Published prices, contract terms and support scores for every provider we track, free to anyone. When you’re ready to talk, we match your brief to suppliers who serve your size, category and province.
What are you buying?
How do I choose a business phone provider in South Africa without wasting a month on it?
Decide the category first – VoIP lines if you already own a phone system, a Cloud PBX if you need extensions and an IVR. Then shortlist on published price plus contract term, not on the sales call. Entry pricing runs from about R26 to R185 per extension per month, and the cheapest headline number is almost never the cheapest year once setup, call rates and lock-in are counted.
Rubric v2 · scores out of 10
Last re-verified 9 September 2026
Built from published entry pricing we have verified and dated. It will not match a quote to the rand – it will tell you when one is out of line.
Drag for team size, pick what you’re buying, and see the range the market actually charges.
Estimated monthly spend · 5 users
Excludes call charges and handsets. Setup is free at several providers – check before you sign.
A score is only worth something if you can see how it was reached and argue with it. Here is the whole method – no weighting hidden behind a badge.
Axis 01
What the entry tier really costs once setup, contract term and per-extension rates are on the table – not the headline number.
Axis 02
What ships in the box against what an SA business actually needs: IVR, call recording, porting, Teams routing, mobile apps.
Axis 03
Public ratings across Hellopeter and Google, weighted by volume. Three glowing reviews do not outweigh six thousand mixed ones.
Axis 04
Network footprint, published SLAs, ICASA licence class and how the provider behaves when something breaks.
Axis 05
Reachability, escalation path, and whether a human answers when a line drops at 16:45 on a Friday.
And then
Scores decay. Every provider carries a sample date, and the whole set gets re-checked on a monthly cycle – the last pass finished on 8 September.
Where a score can mislead you. A 7.9 that is strong on features and weak on support is a different buy from a 7.9 that is the other way around. That is exactly why the five axes are published separately – read the shape, not just the number.
The orange box is the whole decision. Own it and you carry the upgrades, the licences and the 2am call; rent it and you pay per extension every month instead.
Being listed, reviewed and scored is free and open to any licensed South African provider, and it cannot be bought. Receiving matched quote requests is a separate, paid arrangement – it is labelled on the page and it never changes a score.
Every comparison site says it is independent. Ours publishes the rubric, the sources and the sample dates so you can catch us if we aren’t.
The WhichVoIP editorial standard, in force since 2009Most bad telecoms decisions in South Africa are category errors, not vendor errors. These guides settle the category first.
What a hosted PBX replaces, what R26 to R85 per extension actually covers, and the cases where an on-premise box still wins.
Read the guide →Channels versus users, what porting your existing numbers involves, and the call rates that decide the twelve-month total.
Read the guide →Contention ratios, business SLAs against consumer lines, and why the cheapest FTTB quote is rarely the cheapest year.
Read the guide →LTE, 5G and licensed microwave as a primary link or a failover, and what each one does to voice quality under load.
Read the guide →Where a cloud PBX stops being enough, and what omni-channel really costs per agent per month in this market.
Read the guide →The newest category on the site, three providers scored so far, and an honest read on what these agents still cannot do.
Read the guide →We match your brief against the suppliers on our panel who cover your category, your size and your province, and pass it only to those. If nobody on the panel covers what you need, we come back to you ourselves with the options worth looking at, rather than handing your brief to a supplier who cannot serve you.
