The best PBX provider isn’t necessarily the biggest—it’s the one that fits your business. We compare leading providers across features, pricing, reliability, support, and flexibility
Search for the best VoIP provider in South Africa and you will find a dozen lists, most of them written by VoIP providers. This one is no different. We are Othos, we sell a cloud PBX, and we are on this list.
So instead of asking you to take our judgement on faith, we have done something more useful: worked out what seven providers actually cost over a first year, using their own published prices, and shown the arithmetic so you can check it. Where a provider beats us, we have said so — and one of them does.
How we compared
Ten extensions, month to month, excluding VAT. Ten is the size most South African SMEs actually buy, and it is where the differences between pricing models start to bite. We have used month-to-month rates rather than annual-discount pricing, and every figure below excludes VAT.
Published prices only, checked August 2026. Where a provider does not publish its rates, we say so rather than estimate. A first-year total means twelve months of subscription plus any setup or installation fee.
What we did not do is score anyone out of ten. Different businesses want genuinely different things, so each provider below gets the category it actually wins.
The short version
Best all-in value for a team of ten: Othos. Cheapest bare-bones setup: Switch Telecom. Best end-to-end admin and call centre: Euphoria Telecom. Best for UCaaS and contact centre: Telviva. Best single vendor for connectivity, voice and security: Vox. Lowest advertised per-extension rate: Wanatel. Voys offers a straightforward per-user model but does not publish PBX pricing.
What the headline price hides
Nearly every comparison in this market compares advertised per-extension rates. That number is close to meaningless on its own, because three things sit outside it.
Channels are not extensions. An extension is a person. A channel is a simultaneous call. Switch Telecom advertises R260 per ten extensions, but voice trunks are billed separately at R100 for four channels and R25 for each additional channel. Ten extensions that can all talk at once therefore cost R260 plus R250, not R260. Most ten-person teams do not need ten channels — four to six is usually plenty — but you need to know the line item exists before you sign.
Call recording is often rented by retention period. Switch Telecom charges per ten extensions per month according to how long you keep recordings: R150 for three months, R350 for one year, and R800 for five years. Voys takes a different approach, charging R0.05 per recorded minute per month of storage — which is cheap in month one and compounds quietly as the archive grows. If your industry requires you to keep call records for years, this line can end up larger than the phone system itself.
Setup fees are a first-year cost. Euphoria Telecom charges a R1,500 base setup fee plus R65 per extension, so a ten-extension installation starts at R2,150 before the first invoice. New numbers are R125 each and porting an existing number is R250. None of that recurs, but all of it lands in year one.
The first-year numbers
Ten extensions, month to month, excluding VAT.
Provider | First year | Monthly | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|
Switch Telecom — bare bones | R4,320 | R360 | R0 |
Othos SMB | R4,788 | R399 | R0 |
Wanatel | From R5,880 | From R490 | Not published |
Switch Telecom — 1-year recording | R8,520 | R710 | R0 |
Euphoria Express | R9,950 | R650 | R2,150 |
Telviva, Voys, Vox | Not published | — | — |
Switch Telecom, bare bones — R4,320. R260 per ten extensions plus a R100 trunk covering four channels, at R360 a month, with free installation and no call recording. If four simultaneous calls is genuinely enough and you do not need recordings, this is the cheapest way to run ten extensions in South Africa. It beats us, and we would rather tell you than have you find out later.
Othos SMB — R4,788. R399 a month for up to ten users, no setup fee, with IVR, queues, call recording and three mobile apps included. Recordings are retained for as long as you are a client, at no additional charge.
Wanatel — from R5,880. R49 per extension per month on a month-to-month basis, so R490 for ten. Voice trunking is charged separately and the published material does not price call recording, IVR or other add-ons, so the real total will be higher than this. How much higher, we cannot tell you from public information.
Switch Telecom with recording — R8,520. The same setup as above plus one year of call-recording retention at R350 per ten extensions per month, taking the monthly to R710. At five-year retention the recording line alone is R800 a month, and the first-year total reaches R13,920.
Euphoria Telecom Express — R9,950. R65 per extension per month is R650 for ten, plus R2,150 in setup. Their Enterprise tier at R85 per extension works out at R12,350 in year one. Euphoria is month-to-month with no lock-in, and their platform is considerably more than a phone system — but the entry price is not the whole story.
Telviva, Voys and Vox do not publish rand pricing for their PBX products. Telviva previously had a pricing page and no longer does. All three quote on request, which is normal for solutions sold with connectivity or contact-centre services attached, but it does mean you cannot compare them without picking up the phone.
At a glance
Founding years and headquarters where we could verify them, plus who each provider actually suits.
Othos — Cape Town. A cloud-native PBX built on AWS managed services. Suits teams of roughly three to 100 who want recording, IVR and queues included and no setup fee.
Euphoria Telecom — founded 2010, Cape Town. Suits businesses that want deep administration and call-centre tooling inside a single product.
Telviva — the trading name of Connection Telecom cc, which started in 2005, with offices in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. Suits larger unified-communications and contact-centre deployments.
Switch Telecom — founded 2006, based in Sandton, and running its own licensed voice network since 2007. Suits businesses with many extensions and low call concurrency.
Vox — founded 1998, headquartered in Johannesburg, with voice sitting inside a broad ICT portfolio. Suits businesses consolidating connectivity, security and voice under one supplier.
Voys — a straightforward per-user model with published call rates but no published PBX pricing. Suits smaller teams happy to request a quote.
Wanatel — the lowest advertised per-extension rate here. Suits small teams that need extensions and little else.
Provider by provider
Othos — best all-in value for a team of ten
We price in bundles rather than per seat: R149 a month for three users, R399 for up to ten, R649 for up to twenty, with custom pricing for larger or unusual deployments. There are no setup fees and no contracts, and calls are billed per second at R0.39 a minute to mobile and R0.29 to landline.
The platform is cloud-native rather than a virtual machine someone rents and manages. We run on AWS managed services with Cloudflare handling DNS, which is why we are comfortable talking about resilience in a market where load shedding is still a live concern. Because we develop the platform ourselves, custom integration work is a conversation rather than a refusal.
Where we do not win: if you need four channels, no recording and the absolute lowest number on the invoice, Switch Telecom is cheaper. And if you want a single vendor to handle your fibre, LTE, security and voice together, we do not do those other things.
Switch Telecom — best per-channel rate
At R260 per ten extensions plus R100 for a four-channel trunk, Switch has the keenest raw pricing in this comparison, month-to-month with free installation. The model rewards businesses with many extensions and low call concurrency — a warehouse or a branch network where most handsets are idle most of the time.
Where it gets expensive: concurrency and retention. Extra channels at R25 each and the recording-retention ladder can multiply the bill several times over. Price the configuration you actually need, not the entry line.
Euphoria Telecom — best end-to-end admin and call centre
Euphoria has been in this market since 2010 and the product reflects it. The administration and reporting layer is genuinely strong, and for businesses running a call centre alongside general office telephony the end-to-end product is coherent in a way that assembling parts is not.
The trade-off: the entry price is per extension rather than bundled, and the setup fee makes the first year materially more expensive than the monthly rate suggests.
Telviva — best for UCaaS and contact centre
Telviva, which is licensed under the registered name Connection Telecom cc, has moved firmly towards unified communications: voice, video, chat and WhatsApp in a single environment, with a substantial contact-centre offering. For larger deployments where the phone system is one channel among several, this is the strongest fit here.
The trade-off: no published pricing, and the product is more than a small business needs.
Vox — best single-vendor option
If you would rather have one supplier for fibre, LTE, security and voice, with one account manager and one invoice, Vox is built for exactly that. For businesses that value a single throat to choke over best-of-breed components, that consolidation is worth real money.
The trade-off: voice is one product in a broad portfolio rather than the whole company, and pricing is quote-based.
Wanatel — lowest advertised per-extension rate
R49 per extension per month, month to month, is the lowest advertised per-extension figure in this comparison. For a small team that needs extensions and little else, it is worth a quote.
The trade-off: voice is charged separately and the add-on pricing is not published. Ask specifically what call recording, IVR and trunking cost before comparing it with anything else here.
Voys — simple per-user model, opaque pricing
Voys sells a clean per-user proposition and publishes call rates, but not PBX pricing, and their contract terms are described as flexible without being specific. Worth a conversation; hard to evaluate on paper.
One line item to ask about: recorded-call storage at R0.05 per recorded minute per month. Model it against your actual call volume and retention period before you assume it is negligible.
Others worth knowing
Seven providers is not the whole market. These are the other names you are likely to meet, and where they fit.
Telkom — the incumbent fixed-line operator, and the one most businesses are migrating away from as copper is decommissioned. Still the default for many, and still worth a quote if you have an existing relationship.
Vodacom Business and MTN Business — the enterprise arms of the two large mobile networks. Both bundle voice with connectivity and mobile fleets, which makes them compelling if you already buy mobile from them at scale, and less so if you only want a phone system.
Saicom — licensed as Saicom Technology (Pty) Ltd, holding individual ECNS and ECS licences. Focused on wholesale and enterprise voice, frequently delivered through partners rather than direct.
Centracom — licensed as Centracom (Pty) Ltd, also holding individual ECNS and ECS licences, and competitive at the entry level of hosted PBX.
BitCo — appears on ICASA’s 2026 class licensee register. Connectivity-led, with voice attached to a fibre or wireless product.
Huge Connect — appears on both the individual and class registers. Strong in multi-site retail, where connectivity and payments matter as much as voice.
Nashua — an office-automation route into hosted voice, usually delivered through franchise partners, which means your experience depends heavily on which franchise you deal with.
3CX — not a provider at all, but PBX software you host yourself or buy through a partner, with SIP trunks purchased separately. We left it out of the comparison because the cost structure is not comparable, but it comes up often enough to be worth naming.
Licensing: what we could verify
Anyone carrying your calls needs authorisation from ICASA. We checked each provider in this comparison against ICASA’s published register of individual licensees, searching registered entity names rather than trading names.
Verified on the individual register: Othos Telecommunications (Pty) Ltd (I-ECS, national), Connection Telecom cc trading as Telviva (I-ECS and I-ECNS), Switch Telecom (Pty) Ltd (I-ECS and I-ECNS), Voys Telecom SA (Pty) Ltd (I-ECS), and Vox Telecommunications (Pty) Ltd (I-ECS and I-ECNS).
We could not match Euphoria Telecom or Wanatel to a register entry under those trading names. That is a limitation of our search, not a statement about their licensing. Registered entity names very often differ from the brand on the website — Telviva above is a good example — and a provider may hold a class licence or trade under a parent company. If it matters to you, ask them for their registered entity name and licence type, and check it yourself. We wrote a short guide to doing exactly that.
Five questions worth asking any provider
What does this cost at my actual size, all in? Ask for a quote covering your extension count, the concurrent calls you need, recording with your required retention, and setup. Compare those totals, not the advertised rates.
How many simultaneous calls does that include? If the answer is a separate line item, find out what it costs before you sign.
How long are recordings kept, and what does that cost? Retention is where quoted prices and real prices diverge most.
What is the setup fee, and is there a contract? Month-to-month with no setup fee removes almost all the risk of trying someone out.
What is your registered entity name and ICASA licence? A licensed provider answers this in one line.
Our own add-ons, in the open
It would be poor form to criticise unpublished add-on pricing without disclosing ours. On Othos, the desktop application is R25 a month, and an API connector for call-log integration is R299 a month. Deeper custom integrations are quoted per project, and Microsoft Teams integration is quoted rather than listed. Everything else described in this article — IVR, queues, call recording with unlimited retention, mobile apps on the SMB and Enterprise plans — is included in the monthly price.
Frequently asked questions
How much does VoIP cost in South Africa?
For a team of ten, expect somewhere between R360 and R700 a month excluding VAT for the phone system itself, plus call charges, plus any setup fee. The spread comes almost entirely from how many simultaneous calls you need and whether call recording is included or rented separately.
Which is the cheapest VoIP provider in South Africa?
On the numbers in this article, Switch Telecom at R360 a month for ten extensions with four channels and no recording is the cheapest way to run ten extensions. Once you add call recording with a year of retention, Othos at R399 a month becomes cheaper. There is no single cheapest provider — only the cheapest provider for a particular configuration.
What is the difference between an extension and a channel?
An extension is a person or a handset. A channel is a simultaneous call. Ten extensions with four channels means ten people have phones, but only four can be on a call at the same time. Some providers bundle channels, others bill them separately, and this single distinction causes more billing surprises than anything else in this market.
Do I need an ICASA licence to use VoIP?
No. The licence obligation sits with the provider carrying your calls, not with you as the customer. What matters is that the company you buy from is licensed — which you can check yourself on ICASA’s public register.
Can I keep my existing phone number?
Yes. Number porting is standard in South Africa and your geographic numbers can move between licensed operators. Ask what porting costs before you switch — Euphoria publishes R250 per number, and others quote on request.
Will VoIP work during load shedding?
The platform stays up, because it is hosted rather than sitting in your office. What fails is usually local: your router, your fibre ONT or your handsets. A small UPS on the network equipment, plus mobile apps as a fallback, keeps a team reachable through an outage.
Do I have to sign a contract?
Not necessarily. Several providers in this comparison, including Othos, Euphoria, Switch Telecom and Wanatel, publish month-to-month terms. Others describe their terms as flexible without being specific, which is worth pinning down before signing.
Do I need to buy special handsets?
No. Modern cloud PBX platforms work through a mobile app, a browser-based phone, a desktop application or a standard SIP deskphone from a manufacturer such as Yealink or Fanvil. You can mix all four across a team.
How long do call recordings get kept?
It varies enormously, and it is worth asking explicitly. Some providers price recording by retention period, so a year of storage costs more than three months. Others, including Othos, retain recordings for as long as you remain a client at no extra charge.
So which is the best VoIP provider in South Africa?
It depends on the configuration you actually need, which is why this article is organised by category rather than a ranking. If you want our own case rather than a comparison, we have set it out on our best VoIP provider page.
The bottom line
If you want the lowest possible number on the invoice and can live with four channels and no call recording, Switch Telecom is the cheapest option in this comparison. If you want a phone system where recording, IVR, queues and mobile apps are included, retention is unlimited, and there is no setup fee or contract, we think R399 a month for ten users is the strongest all-in value in the South African market — and the arithmetic above is there for you to check.
Whichever way you go, price the configuration you actually need rather than the one on the pricing page. See our full pricing → or book a free demo → and we will quote your exact setup.
All prices exclude VAT and were checked in August 2026. Providers change their pricing; verify before you buy.
