fact, and we did not invent a single 8x8 dollar amount to make the tables look tidy. You can read the full method behind our scoring on our how we test page.

At a glance

Here is the fast scan before we get into each dimension. Nextiva figures are the published per-user annual rate as of June 2026. 8x8 figures are quote-only unless marked as a reported estimate from secondary sources, which you should verify against a live quote.

Pricing & total cost

This is the section where the two providers stop resembling each other. Let us take the side we can actually price first.

Nextiva runs three tiers, and it leads with the annual-commitment rate on every one. Core is $15 per user per month, Engage is $25, and Scale is $75. Core is the phone system most small teams picture: inbound and outbound voice, 100 SMS per user each month, video meetings with screen share, call routing, team chat, and the mobile app. Engage is the step where Nextiva starts becoming a customer-communication platform rather than just phones. It layers in customer SMS at roughly 500 messages per user, toll-free numbers with up to 2,000 toll-free minutes a month, advanced reporting, an inbound call center, and live chat with a chatbot. Scale is the full customer-experience build: blended inbound and outbound, AI transcription and summaries, skills-based routing, journey orchestration, and around 10,000 toll-free minutes.

Two caveats sit on that clean price sheet, and you should know both before you get excited about the $15. The Core rate is written for new small-business customers with 1 to 100 employees on a term of 12 months or longer, so it is not a walk-up month-to-month number. And the leap from Engage at $25 to Scale at $75 is a real cliff. There is no gentle $40 or $50 middle rung for a team that wants a bit of AI or a touch of contact-center routing without buying the whole CX platform. If your needs land in that gap, you either overbuy into Scale or you stay on Engage and add point tools around it. Nextiva also states plainly that taxes and regulatory fees push your real bill roughly 15 to 25 percent above the sticker, which is normal for the category but easy to forget when you are modeling seat costs.

Now 8x8. There is no equivalent paragraph we can write with confidence, and that is the whole point. 8x8 removed public per-user pricing from its website in late 2023 and moved every plan to a custom quote. It now markets named bundles rather than the old X-series tiers: Unified Communications for core UC, a Contact Center bundle, a broader CX package it frames as going beyond the contact center, and a dedicated 8x8 for Microsoft Teams option. The legacy X2, X4, X6, X7, and X8 names still turn up in older review articles, but they are not the current public branding, and the prices attached to them in those articles are customer-reported estimates rather than anything 8x8 stands behind. For context only, those secondary sources have floated figures like roughly $24 per user for entry UC, roughly $44 for the higher UC tier with international reach, and well into the $85 to $140 range for contact-center and CX bundles. We are repeating those so you have a mental ballpark, not so you plan a budget around them. Get a written quote.

The quote-only model has two real consequences for total cost, and they cut in opposite directions. On the downside, you cannot self-serve, you cannot price-check in a browser tab, and evaluation slows to the speed of a sales cycle. Worse, larger and contact-center deployments carry setup fees that secondary sources put anywhere from about $1,000 into the tens of thousands depending on scope, plus per-number charges, contact-center add-ons that can lift the bill 20 to 50 percent, and the possibility of annual price increases in the 3 to 5 percent range if you do not negotiate a cap into the contract. On the upside, a negotiated deal can be genuinely tailored, and a buyer with real seat volume or a competitive quote in hand can often do better than any published rate would have offered. That is the trade: transparency and speed with Nextiva, or negotiating room and customization with 8x8, if you have the leverage and the patience to use it.

One more honest note on comparing the two on money. Because Nextiva's top Scale tier is a full CX platform, the fair 8x8 comparison for Scale is 8x8's Contact Center or CX bundle, not its entry UC bundle. Comparing Nextiva Core against an 8x8 CX quote is apples to oranges and will make either one look mispriced depending on which way you squint. Match the tier to the job before you compare the number.

To make the total-cost math concrete, run the numbers on a 10-seat team the way we do. On Nextiva Engage you can model it exactly: ten seats at $25 is $250 a month before tax, or about $290 to $310 once you add the 15 to 25 percent in regulatory fees and taxes that Nextiva itself flags. You know that figure before you ever speak to a salesperson, which means you can compare it against your current bill on day one. On 8x8 the same ten seats produce a number nobody can quote you from a webpage. You submit a request, wait for a rep, and get back a figure that may or may not include a setup fee, per-number charges, or a multi-year commitment. For a ten-seat shop that time is pure friction. For a hundred-seat contact center the same process is where a good negotiator actually saves money, because 8x8 expects to discount at volume and you can put a competing quote on the table. The model you should build is not "which sticker is lower," it is "how much does the buying process itself cost me in time and leverage," and that answer flips entirely with your size.

Setup & onboarding

Setup splits along the same line as pricing: self-serve versus sales-led. Nextiva leans self-serve for its Core and Engage phone tiers. You can sign up, provision numbers, build a basic auto-attendant, and get seats calling without a professional-services engagement, and Nextiva's support team has a strong reputation for walking newer admins through the parts that trip people up, like porting an existing number or setting up call flows for the first time. For a small business that does not have an IT department, that hand-holding is worth as much as any feature. The friction points are the ones you would expect from any hosted PBX: number porting always takes longer than anyone hopes because it depends on your losing carrier, and getting call routing exactly right for a multi-location team takes a few iterations.

8x8's onboarding is built for a different customer. Because it sells through quotes and its sweet spot includes contact-center deployments, onboarding is more likely to involve a guided implementation, especially once you move past basic UC into agent queues, routing logic, and analytics. That is appropriate for what it is, a contact center is genuinely more to stand up than a phone system, but it means the time-to-first-call is slower and more dependent on scheduling with 8x8 or a partner. If you are a five-person office that just wants dial tone by Friday, that is overhead you did not want. If you are launching a 30-seat support operation with skills-based routing, a guided implementation is exactly what you would ask for. The tooling itself is capable on both sides; the difference is how much of it you are expected to configure and whether you do it alone.

Voice & video quality

On raw voice, this is close, and neither should scare you. Both are mature carriers running on redundant, geographically distributed infrastructure, both offer a financially-backed uptime SLA that reaches the 99.999 percent range, and both deliver clean HD calling on a decent connection. In day-to-day use the thing that determines your call quality is far more likely to be your own network, your headsets, and whether your router prioritizes voice traffic than which of these two logos is on the bill. If call clarity is your worry, spend the energy on QoS on your LAN, not on choosing between these two.

Video is where a real gap opens, and it favors 8x8. 8x8's standout spec is a reported video meeting capacity of up to roughly 500 participants at its Unified Communications tier. That is webinar and all-hands territory, and it is unusual to find it bundled into the UC product rather than sold as a separate events add-on. If you regularly run large broadcasts, town halls, or training sessions where hundreds of people join, that ceiling genuinely matters and it is hard to match without paying extra elsewhere. Nextiva includes video meetings with screen sharing across its tiers and that is perfectly adequate for the internal team meetings, client calls, and small webinars that make up the vast majority of business video. But Nextiva does not headline a several-hundred-participant ceiling the way 8x8 does. For most teams that distinction is theoretical, because they never fill a 100-seat room, let alone a 500-seat one. For the minority who do, it is decisive.

There is a related point on international voice that belongs here because it is a quality-of-reach question. 8x8's higher UC tier includes unlimited calling to a large set of countries, reported at up to around 48 on the top UC bundle, versus a smaller set on the entry bundle. If your team calls internationally as a routine part of the job, that bundled unlimited reach can save you from metered international rates that add up fast. Nextiva is domestically strong and handles international calling, but broad unlimited-to-many-countries coverage is one of 8x8's signature selling points, not Nextiva's.

AI features

AI is where you should read the fine print instead of the feature bullet, because both providers use the word freely and gate the substance carefully. On Nextiva, the AI you probably want, real-time transcription and automatic call summaries, is locked to the top Scale ($75) tier. Core and Engage do not include it. That means a small team that wants AI call notes on Nextiva has to jump all the way to the CX platform to get them, which is a meaningful cost decision rather than a checkbox. Nextiva's AI, once you are on Scale, is aimed squarely at customer-experience work: summarizing interactions, routing intelligently, orchestrating journeys across channels. It is capable, but it is a top-tier privilege, not an everyday inclusion.

8x8's AI story is tied to its contact-center heritage. Its higher bundles bring supervisor analytics, call monitoring with barge, monitor, and whisper, and the contact-center intelligence you would expect from a platform built to run support and sales floors: interaction analytics, quality management, and increasingly AI-assisted agent tooling. If your AI need is agent assist, conversation analytics, and supervisor visibility across a queue, 8x8 is playing its home game. If your AI need is simply an automatic summary and transcript on ordinary business calls for a small team, both providers make you climb to a higher tier to get it, so neither is the easy budget answer for lightweight AI.

Worth saying plainly: neither of these is the provider you pick if built-in AI on cheap seats is your single deciding factor. Some competitors put live transcription and call summaries into their entry tier, and if that is the whole game for you, look at those instead (we name a couple in the alternatives section). Between these two specifically, the AI question is really a proxy for what kind of operation you run. Contact-center-flavored AI favors 8x8. Broader CX orchestration favors Nextiva Scale.

Integrations

Both integrate with the tools a phone system is expected to touch, and the honest summary is that neither is going to leave you stranded on the mainstream CRMs. 8x8 connects to Salesforce, Zendesk, and NetSuite among others, and its integration story is strongest exactly where its product is strongest, in the contact center, where CRM screen-pops, ticketing sync, and agent-desktop context matter most. If you are wiring a support floor into Salesforce Service Cloud or Zendesk, 8x8's contact-center-native connectors are a real asset and are built for that use rather than bolted on.

Nextiva integrates with common business tools as well, but its philosophy is different: rather than trying to be the hub with the largest connector marketplace, it pushes the all-in-one path where voice, SMS, chat, and the contact center live under one Nextiva roof, reducing the number of integrations you need in the first place. That suits teams that would rather consolidate vendors than stitch together best-of-breed tools. It is less appealing if you have a sprawling stack and you specifically want the phone system to plug deeply into a dozen niche apps. Neither of these two is the integration-marketplace champion of the category; if raw connector breadth is your top priority, that is a reason to widen the search rather than to pick between these two on that axis alone.

Support & reliability

If one section decides this comparison for a lot of buyers, it is this one, and it goes clearly to Nextiva. Nextiva has one of the strongest support reputations in the entire category, and the review scores are not close. Start with the number that surprises people most: a Trustpilot score hovering around 4.7 to 4.8 built on roughly 8,000 reviews, which is close to unheard of in telecom, a category where customers usually show up to a review site only when they are furious. Behind that headline the pattern holds. On G2, Nextiva sits near 4.5 out of 5 across about 2,200 reviews, and the subscore that actually matters for a matchup like this one, Quality of Support, lands close to 9.0. When you are deciding which of these two vendors gets your customer-facing line, that Quality of Support figure is the single most predictive stat on the page. That reputation is Nextiva's single most durable advantage, and it is the reason we default small businesses toward it: when something goes wrong with your phones, and eventually something will, you want the vendor that a very large and very satisfied customer base says answers the phone and fixes it.

8x8's satisfaction scores are respectable but distinctly mid-pack next to that. It sits around 4.2 out of 5 on G2 across roughly 1,400 reviews, about 4.1 on Capterra, and around 3.5 on Trustpilot, with a solid 8.5 out of 10 on TrustRadius across several hundred reviews. Those are not bad numbers, and a 3.5 Trustpilot in this category is unremarkable rather than alarming. But they are visibly a notch below Nextiva, and for a buyer weighing who to trust with the line customers call, that gap is the tiebreaker. On raw reliability the two are comparable, both offer a financially-backed five-nines uptime SLA and both run resilient platforms, so this is a satisfaction and support-experience win rather than an uptime one.

Which should you choose?

There is no universal winner, only the right fit for your shape. Here is how we would steer specific buyers, by team size and by use case.

By team size

• 1 to 5 employees, choose Nextiva. At this size you want dial tone this week, a bill you can predict, and a support team that will hold your hand through porting. Nextiva Core at $15 (annual, new-customer terms) does that. An 8x8 quote cycle is overkill for a five-person office and the quote-only model works against you when you have no volume leverage.
• 6 to 20 employees, choose Nextiva in most cases. This is Nextiva's core market. Core or Engage covers you, the support reputation pays off as you add seats, and Engage's inbound call center at $25 gives you a light queue without buying a full contact-center product. Only lean 8x8 here if heavy international calling or 500-scale video is already a real requirement.
• 21 to 50 employees, it depends on whether you are becoming a contact center. A 40-person team of knowledge workers on phones and video is still Nextiva territory, and cleaner to buy. A 40-person team where 25 of them are agents in a queue is where 8x8's contact-center depth, supervisor tooling, and negotiated pricing start to earn the quote cycle. Draw the line by counting agents, not headcount.
• 51 to 200 employees, get quotes from both, and weigh 8x8 seriously. At this scale you have the volume to negotiate, contact-center and international needs are more likely to be real, and 8x8's guided implementation and CC-grade tooling become assets rather than overhead. Nextiva Scale is still a strong CX contender and worth pricing head-to-head, but this is the band where 8x8 stops being overkill.
• 200+ employees, this is 8x8's home turf, but make Nextiva compete on price. Enterprise contact-center deployments, multi-country calling, and large-scale video all play to 8x8. Use a competitive Nextiva Scale quote to keep 8x8 honest on the number, since 8x8's opacity means your negotiation is the only public pricing pressure it feels.

By use case

• Straightforward business phones with great support: Nextiva, every time. This is the majority use case and Nextiva is built for it.
• Running a real contact center (queues, agents, supervisors): 8x8. Its heritage, tooling, and upgrade path are made for this, and a guided implementation is a feature here, not a tax.
• Heavy international calling: 8x8, for bundled unlimited reach to many countries on its higher UC tier.
• Frequent large-scale video (hundreds of attendees): 8x8, for the reported ~500-participant ceiling bundled into UC.
• You want a knowable bill and a fast, self-serve decision: Nextiva, because you cannot get either from a quote-only vendor.
• You have buying leverage and time to negotiate: 8x8, where a strong negotiator can turn the quote model to their advantage.

Want a recommendation matched to your exact seat count, budget, and must-have features rather than a general steer? Get matched in about a minute, free, with no sales calls attached.

Alternatives worth a look

If neither of these two is landing, three others are worth a quick look before you commit. RingCentral sits between them in spirit, with published pricing like Nextiva but a deeper feature set and larger integration catalog aimed at bigger, integration-heavy orgs; see how it stacks against 8x8 in our RingCentral vs 8x8 breakdown. Dialpad is the one to check if built-in AI on affordable seats is your real priority, since it puts live transcription and call summaries into its entry tier rather than gating them to the top. And Ooma Office is the transparent, no-contract flat-rate pick for small teams that never intend to become a contact center. If you were leaning Nextiva but want to weigh a simpler flat-rate option, our Nextiva vs Ooma comparison covers that trade directly.

Switching & number porting

Ask any owner what actually worries them about changing phone systems and it is rarely the seats or the features, it is the quieter dread that a customer dials the old number one morning and hears dead air. That fear is misplaced if you run the cutover properly, and the way you run it differs between these two providers in a way worth spelling out, because it maps onto the same self-serve-versus-sales-led split that runs through the rest of this comparison.

Here is the mechanic that is identical no matter which one you pick, because it is dictated by the phone network and not by the vendor. When you move a number, your new provider submits a port request to your losing carrier, hands over a recent bill and a signed Letter of Authorization, and the losing carrier controls the release. That is why the timeline is out of your new vendor's hands: a single direct-dial number can clear in a handful of business days, but a spread of numbers, a main line tied to an auto-attendant, or anything sitting behind a reseller commonly runs one to four weeks, and a genuinely messy account with a mismatched service address can drag past that. The two things that reliably blow up a port are avoidable on your end. First, the LOA name and service address have to match your current carrier's records to the character, so pull an actual copy of your latest invoice and copy it verbatim rather than typing it from memory. Second, never cancel your old service before the port confirms as complete, because canceling releases the number back to the carrier's pool and you can lose it outright. Keep the old line paid and live until the last number has moved.

With Nextiva the porting experience is built to be run by a non-technical admin, and this is where its support reputation stops being an abstraction and starts saving you a week. You start the port from the portal, upload the bill and LOA, and Nextiva provisions temporary numbers immediately so your seats are placing and taking calls on day one while the port for your real numbers works through in the background. During that window you can forward the temporary Nextiva number to your existing line, or point your old number at the new system, so nothing goes to voicemail limbo. The reason we keep steering small teams here is that when a port stalls, and ports stall, a Nextiva rep will actually get on the phone with your losing carrier and push it, which is exactly the help a five-person office without an IT department needs. Nextiva does not headline a per-number porting fee on its Core and Engage phone tiers, so for a typical SMB the port is effectively part of onboarding rather than a line item, though you should still confirm that on your specific order.

With 8x8 porting is real and well-supported too, but it lives inside a sales-led implementation rather than a self-serve wizard. Because 8x8's sweet spot is larger and contact-center-shaped deployments, a port there is more likely to be scheduled and managed alongside the rest of your rollout by an 8x8 implementation contact or a partner, with cutover timed to a planned go-live rather than triggered the moment you upload a document. For a thirty-line move across three offices that coordination is a feature, because someone is orchestrating the sequence so agents, queues, and numbers all land together. For a five-person shop that just wants to be live by Friday it is more process than the job needs. And this is where 8x8's quote-only posture bites again: setup and porting charges are not published, they scale with the size and complexity of the deployment, and secondary reports put larger 8x8 implementations anywhere from about a thousand dollars into the tens of thousands once professional services are involved. None of that is unreasonable for a big contact-center stand-up, but it means the one-time cost of switching to 8x8 is a negotiated number you have to extract in writing, not a figure you can look up, so make the porting and setup fee an explicit line in the quote before you sign anything.

Net of all that, the switching story rhymes with the pricing story. Nextiva is the faster, more transparent, DIY-friendly cutover with human help a phone call away and no surprise fee, which is what most small and mid-size teams want. 8x8 is the managed, scheduled, professional-services cutover that shines for a large or contact-center move and costs a quote-dependent amount to run. Match the porting model to your size and your tolerance for coordinating a project, the same way you match the tier to the job.

The real 12-month cost

Sticker prices lie by omission, so the only honest way to compare these two on money is to run a full year for a real team and fold in the things that never make the headline rate. We will use a 20-seat business as the worked example, because that is squarely in the band where both providers are plausible and where the transparency gap between them is at its most expensive.

Take Nextiva Engage first, because it is the tier a 20-person team that wants a light inbound queue, customer SMS, and toll-free numbers would actually land on, and because it is the only side of this we can price to the dollar. Twenty seats at the $25 annual per-user rate is $500 a month in base subscription, which is $6,000 over twelve months before anything is added. Now fold in the surcharges Nextiva itself tells you to expect. Taxes and regulatory fees run roughly 15 to 25 percent on this category, so on a $6,000 base that is somewhere between $900 and $1,500 a year, landing your true annual Engage cost in the neighborhood of $6,900 to $7,500, or about $575 to $625 a month all-in. Two honest add-ons can nudge that up: if a few of those seats are heavy toll-free users you may push past Engage's bundled 2,000 toll-free minutes and meter the overage, and if you need AI transcription and call summaries you cannot buy them on Engage at all, you have to jump the whole team to Scale at $75, which would take the same 20 seats to $1,500 a month base, roughly $18,000 a year before tax. That cliff is the single biggest swing in the whole model, which is why counting who actually needs AI matters before you price it.

Now 8x8 for the same 20 seats, and here the exercise changes character because there is no published rate to anchor on. Working from the customer-reported estimates we flagged earlier, a mid-UC bundle in the low-$40s per seat would put 20 seats around $800 to $900 a month, call it $9,600 to $10,800 a year in base subscription, before the same 15 to 25 percent in taxes and fees layers on to push the real total toward $11,000 to $13,500. But that range is soft in both directions. A 20-seat buyer has some volume, so a decent negotiator can pull the per-seat number down from the reported estimate, especially with a competing Nextiva quote in hand. Pulling the other way are the one-time and recurring extras that do not show up in a per-seat figure: a setup or porting fee that secondary sources start at around a thousand dollars, per-number charges, contact-center add-ons that can lift the bill 20 to 50 percent if any of those 20 seats are agents in a queue, and the 3 to 5 percent annual increase that creeps in unless you negotiate a cap into the contract. In year one especially, the setup fee alone can swing the effective 12-month cost by several hundred to a few thousand dollars.

Cheapest over 12 months for a 20-seat team that wants solid business phones with a light inbound queue: Nextiva Engage, clearly, at roughly $6,900 to $7,500 all-in versus an 8x8 range that starts higher and carries a first-year setup fee you cannot see until you request a quote. The picture only flips if a real slice of those 20 seats are contact-center agents, in which case you are no longer comparing Engage to a UC bundle at all, you are comparing Nextiva Scale against an 8x8 Contact Center quote, both of which land in five figures a year, and there the winner is whoever negotiates the better deal rather than whoever prints the lower sticker. The lesson the year-long math teaches is the same one the pricing section did: for a straightforward 20-seat phone deployment Nextiva is both cheaper and knowable, and 8x8 only earns its higher, foggier number when the contact center is the actual job.

Frequently asked questions

Is Nextiva or 8x8 cheaper?

You cannot answer this cleanly because 8x8 does not publish prices. As of June 2026, Nextiva lists firm rates of $15 for Core, $25 for Engage, and $75 for Scale per user per month on an annual term. 8x8 went quote-only in late 2023 and removed all public per-user pricing, so any 8x8 seat price you find online is a customer-reported estimate, not an official rate. The only fair way to compare cost is to request an 8x8 quote and weigh it against Nextiva's published tiers, matching tier to tier so you are not comparing a basic phone plan against a full contact-center bundle. Remember that month-to-month billing runs higher than annual and taxes and fees add roughly 15 to 25 percent on top of either provider. Verify current pricing before you buy.

Why does 8x8 hide its pricing?

8x8 moved to quote-only pricing in late 2023 and pulled public per-user rates from its website. It now promotes named bundles such as Unified Communications, Contact Center, and a broader CX package instead of the old X2 through X8 tier names, and you request a custom quote for each. The upside is that a deal can be tailored to your scope and negotiated, which can benefit larger buyers. The downside is slower, less transparent evaluation than Nextiva, which lists firm per-tier prices you can read in seconds. If you value speed and a knowable bill, the opacity counts against 8x8; if you have volume to negotiate, it can work in your favor.

Which has better customer support, Nextiva or 8x8?

Nextiva, clearly, on the review scores. It carries a G2 rating around 4.5 out of 5 with a Quality of Support subscore near 9.0, and a Trustpilot rating around 4.7 to 4.8 across roughly 8,000 reviews, which is exceptional for the category. 8x8 sits around 4.2 on G2 across roughly 1,400 reviews and about 3.5 on Trustpilot, which is respectable but mid-pack by comparison. Both offer a financially-backed five-nines uptime SLA, so reliability is comparable; the difference is in the support and satisfaction experience, where Nextiva has a clear and well-documented edge.

Does 8x8 really support up to 500 video participants?

That is the reported capacity for 8x8's video meetings at its Unified Communications tier, and it is one of 8x8's signature strengths. It puts webinar and all-hands scale inside the UC product rather than charging for a separate events add-on. Nextiva includes video meetings with screen sharing across its tiers, which is plenty for the internal meetings, client calls, and small webinars most businesses run, but it does not headline a several-hundred-participant ceiling. If you routinely host large broadcasts, 8x8 is the stronger choice on video; if you never fill a 100-person room, the difference is academic. Confirm the current participant cap with 8x8, since specs change.

Which is better for international calling?

8x8, for most international-heavy teams. Its higher Unified Communications tier includes unlimited calling to a large set of countries, reported at up to around 48 on the top UC bundle versus a smaller set on the entry bundle, which can save you from metered per-minute international rates that add up quickly. Nextiva is strong domestically and handles international calling, but broad unlimited-to-many-countries coverage is one of 8x8's signature selling points rather than Nextiva's. If a meaningful share of your calls cross borders, price the international reach carefully, because that is where the cost difference tends to live.

Can I keep my existing phone number with either provider?

Yes, both carry your existing numbers over, and we walk through exactly how in the switching and number porting section above. The short version: Nextiva runs porting as a self-serve request backed by a support team that is unusually good at chasing a stuck port, and it does not headline a porting charge on its phone tiers. 8x8 folds porting into a sales-led onboarding, which is smoother for a large multi-location move but means the number lands inside a broader implementation timeline. Plan for one to four weeks either way, keep your old service live until the port completes, and pin down any one-time charge in the quote or order before you sign.

Is Nextiva Engage a real contact center, or do I need Scale?

Nextiva Engage at $25 includes an inbound call center with advanced reporting and live chat, which is enough for a small team that needs to queue and route incoming calls and see basic metrics. It is not the full customer-experience platform. For blended inbound and outbound, AI transcription and summaries, skills-based routing, and journey orchestration, you need Scale at $75. If your contact-center needs are light and inbound-only, Engage may cover you; if they are serious, either Nextiva Scale or an 8x8 Contact Center quote is the honest comparison, and you should price both.

When does 8x8 actually make more sense than Nextiva?

8x8 makes more sense when you are running or building a genuine contact center, when a real share of your calling is international, when you need large-scale video for hundreds of attendees, or when you are a large enough buyer to negotiate a quote to your advantage. In those situations 8x8's contact-center depth, international reach, video ceiling, and negotiable pricing outweigh the friction of a quote-only model. For most small and mid-size businesses that just want reliable phones, predictable billing, and excellent support, Nextiva is the better default.