8x8 Work vs. NetFortris (discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
8x8 Work
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
8x8 Work is a collaboration hub for phone, video, and messaging. It brings secure unified communication and collaboration experiences to every employee.N/A
NetFortris (discontinued)
Score 6.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NetFortris, and the former Fonality, provided business phone systems using Polycom and Yealink IP phones. In 2022 the company was acquired by Sangoma. NetFortris and Fonality UCaaS and other services are no longer available.N/A
Pricing
8x8 WorkNetFortris (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Hybrid Premise Purchase
Varies
Varies
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
8x8 WorkNetFortris (discontinued)
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
8x8 WorkNetFortris (discontinued)
Features
8x8 WorkNetFortris (discontinued)
Cloud PBX
Comparison of Cloud PBX features of Product A and Product B
8x8 Work
8.7
Ratings
4% above category average
NetFortris (discontinued)
7.8
Ratings
2% below category average
Hosted PBX9.80 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Multi-level Interactive Voice Response (IVR)8.80 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Directory of employee names8.40 Ratings10.00 Ratings
User templates00 Ratings6.80 Ratings
Call reports00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Call Management
Comparison of Call Management features of Product A and Product B
8x8 Work
8.7
Ratings
3% above category average
NetFortris (discontinued)
7.4
Ratings
13% below category average
Answering rules9.10 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Call recording8.80 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Call park8.40 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Call screening9.10 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Message alerts8.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Mobile apps
Comparison of Mobile apps features of Product A and Product B
8x8 Work
8.9
Ratings
5% above category average
NetFortris (discontinued)
9.0
Ratings
12% above category average
Mobile app for iOS9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Mobile app for Android8.80 Ratings9.00 Ratings
VoIP system collaboration
Comparison of VoIP system collaboration features of Product A and Product B
8x8 Work
-
Ratings
NetFortris (discontinued)
7.5
Ratings
7% below category average
Video conferencing00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Audio conferencing00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
User Ratings
8x8 WorkNetFortris (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.9
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.7
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.5
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.9
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.2
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
9.8
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.8
(0 ratings)
9.7
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.9
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.9
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
8x8 WorkNetFortris (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
8x8 Work is an ideal communication platform for intra-organization communication; it is very easy to find any employee at my firm and quickly ascertain their availability. I don't like for outside clients to know my direct line, so I would like to be able to mask my number in outgoing texts/display our general reception number so that those clients are not confused on how best to call in to me.
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Following up with leads and prospects with its Click to Dial feature makes Fonality an effective tool to a sales organization. Misdials and wrong numbers are virtually eradicated by this feature. In addition to saving a few seconds for every call, you add time to your day and are able to conduct more business throughout the year. The Polycom phones are a little basic and finding missed calls is a little difficult. Also, the HUD is a little confusing. Depending on how you dial or how the call comes into the office, the call log may only show your extension instead of the external number being contacted.
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Pros
  • Direct calls to the extensions.
  • Callers were able to either talk to our individual staff members or leave a message.
  • We loved having a record of every single call that came in for CRM purposes.
  • We loved being able to collect our messages from the console.
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  • Customer service is outstanding! They were quick to solve any issue we had.
  • During set up the Fonality staff member did not close out our set up ticket until we were completely satisfied and ready to use the system on our own.
  • We needed a cordless system to use in our small office and it works great!
  • I love being able to keep the Fonality line at my desk and then pass it off to an attorney when my work day ends. It has just been a perfect set up.
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Cons
  • The auto attendant has built in text-to-speech, but this same engine should be put to use for individual and ring group voicemail messages.
  • Call forwarding in the mobile app should be relocated for easier access. Instead it's buried somewhere under the generic "account settings"
  • The default user template disables voicemail text transcription. Why???
  • One fax number should be accessible by app for more than 1 user. Responsibility for faxes is usually distributed among a few people in a typical small office setting.
  • Ability to receive and send SMS messages from a shared "main company number" would be awesome. Ability to assign this to certain users would rock!
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  • Bugginess - Some things just really need some tweaking. I had to get very creative with my call routing and hold music, because the in-queue announcements don't work right at all. For example, even set to 'play once' it would loop the 'you are the first caller' announcement over and over, and cause call drops. Or my caller-name ID, which shows the registered user's name on each line on outgoing calls, even though it's not set to such anywhere in the CP settings.
  • Support - I'll give them 50/50 on this. My experience with Verizon VCE was everyone playing hot potato with issues and saying it was the responsibility of another department, meaning several phone calls and lots of hold time. Fonality doesn't have that issue, I've never really been passed around or blown off. However, some of the 'offshore' CS reps are... wow. I spent about half a dozen emails back and forth with two of them, trying to figure out why queues I deleted from the CP randomly and consistently reappeared in the HUD. Most of those emails were spent trying to explain that no, my issue was NOT that I wanted to create those queues again in the CP.
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Likelihood to Renew
Everyone at the company now have the experiance needed to make phone calls, meetings, video conferencing. It's easy to use is unmatched in the industry. It's been a solid product throughout. The phone tree was easy to setup with the implementation team and they guided us throughout the process
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We've already made a deep investment in the system hardware. We wouldn't be interested in another system at this point! And by the look of my colleagues faces when they see the HUD, I don't think we'd want to switch to a system that would limit us or take away any of these features! We may look at putting the server in the cloud, should internet outages prove to be such a common issue that it is preventing our other locations from functioning smoothly
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Usability
I'm not using it to its full capacity like a Zoom or teams Workspace. I use the service for phone calls, hate application on my cellphone and the voicemail apparatus. This we like because it gives us the feel of a large firm when we aren't.
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When the system works it is wonderful. But I feel the sluggish UI and web interface really kill most of what is good about this product. Other than that the system works like a charm and is very easy to learn the administrative portion of the platform.
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Reliability and Availability
In the time I have used 8x8 Virtual Office, the core system has been up and running almost flawlessly though we do have a slight performance degradation from time to time as is expected of cloud software. The one recurring issue for us is that the fax connection is not always functional for outbound messages. We usually have to retry three or four times to get the fax to connect reliably to the destination machine. Once connected, it's smooth sailing.
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Fonality has been available to us 99% of the time. There have rarely been any lengthy outages. If any issues do occur, their support staff is available around the clock to help. This is important, since communication is a big part in our company and availability of the phone system is important in maintaining this reliability
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Performance
No problems with performance, Pages load as they should. I can't answer on the reports side as only a handful of our Admins ( call center ) currently use that side of the software. It does intergrate very well with Office for meetings and conferences. Sometimes there is a slight lag or static when users are talking, but we found this to be a cause of a users computer had not restarted in a while, Once the user restarts thier computer the problem is resolved, So this is not an issue with 8x8
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Fonality's performance is excellent. The phones work flawlessly and the calls are clear. It is a well put-together system that does not need daily support. It is not complex from a user standpoint, as most of our staff are quick to learn how to use the phones. More systems should strive to work as well as Fonality's
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Support Rating
We are a USA based organization. Support was refreshingly quick (callback via phone or email, online live agents). Agents are knowledgeable, thorough in their explanations, and extremely patient when dealing with end-users at various levels of the ICT knowledge spectrum.
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Because of their customer support and their attention for details in our problems that we face during our initial stage. We simply love fonality just for the way we are treated when we reach them with our fonality issues - they take it seriously and resolve it as early as possible and the most important part is we dont need to keep on insisting them to do so.
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In-Person Training
The person giving the training was very engaged, He also listened and answered all the questions. He created a video for our company while he was training in case we needed to reference it again in the future. The questions he could not answer were answered within 24 hours via an email to the IT support staff here so we could share the answers with the rest of the group
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Training was provided by the in-house IT administrator. Fonality was able to provide support to the admin, who then assisted the users. It went smoothly and all the details and functions of the system were made available to the office staff. Any questions were answered promptly and if any issues did arise, Fonality was available to answer them
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Online Training
Good and Simple Training Module, also Certification is available.
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Training was excellent, but most of what they had was webinars and not real world situation for our company's need. It would be better to have them remote in my local computer and test my system using inbound / outbound calls. This would have made it easier to learn and more relevant
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Implementation Rating
We had a third party implement and set up the system the way we wanted it - after that I do all changes or additions. The vendor was very knowledgeable and had it up and running in less than an hour.
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Everything from the installation to the implementation has been great with Fonality, there is a lot of freedom to how the system will operate but the freedom comes at a cost of more technical experience to make sure it is configured correctly. The staff is very helpful can will make sure that the system is setup correctly and work perfectly.
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Alternatives Considered
8x8 Work offers all we need in an easy-to-use format. Zoom seemed to have too many features that are not required and can be overwhelming to Users who are not the most Tech-Savvy. The price point of 8x8 is great, too. Get everything we need at a low cost.
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I'm a hardware guy, always had panasonic and siemens PBXs. You can't compare them to Fonality. It is so complex to program them and with less functionalities, it is a waste of money and time in my humble opinion. I've also installed my own Asterix servers and used to admin Avaya Enterprise level PBXs and I have a special part in my heart for them but when we started to search for a solution for our new building, Fonality rose among the other services like Vonage. Fonality is the perfect solution for any business that uses Telefone as a marketing and sales platform.
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Scalability
8x8 100% suits Business needs to connect with from anywhere and everywhere. The Softphone features is very light and very easy to use also very reliable with Zero Downtime. Can also be set personal Voicemail over softphone at anytime and logs everything is very easy to find.
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It is easy to scale this system, as long as you have the proper technical staff available to support it. Adding users and phones is straightforward. The main work involves having the physical network in place and configuring the networking equipment. Overall, it is not that difficult as long as all of this is in place.
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Return on Investment
  • Moving to 8x8 Work helped us consolidate our soft phone and IVR needs with our contact center platform and save thousands in the first year alone.
  • All of the 8x8 Work products I've worked with have great integration options from CRMs like Zoho/Salesforce to Google and Microsoft Office.
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  • Fonality - VOIP features have allowed our staff to be more effective in communicating with their constituents both within and outside the organization
  • Fonality resolved a bunch of call restriction issues with student calling capabilities we were having with our previous phone service
  • Fonality has enabled us to use much cheaper carrier services.
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ScreenShots

NetFortris (discontinued) Screenshots

Screenshot of Fonality's Heads Up Display (HUD) Web dashboard is home base for connecting with colleagues and customers.Screenshot of Chatting is easy in HUD as they are easily launched by hovering over a fellow user's avatar. Chats are also available within Groups and Conferences.Screenshot of Managers with Fonality's Advance Call Center license can Barge, Monitor, or Whisper with one click. Useful for training, customer insights, and quality assurance. Real-time call queue information is shown in the Dock area to the right.Screenshot of Every Fonality system comes with voicemail boxes for all users, but with optional Voicemail Transcription you'll never have to listen to a voicemail again. Transcribed voicemails are delivered in HUD and via email.