10 Best Google Voice Alternatives in 2026 (Tested and Priced)

If you need a free US number and you live in the United States, nothing here beats Google Voice and you should keep it. If you are outside the US, or you do not have a US phone number to register with, the strongest alternatives are OpenPhone for teams, Dialpad if you want the AI features, TwinPhone for cheap international calling from a browser, and TextNow if you want free and can live with ads. Everything else on this list is a narrower fit.

Google Voice's limitation is not price — it is eligibility. Personal accounts are US-only for new signups and the registration flow requires you to already hold a US phone number. That single requirement is what sends most people looking, and it is why "cheaper than Google Voice" is usually the wrong search: Google Voice is free. What you actually need is a service that will have you.

This list is ordered by how many people each option genuinely serves, not by who pays us. TwinPhone is our product and it is fourth, because for the majority of people replacing Google Voice — Americans who want a second line — OpenPhone, Dialpad and TextNow are better answers.

Every service below was assessed on five things: whether you can sign up from outside the United States, whether it gives you a real inbound phone number, what it charges to call an ordinary phone, whether it needs an app, and what it does badly. That last one is the criterion most comparison articles skip, and it is the one that decides whether a service works for you.

What "alternative" means here

Google Voice does three separate jobs: it gives you a free US phone number, it makes free US-to-US calls, and it makes paid international calls. Almost nothing replaces all three, so each entry below states which of the three it covers. A service that gives you a number but charges for domestic calls is not a Google Voice replacement for a US resident, and a service with free domestic calling but no number is not one either.

On prices

Competitor pricing checked 14 August 2026 against each provider's public pricing page. Rates change and several of these providers price by destination, so treat the figures as the shape of the pricing rather than a quote. TwinPhone's own rates are pulled from the same pricing engine that debits the wallet, so those are exact.

What is deliberately not here

Skype is absent because Microsoft retired it in May 2025 and it cannot be signed up for. WhatsApp, Telegram and FaceTime are absent because they only call other users of the same app, which is not what Google Voice did. Burner phones and eSIM data plans are a different product category.

OpenPhone is the closest thing to a straight upgrade on Google Voice for anyone using it for work. It gives you a real US or Canadian number, a shared inbox your colleagues can answer from, and it does not require an existing phone number to register. It starts around $15 per user per month, which is the catch.

What it does well

The shared-number model is genuinely good and Google Voice has no equivalent. Two people can watch the same line, hand a conversation over, leave internal notes on a thread, and see the full history of a contact across calls and texts. For a small business that currently has one person's Google Voice number acting as the company line, this is the upgrade.

Where it falls down

It is a subscription, per seat, and it does not get cheaper if you barely use it. International calling is available but is not the product's focus and the rates are unremarkable. And numbers are US and Canada only, so it does not solve the "I live in Portugal and want a local number" problem at all.

Who should pick it

Teams. If more than one person needs to answer the line, stop reading and use OpenPhone.

Dialpad is a full business phone system with live transcription, call summaries and coaching built in, starting around $15 per user per month. It is a much bigger product than Google Voice and priced accordingly, and it is the right choice only if you will use the parts that justify the price.

What it does well

The transcription is the best in this list by a distance, and it is real-time rather than after the fact. Call summaries land in your inbox without being asked for. If you run a sales or support team and currently pay separately for a dialer and a conversation-intelligence tool, Dialpad collapses those into one bill.

Where it falls down

It is heavy. There is an admin console, there are user roles, and there is a setup process measured in hours rather than minutes. For one person who wants a second number, it is the wrong shape of product entirely. International rates are, again, not the reason anyone buys it.

Who should pick it

Sales and support teams of five or more who will actually open the analytics.

TextNow gives you a free US phone number with free calling and texting inside the US and Canada, paid for by advertising. For a US-based user who wants a second number and does not want to spend anything, it is the closest free equivalent to Google Voice and it does not need an existing US number to sign up.

What it does well

Free is free. You get a real number that receives calls and SMS, and domestic calling costs nothing. There is a paid tier that removes ads, and there is a data plan if you want to use it as an actual phone service.

Where it falls down

Ads are in the app and they are not subtle. Numbers are recycled if the account goes inactive, which has caught out people who treated a free number as permanent — losing a number that services authenticate you against is a genuinely bad afternoon. International rates are mediocre and it is US and Canada only.

Who should pick it

US residents who want a disposable-ish second line for classified ads, deliveries and signups, and who will not build anything important on it.

TwinPhone is a browser-based pay-as-you-go calling service: no app, no SIM, no phone number required to register, and no subscription for outbound calls. It is on this list for one job specifically — calling ordinary phone numbers abroad cheaply from anywhere in the world — and it is our own product, which is why it is not higher.

What it does well

Signup asks for an email address and nothing else, which is the entire reason it appears in a Google Voice list: it will take you from any country. Calls run in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave or Safari with no install, and the person you call answers on their ordinary landline or mobile with no app on their side. Rates are $0.02/min to the US and Canada, from $0.1064/min to India, from $0.02/min to Mexico and from $0.1675/min to Japan, and the destination rate appears on screen before the call connects. Billing is per second with a minimum charge on very short answered calls, the smallest top-up is $10, and the balance does not expire.

Where it falls down

There is no free tier — US-to-US calls that Google Voice does for nothing cost $0.02/min here. Virtual numbers are US and Canada only at $3.19/month, so it does not solve local-number needs in the UK, the EU, Australia or Japan; those regulators require the operator to verify the end user's local address and that flow is not built. There is no video, no app-to-app messaging, no voicemail transcription, and inbound number ports are not accepted, so a Google Voice number cannot be moved onto it.

Who should pick it

People outside the US who cannot register for Google Voice at all, and people anywhere whose calling is mostly international. The full Google Voice comparison goes into the geographic restriction in more detail.

Talkatone is an ad-supported free calling and texting app for US and Canadian numbers, in the same category as TextNow but smaller and simpler. It gives you a free US number and free domestic calls, and it has been around long enough to be a known quantity.

What it does well

It is lighter than TextNow and the interface gets out of the way. Free US and Canada calling works as advertised over wifi or data.

Where it falls down

Smaller company, smaller support operation, and the same number-recycling risk that comes with any free number. International calling exists but is not competitive. No web client worth using, so you are on the phone app.

Who should pick it

Anyone who wants what TextNow offers and finds TextNow too cluttered.

RingCentral is a full enterprise phone platform with auto-attendants, call queues, extensions and video, priced from roughly $30 per user per month. Nobody replacing a personal Google Voice number should buy it, and any company with a receptionist should look at it.

What it does well

Everything a business phone system is supposed to do, done properly: IVR menus, ring groups, call recording, analytics, hardware desk-phone support, and integrations with the CRM you already run. Numbers in 100+ countries on business plans, which is far beyond anything else here.

Where it falls down

The price, and the fact that most of what you pay for goes unused by small teams. Contracts and per-seat commitments mean you pay in the months nobody calls. Setup is an IT project.

Who should pick it

Organisations with more than about twenty people who need extensions and queues. Our RingCentral comparison works through the cost crossover.

Grasshopper forwards calls from a business number to a phone you already own, from about $14/month, and it makes no VoIP calls of its own. That architecture is the whole product: it is a routing layer, not a calling service.

What it does well

Setup is close to instant and there is nothing to learn. You get a professional US or Canadian number, an auto-attendant, custom greetings and voicemail transcription, and your existing phone rings. For a sole trader who wants to stop giving out a personal mobile, that is exactly enough.

Where it falls down

No international outbound calling at any price — the calls run over your carrier, so you pay your carrier's rates and consume your plan minutes. Encryption is whatever your mobile network provides. Numbers are US and Canada only.

Who should pick it

US sole traders whose calling is entirely domestic. See the Grasshopper comparison for the forwarding-versus-VoIP distinction.

Hushed sells temporary and disposable phone numbers on short subscriptions, aimed at privacy rather than at being your main line. You can take a number for a week, use it for one purpose, and drop it.

What it does well

Short commitments that nothing else here offers. Numbers in several countries. It is honest about what it is for: selling something on a marketplace, a dating profile, a trial signup you do not want attached to your real number.

Where it falls down

Per-number subscriptions get expensive if you keep several. Not built to be a permanent line and it does not pretend to be. Calling rates are unremarkable.

Who should pick it

Anyone who needs a number for a defined, short period and then wants it gone.

Rebtel sells unlimited monthly calling plans to specific countries, typically around $10/month per destination. If you call one country a great deal and nowhere else, it beats per-minute pricing outright and beats everything else on this list.

What it does well

The arithmetic. Above roughly 200 minutes a month to a single destination, a flat plan wins and keeps winning. Long-established, with a large diaspora user base and the reliability that implies.

Where it falls down

Plans are country-specific, so calling three countries means three plans and the economics collapse. Per-minute rates outside a plan are not competitive. Mobile app only — there is no browser client. No virtual numbers in most markets.

Who should pick it

Heavy callers to exactly one country. Everyone else does better on pay-as-you-go.

Every major US carrier sells an international calling add-on for roughly $10 to $15 a month, and it is almost always the worst value on this page. It is on the list because it is what most people default to, and because it is occasionally the right answer.

What it does well

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for, and it uses the phone number you already have with the call quality of your cellular network. Billing arrives on a statement you already pay. For someone who makes two international calls a year and values not thinking about it, that convenience is worth something.

Where it falls down

The rates. Even with the add-on, carriers commonly charge $0.15 to $0.25 a minute to destinations that cost a fraction of that on any VoIP service, and without the add-on the same call can be several dollars a minute. You pay the monthly fee in months you make no calls, and the rate is not shown before you dial.

Who should pick it

People whose international calling is rare enough that the monthly fee still beats the effort of setting anything else up.

The figures below are the shape of each service's pricing rather than a quote for your specific corridor. Competitor pricing checked 14 August 2026 against each provider's public pricing page.

TwinPhone's rates in that row come from the same pricing engine that debits the wallet, so they are exact rather than indicative. Every other figure is a market claim about somebody else's rate card.

Most people arrive at this question with a specific blockage rather than a general preference. Match the blockage.

"Google Voice will not let me sign up"

You need a service with no US-number requirement: TwinPhone, OpenPhone, Dialpad or Hushed. TwinPhone is the cheapest of those if you mainly want to make calls rather than receive them, because there is no monthly fee at all.

"I want a free second number and I live in the US"

TextNow or Talkatone, and keep Google Voice if you can get it. Do not pay for something you can have free, and do not let anyone tell you a $15/month subscription is a Google Voice replacement for this use case.

"My international bill is too high"

Pay-as-you-go VoIP, unless you call exactly one country heavily, in which case Rebtel. Check the specific corridor rather than the headline rate — the gap between providers on a popular route can be several times over.

"Two of us need to answer the same line"

OpenPhone. Nothing else in this price bracket does shared inboxes properly, and Google Voice does not do them at all.

"I need a number in a country that is not the US"

RingCentral or Dialpad on a business plan, or a domestic provider in that country. TwinPhone rents US and Canadian numbers only and will not help here, and saying so is more useful than selling you something that will not work.

Two mistakes show up in nearly every "Google Voice alternatives" article, and both cost readers money.

Treating Google Voice as a paid product

Google Voice Personal is free. Articles that lead with "cheaper than Google Voice" are comparing against a price of zero, which no paid service beats. The reason to leave Google Voice is eligibility or international rates, not the monthly cost, and a recommendation that does not understand this will point you at a $15/month subscription to replace something free.

Confusing a number with a calling service

A virtual number receives calls. A calling service places them. Several entries on any such list do one and not the other, and the article rarely says which. If you want people to reach you, you need a number. If you want to reach people abroad cheaply, you need per-minute rates. Wanting both means either one service that does both or two services that each do one, and it is worth being clear which you are buying.

Ignoring what happens to a free number

Free numbers get recycled when accounts go quiet, at TextNow, Talkatone and Google Voice alike. If a number is the thing your bank texts, or the thing your family has saved, treat "free" as a feature with a maintenance requirement rather than as permanent.