grasshopper vs google voice phones for small business owners

Unless you want to be tied to your desk all day, you need a way for important calls to reach you on your mobile. The now outdated solution was to forward calls to your cell on the way out of the office. But then you run into the hairy situations of not being able to easily distinguish between personal and business calls, forgetting to set the forward, only having one voicemail greeting, etc.


It was only a matter of time before services were created to address this common situation. Two services stand out as major players in this field: Google Voice (get your beta invite here) and Grasshopper. Both help to elegantly handle the problem of juggling multiple phones numbers and needing to be two places at once.
Both allow you to add multiple existing phone lines to your account so that all phones ring when the number is called. Both allow you to access your voicemail online. Both give you voicemail transcripts. In many ways, they are quite comparable.

For business owners, Google Voice offers the distinct advantage of being free but little else over Grasshopper which caters exclusively to that market (plans start at $9.95/month). For instance, Grasshopper allows for transferring to other extensions in the account and an auto-attendant and company directory. Key features if you are trying to communicate professionalism and not have callers feel like they are calling some guys cell phone (they may be, but they don’t need to know that). Grasshopper also allows you to transfer an existing number (Google Voice doesn’t currently but is rumored to be working on this).


That Grasshopper is a superior solution for the typical business owner is almost a given when you look at the featureset and reasonable pricing. However, I use Google Voice and will probably continue to do so simply because I have already invested in a vPBX system that works well for our company. Were I to start over, I might give Grasshopper more serious consideration because it is considerably cheaper than our current solution and offers almost identical functionality but at this point I’d hate to fix what isn’t broken.


Given that, Google Voice does everything that I need. When people call our 800 # and dial my extension, it rings my cell and my desk phone simultaneously. If I don’t pick up the call, it transfers the callers to one of two voicemail greetings. If it is a personal contact, it sends them to a personal greeting. If it is a business call or any caller that is not a known contact, they get my business greeting. If I’m at my desk, I can choose to pick up the call on my cell or my desk phone. No need to remember to forward, no need to dial in to my work line to listen to voicemails.
This is all I need. Problem solved. But, for clients who haven’t yet tied themselves to a PBX solution, I’ll be recommending Grasshopper which truly is a small business owner’s dream solution.