VoIP for 10 Users: Costs, Features & Best Systems UK 2026

Last updated: April 2026

Ten users is the sweet spot for VoIP. You are big enough that a proper phone system makes a real difference to how your business operates, but small enough that setup is straightforward and costs stay manageable. This is also the size where volume discounts start to kick in with most providers, so you get more for your money than a five-user business without the complexity that comes with larger deployments.

At Compare The Networks, we have been helping UK businesses find the right phone systems since 2008. We are OFCOM regulated, have a 4.3/5 Trustpilot rating from over 1,000 reviews, and we have set up VoIP for thousands of businesses at exactly this size. This guide covers everything you need to know: real costs, the features that actually matter at ten users, how the main providers compare, and what to watch out for.

With the PSTN switch-off completing in January 2027, every traditional phone line in the UK is going digital. If you have not already moved to VoIP, now is the time.

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Monthly Costs for 10 Users

The first thing most businesses want to know is what this is going to cost. At ten users, you start to see meaningful volume discounts compared to smaller deployments.

Per User Pricing by Tier

Total Monthly Costs at 10 Users

Notice the per-user cost at the Standard tier drops to around £10+VAT at ten users, compared to £12+VAT at five users. That is the volume discount in action. Over a year, the difference adds up to a meaningful saving.

Volume Discounts: What to Expect

At ten users, most providers offer discounts of 10-20% compared to their published per-user rates. The exact discount depends on the provider and the contract length you commit to. Here is a rough guide:

We generally recommend 12-month contracts. They give you the bulk of the available discount without locking you in for too long. If a provider is offering dramatically better pricing on a 36-month deal, that is usually a sign their standard pricing is inflated.

Cost Comparison: VoIP vs Traditional System for 10 Users

The savings at ten users are substantial. Even on a premium VoIP plan, you are paying less than the line rental alone on a traditional system. And there is no five-figure hardware purchase to finance.

Get a tailored VoIP quote for 10 users, free and no obligation

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Features That Matter at 10 Users

At five users, basic call handling covers most needs. At ten, you start needing features that help manage call flow properly. Here is what makes a real difference at this size.

Call Groups and Ring Strategies

With ten people, you probably have distinct teams or functions. Sales, support, accounts, administration. Call groups let you route incoming calls to the right team automatically. When someone calls your sales number, it rings the three people in your sales team. When they call support, it rings the support team.

Within each group, you can set different ring strategies:

• Ring all: Every phone in the group rings simultaneously. First to answer gets the call. Best for small teams where speed matters.
• Sequential: Phones ring one at a time in a set order. Good when you want a primary person to answer first, with others as backup.
• Round robin: Distributes calls evenly across the team. Prevents one person getting all the calls while others sit idle.
• Least recent: Routes to whoever has been idle longest. Ensures fair distribution.

Hunt Groups

Similar to call groups but with more sophisticated routing. If nobody in the first group answers within a set time (say 15 seconds), the call automatically moves to a second group, then a third, then eventually to voicemail or an external number. This means calls almost never go unanswered.

At ten users, a typical hunt group setup might look like:

1. Main number rings reception (5 seconds)
2. If no answer, rings the relevant department (15 seconds)
3. If still no answer, rings the mobile app for all available staff (15 seconds)
4. Finally, goes to voicemail with a callback promise

Reception Console

If you have a dedicated receptionist or office manager who handles incoming calls, a reception console view is extremely useful at ten users. It shows all ten extensions at a glance: who is on a call, who is available, who is away. The receptionist can transfer calls with a click, see the caller's number (or name if they are in the system), and manage the whole office's call flow from one screen.

On a physical desk phone, this is done with BLF (Busy Lamp Field) keys, where each key lights up to show the status of a colleague's extension. On a softphone, it is a visual panel on screen.

Auto-Attendant with Multiple Levels

At five users, a single auto-attendant menu is usually enough. At ten, you often want a two-level menu:

Level 1: "Press 1 for Sales, 2 for Support, 3 for Accounts" Level 2: "For existing orders press 1, for new enquiries press 2"

This routes callers precisely without anyone having to manually transfer calls. It also means your team spends less time on routing and more time on actual conversations.

Call Recording

At ten users, call recording becomes almost essential rather than nice-to-have. With more staff handling calls, recording provides:

• Training material for new starters (listen to how your best people handle calls)
• Dispute resolution (what was actually said on the call)
• Quality monitoring (are calls being handled professionally)
• Compliance (required in some regulated industries)

Most VoIP providers include call recording at the Standard tier. Recordings are stored in the cloud and accessible through the admin portal.

Shared Voicemail Boxes

Departmental voicemail boxes that the whole team can access. If someone calls sales out of hours and leaves a message, any member of the sales team can pick it up the next morning. Much better than having it stuck on one person's individual voicemail.

For a comprehensive look at all the features available on modern VoIP platforms, see our hosted VoIP for business guide.

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Provider Comparison for 10 Users

At ten users, provider choice matters more than at five. The differences in pricing, features, and support quality are amplified when you multiply them across ten licences. Here is how the main options compare:

For ten-user deployments, 3CX continues to be our top recommendation. The combination of features, flexibility, and pricing is hard to beat. At this size, the ability to configure sophisticated call groups, hunt groups, and auto-attendant menus through the 3CX admin portal really pays off. And because 3CX is SIP-trunk agnostic, we can pair it with the carrier that gives you the best call rates for your usage pattern.

Want to see exact pricing for your 10-user setup? Get a free quote

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Hardware Planning for 10 Users

At ten users, hardware decisions need a bit more thought than at five. You are spending more on phones, so getting the right mix matters.

Recommended Hardware Setup

Here is what we typically recommend for a ten-user office:

Total hardware cost for a typical 10-user setup: £530-780 purchased, or £27-39+VAT/mo leased.

Desk Phones vs Softphones at 10 Users

At this size, we almost always recommend a hybrid approach. Staff who are desk-based and handle lots of calls get physical phones. Staff who are frequently out of the office, working from home, or primarily use their mobile get softphone apps.

The split is usually around 60/40 or 70/30 in favour of desk phones, but it varies hugely by business type. A ten-person accountancy practice might put a desk phone on every desk. A ten-person digital agency might only have two or three physical phones in the whole office.

Conference Phones

At ten users, you might also want a conference phone for meeting rooms. A good IP conference phone (like the Yealink CP920) costs £200-300 and connects to your VoIP system as an additional extension. It is a one-off cost that makes speakerphone meetings much better than huddling around a desk phone.

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Do You Need Dedicated Broadband?

This is a question that comes up often at the ten-user level. The short answer for most businesses: no, but there are situations where it makes sense.

Bandwidth Requirements

Each simultaneous VoIP call uses about 100kbps in each direction. With ten users, worst case (everyone on a call at once) is 1Mbps up and 1Mbps down. A standard FTTC connection at 80/20 Mbps handles this with massive headroom.

When a Shared Connection Works Fine

If your office broadband is stable, has low latency, and is not being hammered by large file uploads or video streaming throughout the day, a single broadband connection handles ten VoIP users and general internet traffic without breaking a sweat.

We offer Sky SOGEA broadband at 80/20 for £35+VAT/mo. For most ten-user offices, this is all you need.

When to Consider Dedicated or Dual Lines

You might want a second broadband line if:

• Your business involves regular large file transfers (video production, architecture, engineering)
• Staff are frequently on video calls alongside voice calls
• Your primary broadband provider has reliability issues
• You absolutely cannot afford any phone downtime (e.g. a medical practice or emergency service)

In these cases, having your VoIP traffic on one line and general internet on another provides a clean separation. Alternatively, a 4G/5G backup connection (£15-25/mo) gives you automatic failover if your main broadband goes down.

Network Quality of Service (QoS)

At ten users, your router's default settings typically handle VoIP fine without any special configuration. However, if you are experiencing any audio quality issues, enabling QoS (Quality of Service) on your router can help. QoS prioritises voice packets over other traffic, ensuring calls stay clear even when someone is downloading a large file.

Most modern business routers have QoS settings built in. It takes five minutes to configure and can make a noticeable difference if your broadband is under heavy use.

If you are experiencing quality issues with your VoIP calls, our VoIP problems and solutions guide covers every common cause and fix.

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Management and Admin Features

At ten users, you need proper admin tools. Not because VoIP is complicated to manage at this scale, but because having visibility into how your phone system is being used helps you run your business better.

What Good Admin Looks Like

User management: Add, remove, and modify users through a web portal. Change extension numbers, set permissions, assign to call groups. Should take minutes, not hours or support tickets.

Call analytics: See total call volumes, calls per user, average call duration, peak times, missed calls. At ten users, this data starts showing meaningful patterns. Maybe Monday mornings are your busiest time and you need all hands on deck. Maybe one team member is handling twice the call volume of everyone else.

Call flow editing: Change your auto-attendant messages, adjust ring group membership, update business hours, all through a web interface. You should not need to call your provider every time you want to change which phones ring when.

Voicemail management: Centralised voicemail access, voicemail to email forwarding, shared departmental voicemail boxes. All configurable through the admin portal.

Call recording access: Search, play back, and download call recordings. Filter by date, user, or phone number. Essential for training and dispute resolution.

Self-Service vs Managed

At ten users, you have a choice: manage the system yourself or let your provider handle changes. With 3CX, the admin portal is intuitive enough that most businesses handle day-to-day changes themselves (adding a new starter, changing a ring group, updating hold music). For bigger changes, like restructuring your call flow or setting up a new department, we handle it as part of our ongoing support.

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Multi-Site and Remote Worker Considerations

Ten-user businesses often have a more distributed setup than five-user ones. You might have eight people in the office and two working from home. Or six in one office and four in another location. VoIP handles all of these scenarios natively.

Remote Workers

Every VoIP user gets access to mobile and desktop apps. A remote worker's setup is identical to an office worker's experience, just without the physical desk phone. They make and receive calls on the business number, see colleague availability, transfer calls, and access voicemail. Callers have no idea whether they are reaching someone in the office or at their kitchen table.

Multi-Site

If you have two offices, VoIP treats them as one system. A caller rings your main number, the auto-attendant routes them, and calls ring across both sites. Inter-office calls are free (they are just internal extensions). Transferring a call from one site to another is seamless. No special hardware or configuration needed, it all runs through the cloud.

Shared Presence

Regardless of where your ten users are located, everyone can see everyone else's status: available, on a call, away, do not disturb. This is essential for efficient call handling when your team is spread across locations.

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Training Your Team

At ten users, training takes a bit more structure than at five. You cannot just show everyone individually during a quiet afternoon.

What Training Covers

For most users, VoIP training is genuinely simple. The phones themselves work like any phone, you pick up, dial, hang up. The new bits are:

• How to transfer calls (attended and blind transfer)
• How to use the mobile app
• How to check voicemail (and set up voicemail to email)
• How to see colleague availability
• How to pick up a call from a call group

For the person managing the system (usually the office manager or whoever looked after the phones before), there is a bit more to learn around the admin portal: adding users, changing call groups, running reports.

How We Handle Training

For ten-user deployments, we typically run a 30-minute group session for all users covering the basics, then a separate 30-minute session with the system admin covering the management side. Both sessions can be done remotely via screen share. We also provide written guides and videos for reference.

The reality is that most people are comfortable with the new system within a day. It is intuitive, and the mobile apps are just apps. If you can use WhatsApp, you can use a VoIP softphone.

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Setup Timeline for 10 Users

Total timeline from go-ahead to working system: typically 2-3 weeks. The longest part is number porting, which runs in the background. We can have you making calls on temporary numbers within days if needed.

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Scaling from 10 to 20+ Users

If your business is growing, it is worth knowing what changes when you go from 10 to 20 users. The good news is that on a platform like 3CX, almost nothing changes in terms of the system itself. You add more user licences, order more phones if needed, and extend your call groups.

The main differences at 20 users are:

• Better volume discounts (per-user cost drops further)
• You may want more structured call centre features (queue management, wallboards)
• Network considerations become more important (QoS, possibly dedicated VLAN)
• You might want a dedicated line for voice traffic

For the full picture on larger deployments, see our guide to VoIP for 20 users.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What volume discounts can I expect at 10 users?

Most providers offer 10-15% off their standard per-user pricing at 10 users on a 12-month contract. The exact discount varies by provider. When you request a quote through us, we negotiate with multiple providers on your behalf and present you with the best available pricing. Because we bring volume across all our customers, we often secure better rates than you would get going direct.

Can different team members have different VoIP plans?

Yes. Most providers allow you to mix and match tiers within the same account. Your receptionist might be on a Premium plan for call centre features while general office staff are on Standard. This lets you optimise costs by only paying for premium features where they are actually needed.

How do call groups work in practice?

You define groups in the admin portal (e.g. "Sales Team" with extensions 101, 102, 103). When someone calls your sales number, all three phones ring. You can also set a ring strategy: ring all at once, ring in sequence, or round robin to distribute calls evenly. If nobody answers within a timeout you set, the call overflows to another group, a mobile number, or voicemail. It takes about five minutes to set up and can be changed any time.

What if I have staff in different locations?

VoIP handles multi-site and remote working natively. Every user gets access to mobile and desktop apps, so they can work from anywhere with an internet connection. Calls between users are free regardless of location. The system treats everyone as if they are in the same office. You can even have different sites with different local phone numbers but managed through one central system.

Is 10 users enough for call queuing?

Absolutely. Call queuing is not just for big call centres. At ten users, a simple queue for your sales or support team can make a real difference. Instead of callers hearing a busy tone or going to voicemail during peak times, they hear "You are number 2 in the queue, your call is important to us" and hold until someone is free. On 3CX, basic call queuing is included in the standard licence.

How much does number porting cost?

Number porting is free in most cases. Your new VoIP provider handles the process. It takes 5-10 working days, during which your existing phones keep working normally. On the porting date, your numbers switch seamlessly to the new system. There should be no downtime and no missed calls during the changeover.

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Ready to Get Started?

If you are running a ten-user business and want to see exactly what VoIP would cost, including hardware, setup, and monthly fees, we can give you a detailed quote in minutes. We compare options across multiple providers and recommend the best fit based on how your team actually works.

As an OFCOM-regulated business with 18 years of experience, we have done this thousands of times. Our advice is impartial because we are not tied to any single provider.

For more context, our business VoIP page gives an overview of what we offer, and our hosted VoIP guide goes deep on the technology behind it all.

Get your free VoIP quote for 10 users