Compare Voco

How does Voco compare?

Name: Voco
Address: GB
Telephone: +443330436661
Price range: From £49/month

See how Voco stacks up against other UK answering services and AI receptionists. Transparent comparisons to help you make the right choice for your business.

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Choosing the right receptionist for your UK business

If you are searching for an AI receptionist or telephone answering service for your UK business, you will find no shortage of options. Some use human operators. Some use AI. Some combine both. The pricing models vary widely, from per-minute billing to monthly subscriptions, and the features that matter most to a plumber are not the same as those that matter to a dental practice or a letting agent.

This section compares Voco directly with the most commonly considered alternatives. Each comparison covers pricing, availability, how calls are handled, what happens to the information captured, and where each service fits best. The goal is to give you an honest picture so you can make the right decision for your business, even if that decision is not Voco.

Voco is an AI-powered inbound call answering service built for UK small businesses. Every plan includes a UK phone number, call transcripts, SMS and email notifications, and lead capture from the first month. There are no setup fees and no minimum contract. Plans start from £49 per month.

UK receptionist services compared

Most providers below publish a headline price, and one, alldayPA, publishes no price at all. Almost none of them publish what you will actually pay, because a headline is an entry point and the bill is decided by things most rate cards leave out: the minimum you are committed to each month, what happens to the rate at three in the morning, and how long you must give notice.

The table records what each provider states on its own website. Where a provider does not publish something, the cell says so rather than carrying an estimate. Voco publishes this comparison, so read it with that in mind, and note that on several rows a competitor is the stronger choice.

Published entry price, inclusions, contract minimum, out-of-hours treatment and staffing model for Voco and seven UK receptionist and answering services.
Provider	Published entry price	What that price buys	Contract minimum	Out of hours	Human or AI
Voco	29p per minute ex VAT, no monthly fee. Monthly plans from £49	Billed per minute, rounded up to the whole minute	None	Same 29p rate at every hour	AI
Moneypenny	AI receptionist from £25 per month. Human answering service: no rate card published	Not published	3 months on schemes with 150 inclusive minutes and below, 6 or 12 months on larger schemes. Notice of 1 to 3 months	Not published	Both, sold as separate products
AnswerConnect	From £45 per month	Not published. Plan detail sits behind a contact form on both the homepage and the pricing page	Not published	24 hours a day	Human. States "Always people, not bots"
alldayPA	Not published. The pricing page says "Get A Quote"	Not published. States "Pay per call/per minute, you choose"	Not published	Not published	Three contact centres. Trading since 1999
JAM	From £35 per month	Not published	No long contract, monthly invoicing	24/7	Human PAs
Face for Business	Taster £49. Message Only £99. Inclusive Minutes £115	Per-second billing, no setup fees, 7-day trial	Not published	Not published	Human
Smith.ai	AI: Free at $0 for 25 calls, then $3.00 per call. Pro $150. Enterprise $500. Human service from $300	Priced per call on the AI tiers	Not published	Not published	Both, sold as separate products
Ruby Receptionists	$250 per month for 50 minutes	50 minutes. Then $395 for 100, $720 for 200, $1,725 for 500. No activation, onboarding or setup fees	Not published	24/7 cover included on every plan	Human, with optional AI enhancements

Every figure above is sourced and dated at the foot of this page.

Voco vs Moneypenny

Moneypenny's AI receptionist starts at £25 a month; its human service is quote only. Voco publishes 29p a minute with no monthly fee and no contract.

Moneypenny sells an AI receptionist from £25 a month and a human telephone answering service priced on request, with minimum contracts of three to twelve months. Voco is 29p a minute with no monthly fee and no contract. Compared on published price, commitment and cover.

Voco Advantages

The rate you actually pay is published on the page, with no form in the way.No monthly minimum on pay as you go, so a quiet month costs close to nothing.No contract of any kind, so there is nothing to give notice on.One rate at every hour, including weekends and bank holidays.Monthly plans from £49 if steady volume makes one worthwhile.

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Voco vs AnswerConnect

AnswerConnect advertises from £45 a month and shows its plans only after you enter your details. Voco publishes 29p a minute with no monthly fee.

AnswerConnect is a UK live answering service staffed by people, 24 hours a day, advertising from £45 a month with full pricing behind a form. Voco is an AI receptionist at 29p a minute with no monthly fee and no contract. Compared on published price, model and cover.

Voco Advantages

The rate you actually pay is published, with no form in the way.No monthly minimum on pay as you go, so a quiet month costs close to nothing.No contract of any kind, so nothing to give notice on.Every call answered at once rather than queued when several ring together.One rate at every hour, including weekends and bank holidays.

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Voco vs AllDayPA

AllDayPA publishes no prices at all and quotes on request, with per call or per minute billing at your choice. Voco publishes 29p a minute, no monthly fee.

AllDayPA is a UK call handling service using real people, operating since 1999 from Salford. It publishes no prices and quotes on request, with per call or per minute billing at your choice. Voco is 29p a minute with no monthly fee and no contract.

Voco Advantages

The rate you actually pay is published, so you can compare without a phone call.No monthly minimum on pay as you go, so a quiet month costs close to nothing.No contract of any kind, so nothing to give notice on.Every call answered at once rather than queued when several ring together.One rate at every hour, including weekends and bank holidays.

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Voco vs Face for Business

A UK answering service with published prices and real PAs, compared with Voco on cost, cover and who actually answers.

Face for Business is a UK answering service using named human PAs, with plans published from £49 a month. Voco is AI, charged by the minute with no monthly fee. This compares what each costs, who answers, and which suits which kind of business.

Voco Advantages

One rate whatever the hour: evening, weekend and bank holiday calls cost the same as a Tuesday morning.No monthly fee on pay as you go. You pay for the minutes you use and nothing else.No queue. Ten callers at once are all answered at once.Published rate on the page, not behind a quote form.

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Voco vs Smith.ai

Smith.ai's AI receptionist starts free at 25 calls a month, then $3.00 a call, billed in US dollars. Voco is UK-based at 29p a minute with no monthly fee.

Smith.ai is a US provider selling both an AI receptionist and a human virtual receptionist service. The AI receptionist starts free at 25 calls a month; the human service starts at $300 a month. Voco is UK-based and charges 29p a minute with no monthly fee. This compares them on cost per call, currency and out-of-hours cover.

Voco Advantages

Priced and billed in pounds. No exchange rate movement between quote and invoice.No monthly minimum. A quiet month costs you close to nothing.Charged by the minute rather than by the call, so a 40-second call costs 40 seconds.UK business hours, UK phone numbers and UK data handling by default.

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Voco vs Ruby Receptionists

Ruby starts at $250 a month for 50 minutes, billed in US dollars. Voco is UK-based at 29p a minute with no monthly fee.

Ruby is a US virtual receptionist service with live human receptionists, priced from $250 a month for 50 minutes, with optional AI enhancements included in every plan at no extra cost. Voco is a UK AI receptionist at 29p a minute with no monthly fee. This compares them on cost per minute, currency and who answers.

Voco Advantages

Roughly a tenth of Ruby’s entry rate per minute, though against AI rather than a human receptionist.Billed in pounds, so the invoice does not move with the exchange rate.No monthly minimum and no allowance to waste in a quiet month.UK numbers, UK hours and UK data handling as standard.

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Voco vs JAM

JAM publishes a starting price of £35 a month with human PAs and no long contract. Voco is 29p a minute with no monthly fee and no contract at all.

JAM is a UK call answering service with human PAs, 24/7 cover and prices starting at £35 a month, though it does not publish a full rate card. Voco is a UK AI receptionist at 29p a minute with no monthly fee. This compares what each costs at your volume and what you commit to.

Voco Advantages

No monthly fee on pay as you go, so a quiet month costs close to nothing.Charged for the seconds you use rather than an allowance you might not use.No contract at all, so nothing to give notice on.Every call answered at once rather than queued when several people ring together.One rate at every hour, including weekends and bank holidays.

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How to choose between voice receptionist providers

Four numbers decide what a receptionist service actually costs you. A headline price is only the first of them. Get all four in writing before you sign, from us as much as from anyone else, because a service that looks cheap on one number can be the most expensive on the other three.

1. The per-minute or per-call rate

This is the unit you are buying. Ask which unit it is, because per-call and per-minute pricing behave very differently: a service billed per call is cheap for long calls and expensive for a run of short ones, and per-minute pricing is the reverse. Ask how the unit is rounded, too. Face for Business bills by the second, which is finer than Voco, because Voco rounds every call up to the whole minute. On a business whose calls are mostly under a minute, that rounding is a real cost and it is worth doing the arithmetic on your own call log.

2. The monthly minimum

Most services sell a bundle of inclusive minutes. In a quiet month you pay for minutes you never used, and in a busy one you pay the overage rate on top. The question to ask is what a month with almost no calls costs you. Ruby Receptionists publishes this clearly at $250 per month for 50 minutes, so you can work out the floor before you commit. Voco has no monthly fee on its pay as you go rate, so a quiet month costs close to nothing, though its monthly plans start at £49 and work the same way as everyone else's.

3. The out-of-hours rate

Evenings, weekends and bank holidays are where answering services have traditionally charged a premium, and it is the least consistently published of the four. AnswerConnect states 24 hours a day, Ruby includes 24/7 cover on every plan and JAM states 24/7. Several others do not publish how out-of-hours calls are treated at all. Voco charges the same rate at every hour, which is straightforward, but it is an AI service and that is a different proposition from a person picking up at midnight.

4. The notice period

The notice period is what you pay to leave if the service does not suit you. Moneypenny publishes its terms in useful detail: a 3 month minimum on schemes with 150 inclusive minutes and below, 6 or 12 months on larger schemes, and 1 to 3 months' notice. That is a longer commitment than Voco asks for, but Moneypenny telling you up front is more useful than a provider that does not say. JAM states no long contract with monthly invoicing. Voco has no contract minimum.

Why only some providers publish them

Human answering services are priced against a real wage bill, and that cost varies with how long your callers talk, how often they call and what hour they call at. A single published rate card would either be too high to win a small account or too low to cover a demanding one, so the honest commercial answer is a quote. That is why alldayPA publishes no prices at all and directs you to "Get A Quote", and why AnswerConnect puts plan detail behind a contact form.

It is a reasonable way to sell a human service. It is also why a like-for-like comparison of this market is difficult, and why the table above has as many gaps as it does. If a provider will not tell you the four numbers above before you talk to a salesperson, that is worth knowing, but it is not by itself evidence that the price is bad.

Comparing the others

Not every comparison worth making has Voco on one side of it. These two come up often enough to be worth setting out plainly, on the same published facts as the table above.

Moneypenny compared with alldayPA

The clearest difference is transparency. Moneypenny publishes an AI receptionist from £25 per month and sets out its contract terms: 3 months on schemes with 150 inclusive minutes and below, 6 or 12 months on larger schemes, and 1 to 3 months' notice. Its human answering service has no published rate card. alldayPA publishes no prices anywhere, and its pricing page offers "Get A Quote" and "Pay per call/per minute, you choose".

What alldayPA does publish is scale: trading since 1999, based in Salford, more than 500 million calls handled, more than 26,000 clients and three contact centres. If your priority is a long track record and UK contact centre capacity, that record stands on its own and neither Moneypenny's price list nor Voco's can match the length of it. If your priority is knowing the cost before a sales call, Moneypenny tells you more.

Moneypenny compared with AnswerConnect

These two are closer than they first appear, because the published entry prices are not measuring the same thing. Moneypenny's £25 per month is its AI receptionist. AnswerConnect's £45 per month is the entry price for a service it describes as human throughout: it states "Always people, not bots", 24 hours a day. What that £45 itself includes is not published. Even so, comparing £25 against £45 is comparing an AI product with a staffed one, and Moneypenny's own human service has no published price to set against it.

On the detail behind the headline, Moneypenny publishes contract minimums and notice periods where AnswerConnect keeps plan detail behind a contact form on both its homepage and its pricing page. On the promise itself, AnswerConnect is the clearer of the two: you know you are getting a person, at any hour, and for a business that wants a human voice at three in the morning that is a more definite commitment than any AI service can make, Voco included.

Where Voco is not the right choice

Voco's case is a narrow one: no monthly minimum, no contract, and one rate at every hour. If those are not what you are optimising for, several providers on this page beat it, and on published prices some of them beat it outright.

On headline price, Moneypenny is cheaper. Its AI receptionist starts at £25 per month, which is lower than any Voco monthly plan. Voco's £49 plan is more expensive on the headline, and the comparison only turns on the terms behind it.

If you want a person on the phone, Voco is the wrong product. JAM starts at £35 per month with human PAs, 24/7, monthly invoicing and no long contract, after 46 years in the business. That is a lower entry price than Voco's monthly plans, with people answering rather than software. AnswerConnect and Ruby Receptionists make the same human promise, and alldayPA has been doing it from UK contact centres since 1999.

If you want to try before you pay anything, Smith.ai has a free tier. Its AI service is $0 for the first 25 calls, then $3.00 per call, with Pro at $150 and Enterprise at $500. Voco has no free tier, only a demo line.

If your calls are short, per-second billing will beat us. Face for Business bills by the second and charges no setup fees, with a 7-day trial and plans at £49 for Taster, £99 for Message Only and £115 for Inclusive Minutes. Voco rounds every call up to the whole minute, so on a run of thirty-second calls Voco charges for a full minute each time and Face for Business does not.

Why UK Businesses Choose Voco

£49

Plans from £49/month, no surprises

24/7

Always available, never misses a call

Mins

Live in minutes, no onboarding wait

Contracts or setup fees

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Sources and dates

Every price and term on this page was read on each provider's own published pages on 5 September 2026, and refers to the specific product named in the row. Providers change their prices and terms without notice, and figures quoted in US dollars are published in dollars by the provider. Check the provider's own site before you buy. This comparison is published by Voco, which sells one of the services compared.

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