What each one actually is
Nextiva is a US business phone system. The AI Receptionist (its XBert AI product) is an add-on that sits on top of that platform: you buy Nextiva seats for your team, then add AI Receptionist to them. It answers calls, handles texts and web chat, and it can book appointments into Google Calendar, Calendly, Cal.com and Zoho.
Remi is not a phone system. It sits on the number you already have and does the front-desk job: it answers calls and WhatsApp messages, books into the diary your clinic actually runs on, sends no-show reminders, takes deposits at the point of booking, applies your no-show fee, chases unpaid invoices, fills cancellations and wins back patients who have drifted.
That difference in shape explains almost everything below. One is a communications platform with AI bolted on the front. The other is a receptionist's task list, automated. Both are legitimate products. They are answers to different questions.
What each one costs, as published
Nextiva publishes AI Receptionist at $99 per month, and it is an add-on: it requires at least one Nextiva seat alongside it. Seats are published at $15, $25 or $75 per user per month on annual billing, depending on the tier you choose. So the realistic entry point is not $99. It is $99 plus at least one seat, on an annual commitment, and it goes up from there as you add users.
All of those figures are in US dollars. Nextiva does not publish a pound price for AI Receptionist. We are not going to convert it for you, because a converted figure would be our number rather than theirs, and the rate moves. If you are buying from the UK, ask them for a written GBP quote, and check whether VAT and card conversion fees land on top.
Remi starts at £89 per month ex VAT on the Lite tier, which includes 500 talk-minutes. The Standard tier is £149 and includes 1,000 talk-minutes. Above the included pool either tier is 15p per minute. There is a one-week free trial, no setup fee, and you can cancel at any time.
Both sets of figures are a snapshot taken on 24 August 2026, read from each vendor's own published pricing. Rate cards change. Check the current ones before you sign anything.
100 resolutions is not 100 calls
This is the detail most comparison pages get wrong, so it is worth being precise. The $99 buys 100 "resolutions" a month, and that pool is shared across calls, texts and chats. Extra resolutions are $0.99 each. A busy web chat widget eats the same allowance as your phone line.
Here is the sum, with the assumptions on the table. Take a small clinic handling 20 calls a working day over 22 working days — 440 calls a month. Assume one resolution per handled interaction, and assume no web chat or text traffic at all, which is generous. That is 340 resolutions over the included 100, at $0.99 each: $336.60. Add the $99 and one $15 seat and you are at roughly $450.60 a month, in dollars, before anyone types a word into a chat box.
Remi at the same volume, assuming a three-minute average call, is 1,320 minutes. That is the £149 Standard tier plus 15p on 320 minutes: £197. At that volume Lite has been outgrown, so Standard is the tier a clinic of this size buys.
We are deliberately not putting those two numbers side by side in one currency. What you can compare without any exchange rate is the shape. Remi's bill rose by about a third above its floor. The resolution model rose roughly four-fold above its floor. That is the difference between a plan sized for clinic volume and a plan sized for a light user.
One point in Nextiva's favour, and it is a real one: charging per resolution rather than per minute means a five-minute booking conversation costs the same as a 40-second "what time do you close?". If your calls run long, per-resolution billing is kinder to you than per-minute billing. That cuts genuinely in their direction, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
If you want the general version of this argument across the whole category, we set it out in our guide to what an AI receptionist actually costs in the UK.
Booking: where clinics separate them
Credit where it is due. Nextiva's booking capability is real and published: Google Calendar, Calendly, Cal.com and Zoho. That is more than several of the bigger names manage — RingCentral's UK page still lists appointment booking as coming soon. If a caller wants a slot and your diary is a Calendly link, Nextiva can genuinely close that loop.
The catch for a clinic is that those are general-purpose scheduling tools. Clinics do not run on Calendly. They run on practice-management systems that hold the patient record, the practitioner, the room and the appointment type, and where the booking has to land in the right place or it is worse than no booking at all.
Remi books into Google Calendar, Acuity and Cliniko. Cliniko and Nookal are the ones that matter for physiotherapy and allied health, and neither appears on Nextiva's published integration list. If your diary lives in Cliniko, a Cal.com connector does not help you.
What happens after the call
Answering the call is the easy half. The money leaks afterwards: the patient who does not turn up, the invoice that sits unpaid for six weeks, the cancelled Tuesday slot nobody fills, the patient who came twice in March and never came back.
Remi handles that tail. It sends no-show reminders, takes deposits at the point of booking, applies your no-show fee when someone does not show, backfills cancellations from your waiting list, chases unpaid invoices, runs win-backs on lapsed patients and asks happy patients for reviews.
Nextiva does not publish invoice chasing, deposit collection or no-show handling. In fairness, neither does any other vendor we checked across this category — it is a gap in the whole market rather than a Nextiva failing. But it is the part of the front-desk job with the clearest link to revenue, and it is worth asking any vendor about directly.
| Capability | Remi | Nextiva AI Receptionist |
|---|---|---|
| Standalone, or add-on? | Standalone, on your existing number | Add-on — requires at least one Nextiva seat |
| Published price | From £89/mo ex VAT (Lite); £149 (Standard) | $99/mo + seat at $15–$75/user/mo (annual) |
| Price published in GBP | Yes | No — USD only |
| What the allowance buys | 500 talk-minutes on Lite, 1,000 on Standard | 100 resolutions, shared across calls, texts and chats |
| Overage | 15p per minute | $0.99 per resolution |
| Books appointments | Yes | Yes |
| Diaries it books into | Google Calendar, Acuity, Cliniko | Google Calendar, Calendly, Cal.com, Zoho |
| Clinical practice systems | Cliniko, Nookal | Not published |
| WhatsApp booking and messaging | Yes, native | Not published |
| No-show reminders | Yes | Not published |
| Deposits at booking, no-show fees | Yes | Not published |
| Chases unpaid invoices | Yes | Not published |
| Win-backs, cancellation backfill, review chasing | Yes | Not published |
| Warm transfer to a human | Yes | Yes |
| Full business phone system | No | Yes |
| Setup | Done for you | Self-serve |
Everything in the Nextiva column is taken from their published material on 24 August 2026. "Not published" means exactly that — it is not a claim that the product cannot do it, only that they do not say it does.
Channels, languages and the human handover
Nextiva covers voice, text and web chat, which is a sensible spread for a US small business. Remi covers voice and WhatsApp, natively, on an approved WhatsApp Business account. That matters more than it sounds: a patient who ignores a voicemail will answer a WhatsApp message in four minutes, and rebooking over WhatsApp costs nobody a phone call. Nextiva does not publish WhatsApp support.
Remi handles 11 languages in text, with English and Afrikaans on voice. Both products can pass a live call to a person — Remi does a warm transfer to your own team, and so does Nextiva. Neither is trying to lock a caller in with a machine, and neither should.
Where Nextiva is the better choice
There are real cases where Nextiva is the right buy and Remi is not.
- You want one vendor for your whole phone system. If you need numbers, extensions, hunt groups, desk phones, mobile apps and voicemail as well as AI answering, Nextiva gives you all of it on one bill with one support contract. Remi does not replace your phone system, and we are not pretending it does. One throat to choke is a legitimate reason to buy.
- You are already a Nextiva customer. If your seats are already paid for, the marginal cost of the AI add-on is the $99, not the whole stack, and the integration work is already done.
- Your calls run long. Per-resolution pricing beats per-minute pricing when conversations are lengthy. If your average call is eight minutes, that model is on your side.
- You are low-volume and chat-heavy. A business taking a handful of enquiries a day may never exceed 100 resolutions, so it pays only the floor of $99 plus one seat. Remi's own floor is £89 a month for 500 talk-minutes. The two are quoted in different currencies, so compare them at the rate on the day rather than taking a converted figure from us.
- Your diary is Calendly, Cal.com or Zoho. Their booking integrations are genuine, not roadmap items, and those three cover a great many non-clinical businesses well.
- You are US-based or multi-site in the US. Nextiva is a US company with US support hours and US number provisioning. That is a feature there and a friction here.
How to decide
Three questions settle it for most clinics.
- Do you need a phone system, or a receptionist? If your phones are the problem — old handsets, no mobile app, calls not routing — buy a phone system, and Nextiva is a credible one. If your phones are fine and the problem is that nobody picks them up, buy a receptionist.
- Where does your diary live? Write down the system your reception team types into every day. If it is Cliniko or Nookal, that answers the question on its own. If it is Google Calendar, both can help.
- What happens after the call? Count how many appointments you lost to no-shows last month and how much is sitting in unpaid invoices. If those numbers are large, an answering layer that stops at "booked" leaves most of the value on the table.
If you are still working out whether you want software at all, our comparison of an AI receptionist versus a traditional answering service covers the ground before this one, and there is a clinic-specific walkthrough on the Remi for UK clinics page.