CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service)

Enrich and improve the customer experience by integrating communications features into your business applications.

By clicking the button above, you consent to receiving calls and emails from RingCentral. Calls may be connected using automated technology.

Thank you.

A RingCentral sales advisor will contact you within 24 hours

A call center manager using advanced communications features made possible by RingCentral's CPaaS solution

Employee access RingCentral App on both laptop and mobile device

What is CPaaS?

Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) is a cloud-based delivery model that allows companies to embed extra communication features into existing business applications. It does this by providing communication APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), through which companies can deploy capabilities like voice, video, and SMS.

RingCentral—one of the leading Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) providers—also offers a comprehensive CPaaS solution through our Developers platform.

Get access to free communications APIs and embedded communications technology, and easily add voice, SMS, meetings, data, and more to your business apps.

From softphone dialers for instant calls and texts to data analytics for better insight into your workflows, the possibilities are virtually endless.

Access APIs in your production environment with RingEX

Users of RingEX, RingCentral’s comprehensive unified communications platform, get access to our APIs in their production environments as part and parcel of their plans.

That means you get a complete out-of-the-box employee experience solution with APIs for voice, SMS, social messaging, team messaging, video, fax, data, configuration, AI, and more. All starting from just $20 per user, per month.

Or, you can get a watermarked sandbox as a separate development environment to build and test business applications without accessing, impacting, or modifying production data. That’s available at just $10 per month for two included phone extensions, and a further $5 per month for each additional extension.

Why customers choose RingCentral

Developed for business use

Do more with expanded capabilities from RingCentral. Apart from unlimited calling and conferencing, toll-free numbers, and custom caller IDs, your business can leverage texting, faxing, online meetings, and more—all without switching systems.

Mobility at all times

You only need one business number to call, text, or fax from any mobile device. All incoming calls are transmitted through the same call-routing flows in your office.

Simple to set up, easy to use

RingCentral empowers your team to respond to business fluctuations by customizing your phone system using your online account. All it takes is a day or less to be fully operational.

Top-grade security and reliability

Communication goes through encrypted networks and layers of authentication, ensuring a secure transmission journey—that's top-notch security delivered by one of the industry's most reliable service providers.

Next-level customer support

See what award-winning customer support looks like with RingCentral. How much do we value customers? We make sure we're always available for technical support, consultations, and recommendations.

Reasonable pricing

Gain a competitive edge with the most advanced communications system today. You pay one affordable amount and get a single itemized bill every month. Costs remain low since you don't pay for maintenance upgrades.

RingCentral business communications plans for your small business

PAY ANNUALLY AND SAVE UP TO 33%

Volume discounts for 50+ users available. Contact our sales experts to learn more.

Compare all plans and features

Is CPaaS for me?

Advantages of Communications Platform as a Service

Is CPaaS for me?

If you want better communication features but you don’t want to part ways with your existing business applications, then CPaaS is for you.

Business apps are the lifeblood of modern companies, whose operations revolve around sales software, CRMs, and other collaboration platforms. RingCentral offers a range of communications APIs for integration into your custom business solutions.

Keep up with the constantly-evolving tech in your industry with Communications Platform as a Service

For companies who want to stay competitive and keep up with tech advancements that are usually reserved for big organizations, CPaaS is heaven-sent.

It’s a faster, more affordable alternative to overhauling your business apps to enable communications features. That makes it perfect for startups and mid-sized businesses who’d think twice about developing their own custom applications.

For example, most businesses run software suites from Google and Microsoft, like Gmail and Office 365. RingCentral has existing integrations that add some of the latest communication features to these commonly-used business apps.

Communications integrations available with RingCentral include:

Click-to-dial functions for phone numbers appearing in documents, emails, or even web pages.
A dialer that allows you to call or text from your favorite CRM, like Salesforce.
Options to schedule, host, or join an online meeting directly from your Google Calendar or Office 365 calendar, so you don’t have to navigate away from the work you’re doing.

Check out our App Gallery to discover how to integrate these features into the productivity apps you’re already using for your business, without exerting too much effort in programming or development.

Do you have custom business applications that you use for your organization? Our communications APIs can help you add features to it.

But CPaaS is more than just a way to add new functions to your applications—it’s also a way to streamline your workflows. You can improve the transition from a business app to a communication function, making it much simpler and easier.

Communications APIs for your business solutions

Revolutionize the way your business communicates. We provide businesses with a communications platform with pre-built APIs for voice, SMS, team messaging, online meetings, and fax.

Voice APIs – Add advanced voice capabilities like WebRTC, answering rules, call flip, call park, call recordings, and more.
SMS APIs – Add support for SMS, MMS, and group SMS/MMS with delivery/read status notifications.
Fax APIs – Send online faxes directly from your business applications and add delivery/read notifications.
Online Meetings APIs – Manage your online meetings with key business tools to bring your employees and customers together.
Team Messaging APIs – Build rich chatbots with real-time notifications into your business applications.
Data APIs – Gain more insight by adding access to different data like call logs and call recordings.

Our CPaaS APIs are:

Fast – Integrate them on your web application in 15 minutes. Leverage the professional UX and QA used in RingCentral’s own apps.
Extensible – You can extend the user experience of RingCentral’s own integration by coming up with your own custom version.
Customizable – Personalize user experience by adding your own touches. Update the user interface with your own colors and fonts through CSS.

Embedded communications for voice and text

RingCentral Embeddable lets you instantly add voice and text functions into your web applications through an embedded full-featured softphone. Get an integrated experience that increases productivity and efficiency without the long development time.

Why RingCentral?

RingCentral is more than just a CPaaS vendor—we equip businesses with an industry-leading unified communications solution.

We are one of the few CPaaS providers that offers your business the best of both worlds. You’ll get a complete phone system with all the bells and whistles, plus a platform where you can add voice, text, fax, meetings, and data into your own business solutions.

Advantages of Communications Platform as a Service

Communications Platform as a Service, just like UCaaS, is a cloud-based service delivery model suited for any size and type of business. But unlike UCaaS, which unifies all your business communications in one platform, CPaaS adds various features like voice, video calling, and messaging to existing business applications.

The idea is to improve or enrich your communication channels, leading to greater efficiency for employees and better communication with customers. No wonder the CPaaS market, worth $16.34 billion in 2024, is expected to reach $61.59 billion by 2029.

But if you’re still not convinced, check out the following list of advantages to using CPaaS:

Access the best communications features without overspending

The main advantage of CPaaS is the cost savings it brings. In the past, you’d have had to build your own infrastructure to host different communications features, but CPaaS makes it easy with pre-built APIs.

Plus, CPaaS lets you select communication channels to integrate into your existing apps, instead of buying a one-size-fits-all solution with features you don’t actually need. That’s on top of the savings you get from cloud-based delivery and a pay-as-you-go subscription model.

With our CPaaS, you can integrate different features into your own business applications at no additional cost—as long as you already have a RingEX subscription.

Improve agent experience in your contact center

Elevate how your agents interact with customers by integrating new communications features. For example, you can add a WebRTC feature so agents can take phone calls through their browser—saving them from switching to a different app.

A call recording feature will help you to coach call center agents and ensure compliance. Add analytics into team workflows to get insights into how they talk to customers, so you can identify areas of improvement and make informed decisions.

CPaaS is fully scalable, so you can easily add or remove features as needed. Expecting an influx of customer inquiries after a product launch? Add a messaging channel to reduce call queues and take the pressure off agents.

Enhance customer experience

When you add communications features into your CRM, your agents no longer have to exit the app to make or receive phone calls from customers. This will help you improve efficiency while personalizing customer interactions. Also, by adding voice, SMS, and even online meetings into your CRM, customers have the option to contact you through their preferred channel.

CPaaS makes it easy to customize your tech stack to suit the needs of your unique customer base, and adapt to meet their changing preferences. All of this should help you improve customer experience in the long run.

These are just some of the benefits you can get from a CPaaS vendor. Remember that this technological advancement is driven by the need to make operations simpler, easier, and just plain better for businesses—especially those focused on customer and sales interactions.

If you want a seamless integrated system for your processes so you can focus on what’s important to you, our cloud-based CPaaS platform is one of the best ways to achieve it.

UCaaS and CPaaS in one communications solution

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) refers to the seamless delivery of various communication and collaboration apps and tools through one platform.

CPaaS, on the other hand, delivers similar communications capabilities to UCaaS but does this separately through communication APIs. In essence, it allows users to integrate voice, text, online meetings, and other comms features individually into their own business solutions.

RingCentral is better known as one of the leaders in UCaaS; however, we’re also one of the top CPaaS providers. Our solution is designed to help organizations vastly improve business apps like sales software and CRM, through the addition of useful features such as notifications, multi-factor authentication, and a click-to-call option.

Organizations that combine UCaaS and CPaaS can get the best of both worlds with a top-notch business phone system that integrates communications and collaboration tools into existing apps, making the service truly customized for daily use.

Find out more about how RingCentral can help you boost your business communications with a free demo

CPaaS FAQs

What does CPaaS mean?

CPaaS stands for Communications Platform as a Service. Like any “as a Service” model, you subscribe with a monthly or annual fee rather than purchasing the solution outright.

This technology allows you to build your own customized tech stack, by integrating new communications features and channels into your existing business apps.

How does CPaaS work?

CPaaS enables you to integrate communications features into your own apps by using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

APIs are a set of protocols that enable communication and data transfer between two endpoints, typically different software components or devices. Communications APIs usually rely on VoIP networks to transfer data between the endpoints.

With CPaas, you’re using the APIs as building blocks to create a bespoke communications infrastructure—without the need to build a whole new backend. CPaaS vendors provide the complete development framework, plus tech support if you need it.

Important details and disclaimers