Microsoft Teams Is Great for Chat and Video Calls, But Is It the Right Choice to Be Your Business Phone System?

If your team is like most medium-sized businesses today, Microsoft Teams is already where your internal work happens — chat, meetings, file sharing, the whole day-to-day. It’s a natural next question: can Teams also handle your external phone calls, so you’re not juggling a separate business phone system on top of it?

The honest answer is: yes, but “yes” comes with some fine print worth understanding before you commit.

Teams Doesn’t Call Outside Numbers Out of the Box

Teams handles calls between Teams users natively. But to call or receive calls from a real phone number outside your organization — a client, a vendor, a prospect — you need to connect Teams to the public phone network (the PSTN). Microsoft gives you three ways to do that:

Microsoft Calling Plans — Microsoft acts as your phone carrier directly. It’s the simplest option to turn on, but it comes bundled with Microsoft’s own pricing and minute allotments, and it’s only available in a limited set of countries.

Operator Connect — A middle-ground option. You pick a vetted telecom operator through the Teams admin center, and that operator handles the carrier relationship while staying integrated with Teams.

Direct Routing — The most flexible option. You (or a partner) connect your own carrier to Teams through a certified Session Border Controller (SBC). This gives you the most control over rates, routing, and existing phone numbers, but it also requires real telecom and IT expertise to set up and maintain — SBC certification, SIP trunk configuration, and emergency calling (E911) compliance are all things someone on your team, or a partner, has to own.

What “Going It Alone” Actually Involves

None of the three options above are technically difficult for Microsoft to offer — the complexity shows up in what your business has to manage afterward. If you go the Direct Routing route in-house, you’re taking on carrier negotiations, SBC hardware or hosting, PowerShell-level admin configuration, and ongoing responsibility for call quality and emergency calling compliance. Calling Plans avoids most of that complexity, but you give up flexibility and can end up paying Microsoft’s rates with fewer customization options.

For a business with a dedicated telecom-savvy IT team, doing this in-house is a real option. For most medium-sized businesses, a lot of specialized work bolted onto a team that’s already busy running the rest of the business.

Where Gabbit Fits In

This is the gap Gabbit’s Microsoft Teams integration is built to close: keeping the Teams interface your team already knows, while Gabbit handles the phone service behind it.

Here’s what that looks like in practice, according to Gabbit’s own published details:

• The integration is priced at $19 per user, per month (taxes included).
• It requires both a Microsoft Teams license and Gabbit’s Phone Connect license.
• Once set up, your office phone line rings simultaneously across your smartphone, computer, and desk phone, and you get portal-based control of call routing, ring groups, and auto attendants from within Teams.
• It includes unlimited calling in the US and Canada, voicemail-to-email with transcription, and an automatic disaster recovery feature that reroutes calls if something goes down.

You don’t have to rip out and replace your phones to get this running — if your team is already on laptops and mobile devices, that’s real cost and disruption saved compared to a full hardware refresh. One caveat: if you do want a standard desk phone, Gabbit says those are compatible, but they’re priced separately from the $19/user fee, not bundled into it.

Is It Cheaper Than Going It Alone?

This is where you’ll want to do your own comparison rather than take a blanket “we’re cheaper” at face value from any vendor, Gabbit included. The honest framing is: Gabbit’s flat per-user price removes the need to budget separately for SBC hosting, telecom expertise, and hardware — costs that are real but often not itemized when businesses evaluate a DIY Direct Routing setup. Whether that nets out cheaper for your business depends on your current phone bill, your team’s size, and whether you already have IT staff who could manage Direct Routing without added hires. Ask any provider — Gabbit included — for a side-by-side cost comparison against your current setup before deciding.

The Bottom Line

Microsoft Teams was built for chat and collaboration first, and its native calling options are available for $21to $25 per month — but with tradeoffs in flexibility, setup complexity, reliability, number porting and support. If your business wants the reliability of a dedicated cloud phone system without taking on the technical overhead of managing it yourself, a tailored Teams integration is worth a look.