Sonetel Review – Features, Pros & Cons

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As a freelancer living abroad for over 6 years, I’ve made use of multiple virtual phone number apps for both business and personal use – with mixed success.

Many virtual phone number and business VoIP (voice over IP) phone services are aimed at larger companies, leaving freelancers, digital nomads, and personal users with little choice – or overly complicated solutions.

Sonetel is one service that sits in the middle-ground, providing virtual phone numbers (free and paid), call forwarding, voicemail, and plenty more to private users and businesses of all sizes.

In this Sonetel review, I’ll give you an in-depth analysis of the service and its features, pricing, pros and cons, and more.

Our Verdict

Sonetel offers excellent call quality and affordable plans, making it ideal for both business and personal use. Its wide geographic availability of numbers and efficient customer support additionally make it a top choice for me.

While its interface could do with a little fine-tuning, and the necessity to keep the app open to receive in-app calls may frustrate some, its reliable performance and overall value make it a strong contender in the virtual phone service market.

Use this link to get $10 free Sonetel credit once you’ve topped up $10.

Read on below for a full breakdown.

Quick Menu

• Key Features
• Call Quality
• Pricing
• User Experience
  • Initial Setup
  • Using the Apps
• Customer Support

Key Features

Global Phone Number and Calls

For businesses, freelancers, and private individuals, this is arguably the best feature that Sonetel offers. Being able to make calls to your clients and customers that appear as a local phone number simply looks professional and provides them with an additional avenue to get in touch with you. It’s also a lot cheaper when you factor in the local rates (or free minutes).

As someone living abroad for several years, I even use it to call friends and family back home – especially older family members who aren’t too familiar with the concept of a smartphone.

It also means you can call institutions like banks at local rates or even via freephone numbers that would otherwise be unavailable to you. My bank previously told me I couldn’t even call them from a foreign number for security reasons and would have to call a foreign (far more expensive) number instead. Thanks to Sonetel, I could simply buy a local number and call them for free.

Simply put, having access to a local number from anywhere can be a massive advantage.

Global Call Forwarding

Sonetel offers a convenient call forwarding feature that lets you route incoming calls from your virtual numbers to any number you own globally, at local call rates. This flexibility means you can receive calls on your regular number, whether it’s a standard SIM or from another virtual number provider, regardless of your location.

Take a hypothetical Germany-based freelancer with clients in the US. They could get a US number through Sonetel and direct incoming calls to their German mobile number. Under the paid plans, these calls count against the included plan minutes, effectively eliminating extra costs for receiving international calls.

I personally found it effective to forward calls to my Skype number. Living in Georgia (the country), which isn’t covered under the free call destinations, I use my German Skype number for forwarding calls to. This way, I avoid additional charges and can receive calls at any time.

This feature is particularly beneficial for traveling freelancers or business owners. It allows your clients to call a local number at local rates, while you can receive these calls anywhere in the world without the hefty costs associated with foreign call reception.

Voice response

Some of these are particularly useful for larger businesses, although even solopreneurs and non-business users can benefit from a few:

• Voicemail – Take a simple message, and even have the AI transcribe it and email it to you.
• Menu – Create an interactive menu to lead people down different paths (“For Support press 2…” and so on).
• Announcement – Play an announcement message and then hang up or forward the incoming call.
• Text-to-speech – Generate an AI voice message to be played to callers.

SMS to Email

While you can receive SMS messages with many of Sonetel’s numbers, you don’t receive them via the app. Instead, they appear in your associated email inbox.

For me personally, this wasn’t an issue, but if you’re expecting a fully integrated SMS experience, this isn’t it. Then again, SMS is something that many other VoIP and virtual phone app providers struggle with, so it’s fairly par for the course.

On the plus side, I was able to use Sonetel to receive SMS verification codes, something that isn’t possible with many other VoIP services I’ve tried (or that’s often limited to specific countries).

You can’t receive SMS to numbers from the following countries:

• Brazil
• Colombia
• Ghana
• Lithuania
• Nicaragua
• Denmark

“Free Forever” Phone Number

Sonetel offers a “free forever” phone number for incoming calls. This is especially beneficial if you want to establish a local presence in a particular region without incurring any monthly charges.

This comes with a couple of caveats:

• You have to host Sonetel’s free chat widget on your website (with a domain owned by you).
• You can only receive incoming calls.
• A message will be played to whoever calls you telling them that the call service is provided by Sonetel.

I chose to simply pay for a Premium plan which includes a free phone number in specific regions. Otherwise, numbers start from just $1.79/month. In these cases, none of the above applies, and you also get access to all additional premium features.

AI Services

Sonetel bundles a number of AI-based services with its paid plans, including:

• Write Meeting Minutes (upload an audio or video file to get a summary of key items and a full transcript)
• Generate a list of blog titles
• Write/rewrite blog articles
• Voicemail summaries

Since Sonetel’s AI services are powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, the quality is surprisingly good. Since (being a freelancer) I don’t partake in many meetings, I used most of my credits on content creation and voicemail summaries, and was happy with their accuracy.

Miscellaneous Features

In terms of features that aren’t necessarily interesting to individuals, freelancers, and small businesses, but still included, you have:

• Call recording – if you need to record calls for legal reasons or simply to cover yourself in the event that a customer “forgets” your agreement, call recordings can easily be set up and stored in the cloud.
• Team communication – chat to your colleagues from inside the app.
• Customer service chat – handle incoming chats from Sonetel’s own chat widget or Facebook Messenger.
• SIP trunking

Call Quality

I was very happy with Sonetel’s overall call quality – as long as my local connection was fast enough. This was the case on a variety of different networks, too. I tested it at home on a relatively slow 35Mbps connection, a 110Mbps 4G mobile connection, and a high-speed 5G connection. In all cases, the call quality was crisp, with very low latency that enabled naturally-flowing calls.

Only in one instance, when I hit a pocket of weak signal while driving, did the call quality dip to the point of robotic voices and eventually cutting out entirely. However, that’s simply one of the risks of using web-based phone calling.

Perhaps most surprising to me was that across 10+ hours of calls, no one I called ever realized I was calling over the internet (until I asked them). This is in contrast to some other VoIP-based services I’ve used in the past and people quickly picked up on poorer call quality and a faint “white noise” in the background.

This isn’t to say that Sonetel’s quality is perfect; it’s not on par with the quality of a regular phone call. However, for the purposes of both business and leisure calls, it’s more than acceptable.

When I asked people what they thought of the call quality, the only point that came up was that I was supposedly quieter than a regular phone call. However, this seemed a little hit-and-miss depending on who I called. Strangely, this only seemed to happen when I was making calls from an Android device – no one mentioned it during calls on an iPhone or via the desktop interface.

Note that you can only receive calls if the app is currently active or you have the web app open in your browser. Otherwise, you need to set up call forwarding to your local number. I set up call forwarding as a fail-safe, that way my phone would ring when I wasn’t online so I could either pick up if it was urgent, or simply call them back later.

Pricing

There are two ways in which you can use Sonetel:

• Sign up for a paid plan (single-month or annual), or
• Top up credit and use it on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Considering its business-oriented approach, call quality, and overall feature set, I was expecting Sonetel’s pricing to be on the higher side. Surprisingly, Sonetel’s plans are highly affordable and come with quite generous usage limits, especially when compared to much of the competition.

Paid plans also include a phone number, which you can choose once you’ve signed up. I chose a Polish number since most of my call destinations are EU-based, allowing me to make intra-EU calls at no additional cost, as well as allowing EU-based people to call me at local rates.

In the table below you can see some of the key features of each plan.

	Free	Premium	Business
Annual plan price (per month)	$0.00	$9.95	$29.95
1-month price	$0.00	$13.95	$39.95
Minutes included	0	2,000	4,000
Free phone numbers per user	0	1	5
Discount on other calls	0	40%	50%
Free calls to 40+ countries	❌	✔️	✔️
Caller ID	❌	✔️	✔️
Call recording	❌	✔️	✔️
SMS-to-email	✔️	✔️	✔️
Extra phone number price	From $1.79	From $1.79	From $0.79
Storage space for shared images and files	2GB (per company)	100GB (per user)	1TB (per user)

I chose the Premium plan, which suited my needs as a freelancer living abroad with clients across Europe and the US. The 33 hours of monthly call time were plenty for both business and personal calls.

The paid plans include free calls to over 40 countries, including much of the EU, as well as a mix of mobile or landlines in the US, UK, Australia, and many more.

My work calls are mostly to the EU and the US, and I call the UK to connect with family, so the plan fits well for me. However, it’s a good idea to review the list of call rates to ensure the countries you frequently call are included for free (as well as the type of number, whether mobile, landline, and so on). In case your preferred destinations aren’t all included, the paid plans still offer a decent discount on per-minute rates to those destinations (-40% for Premium and -50% for Business).

If you prefer to simply pay-as-you-go, most of the per-minute rates I checked were comparable to or cheaper than many competitors, so it’s not essential to buy a plan if you’re not a frequent caller.

If you call someone without a number active the recipient will see a random number from Sonetel’s pool of numbers and will be unable to call you back. However, you can acquire a Sonetel number, from $1.79/month or even get a free one, if you want a caller ID and the ability to receive calls.

User Experience

Initial Setup

You need to verify your Sonetel account before you can buy phone numbers and make calls. This is a regulatory requirement from many local authorities around the world to minimize illegal usage and abuse.

To get set up you need the following:

• A billing address for basic verification.
  • Proof of the address for full verification.
• An ID number for basic verification.
  • Proof of your ID for full verification.

It took roughly an hour for me to get basic verification approved, while the higher-level verification was finalized the following day – a fairly quick turnaround.

Additionally, to receive inbound calls to numbers from certain countries you also need to be approved by Sonetel’s number service provider. To get this started, simply email Sonetel support once you’ve purchased a number.

In my case, I wasn’t aware of this requirement and was initially confused as to why I wasn’t receiving inbound calls – this additional approval step could be better communicated at the point of adding a number. However, after contacting support it took less than half a day to get my EU-based phone number approved. If you’re only making outbound calls, you don’t need to worry about this.

Using the Apps

If you’re using Sonetel’s browser-based app, it’s generally a pretty good experience. On both mobile and the browser-based web app, pages load quickly and incoming calls generally register without a hitch.

I noticed that the billing and usage overview pages took a little while to load, likely since they’re pulling your individual data from a server. Fortunately, these aren’t pages that I visit a lot, but it stood out to me when compared to the rest of the app.

My main issue is that – perhaps as a result of primarily being a business-oriented rather than retail-facing service – I found the user interface a little more confusing than it needed to be.

For example, I naturally assumed that the icon featuring a person with a headset would direct me to the calls section. Surprisingly, it led to the “Customer Service” area, where interactions with chatbots and Facebook Messenger occur. Conversely, a separate chat bubble icon takes you to a multifunctional page for outbound calls and sending chat messages to other Sonetel users. Given that making calls seems like the central function of this page, a more intuitive design would be beneficial. While not a major setback, this unconventional layout initially caused some confusion for both myself and a colleague during our initial days of using the service.

Initially, I found it unclear whether certain calls were covered by my plan’s minutes. In the app, when you input a number on the dialpad, it displays the per-minute rate beneath it. While this information is useful, it would be significantly more helpful if the app also indicated whether the call is included in your plan’s free minutes. This seems like a straightforward enhancement that would greatly improve user experience. It’s worth noting that this is less of an issue with a paid plan, as you can’t make an outbound call if it’s not included in your plan. However, if you have additional credit, you might not realize the call wasn’t free until after it’s completed.

Customer Support

The main issue I had with Sonetel was initially not receiving inbound calls, so I sent them an email to get help. An agent replied to me in under 24 hours with a helpful email that explained why it was happening (the number hadn’t been activated and was reclaimed by Sonetel’s number provider) and helped activate a new number. It was a quick and easy process and the issue was resolved within a day.

If you’re in more urgent need of help, there’s also live chat and phone support, with local support numbers in 50 countries. I was connected to a helpful support agent via live chat in under 1 minute who quickly answered all my queries.

Sonetel’s support is available between 10:30 AM – 7:30 PM UTC Monday to Friday.

The Bottom Line