Yealink is everywhere. Is it actually any good?
Yealink doesn’t get talked about the way Jabra, Poly, or Logitech do, yet its phones sit on more desks worldwide than any other brand, its video bars show up in distributor catalogues right next to the household names, and it now makes headsets too. That breadth is the whole story here — Yealink isn’t competing in one category, it’s pressing on all of them at once, usually on price. Whether “cheap” also means “good” is the actual question, and it has a more complicated answer than either fans or skeptics tend to admit.
Who is Yealink, and how did a phone company end up everywhere?
Yealink was founded in 2001 in Xiamen, China, by four engineers, with the company name itself coming from the joy of their first clear test call: “Yeah” plus “Link.” It started in IP and USB phone hardware and grew quickly — by 2005 it held the top global market share in USB phones, and it became China’s largest SIP phone provider not long after. The company opened a Hangzhou R&D centre in 2013, listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2017, and by 2018 had taken the number one global position in SIP desk phone shipments, a ranking Frost & Sullivan has continued to affirm in subsequent reports.
Video conferencing came later. Yealink shipped its first room systems in 2015, the same year it became a Zoom hardware partner, and it struck a strategic partnership with Microsoft that has now run for a decade. Headsets are the newest front: Yealink’s WH, BH, and UH series headset lines, along with its SP-series speakerphones, only arrived in recent years — putting Yealink in direct competition with Jabra, Poly, and Logitech in a category none of those three had to defend from a phone-and-room-systems company before.
What does Yealink actually make?
Three product lines, run in parallel rather than one feeding the other:
- IP and desk phones — the original business: T-series SIP phones, Teams Phones, Zoom Phones, DECT and Wi-Fi handsets, and conference phones, sold into enterprises, education, and government.
- Video room systems — the MeetingBar series (A20 through A50) covering small to large rooms, the MeetingBoard for all-in-one touchscreen spaces, and the MVC S90/S98 multi-camera systems for auditoriums and divisible boardrooms, alongside peripherals like the CM50 ceiling microphone.
- Headsets and speakerphones — the WH6x DECT wireless series built for call-centre range, the BH7x Bluetooth series for hybrid workers, the UH3x USB wired series for budget desk setups, and the SP-series USB speakerphones.
Yealink holds Microsoft Teams Rooms and Zoom Rooms certification across most of its current room lineup, was one of the first partners in Microsoft’s MDEP device ecosystem programme, and claims credit for the first Android-based Teams Phone and one of the first true all-in-one video bars on the market.
Is “cheap but good” actually a fair description?
On price, yes, mostly. A direct comparison of Yealink’s headset range against Jabra’s Evolve2 line, run by a UK reseller stocking both brands, put the entry-level Yealink UH34 wired headset at $49–59 against Jabra’s Evolve 30 in a similar bracket, and the BH72 Lite Bluetooth model at $205 against the Evolve2 65 Flex’s roughly $215–289 range. The gap narrows higher up the range — Yealink’s WH66/WH67 DECT headsets land close to Jabra’s Engage 65/75 pricing rather than clearly undercutting it.
On quality, the reviews are more generous than the “budget alternative” reputation suggests. One side-by-side microphone test pitted Yealink’s Acoustic Shield noise-cancelling technology directly against Poly’s Acoustic Fence and called the result close enough to be a genuine contest rather than a mismatch. A separate comparison of USB speakerphones — Yealink’s SP92 against the Poly Sync 20 and Jabra’s Speak2 55 — picked the SP92 as the best value of the three on sound quality, build, and a replaceable USB cable, while still crediting Poly and Jabra for design polish the Yealink lacked.
The catch sits in compatibility rather than quality. Yealink’s WH6x DECT headsets connect natively to Yealink desk phones and a select few Polycom models — not to Cisco, Avaya, or other brands’ handsets the way a Jabra or Poly headset typically can. For a contact centre standardising hardware across mixed phone estates, that’s a real constraint to factor in before price becomes the deciding criterion, not an afterthought once the order is placed.
How big is Yealink, really?
Yealink reported annual revenue of roughly ¥5.62 billion (close to $780 million) for 2024, up around 29% year on year, continuing a multi-year run of double-digit growth. The company says its products reach more than 140 countries, and Frost & Sullivan’s market tracking has consistently placed it first globally in IP desk phone shipments since 2018, with a top-three position in video conferencing systems shipments in more recent reports. None of that is independently audited the way a public company’s headline revenue figure might suggest at first glance — Yealink does publish financial statements as a Shenzhen-listed company, which puts it on firmer disclosure ground than most of its privately held competitors in this space.
Should the security questions change how IT buyers think about Yealink?
This is the part of Yealink’s story that price comparisons don’t cover, and it deserves a straight account rather than a dismissal in either direction.
In 2021, a security assessment by Virginia-based Chain Security examined Yealink’s T54W desk phone and its Device Management Platform, and found the phone exchanging encrypted messages with a China-based cloud server multiple times a day, a superuser administrator account based in China with the technical ability to remotely enable call recording, and a service agreement requiring users to accept Chinese law and arbitrate disputes in Xiamen. The report also flagged that the phone didn’t use digital certificates to verify legitimate software updates, which would make unauthorised changes harder to detect. US Senator Chris Van Hollen forwarded the findings to the Department of Commerce later that year, asking whether the agency considered the analysis credible given Yealink’s standing as a top-ten desk phone supplier to US government agencies.
Separately, a 2023 investigation by Dutch outlet Follow the Money, working with Belgian newspaper De Tijd, found Yealink equipment deployed across Dutch police, ministries, universities, and hospitals, and reported that several Dutch universities — including the University of Amsterdam, TU Eindhoven, and TU Delft — removed or discontinued Yealink devices on a precautionary basis, in some cases explicitly stating they hadn’t identified a confirmed security breach but couldn’t rule out the risk. A cybersecurity researcher quoted in that investigation also noted that Yealink’s Microsoft Teams certification, often cited by the company as a trust signal, only covers audio and video quality testing — a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed it doesn’t extend to security at all.
None of this amounts to a confirmed, exploited backdoor. It amounts to documented technical findings, a sitting US senator asking for federal review, and multiple European public institutions choosing to remove the hardware rather than wait for certainty. For general office use, that calculus might not move the needle much. For government, defence, finance, or telecom buyers — exactly the kind of clients this region’s resellers serve — it’s a question that belongs in the procurement conversation, not something to leave out of it.
Does any of this matter for the Arabian Gulf and North Africa?
It does, because Yealink isn’t a fringe brand here. In earlier research on UAE-based AV distributors, Yealink was named specifically — not just listed — as the most-requested brand for corporate and government video conferencing deployments in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain. That’s a stronger regional foothold than most of its competitors in this space can claim. It also means the security questions above aren’t a distant Western-market concern; they sit directly inside the same government and enterprise procurement channels this region relies on. What that actually means for how Yealink stacks up against Jabra, Poly, and Logitech on this turf is exactly the kind of question the brand convergence piece is built to answer properly.
If you made it this far — thank you. We’d genuinely like to know what you think. Please leave us a comment or reach out — whether it’s a topic we should cover, a different angle on something we’ve already written, on-ground experience from your own market, or a deeper technical breakdown you’re missing. This will get better because of what you tell us.
Sources & references
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- Grokipedia, “Yealink” — grokipedia.com/page/Yealink
- Yealink, company profile page — yealink.com/en/onepage/company-profile
- Yealink, enterprise hybrid workspace solutions page — yealink.com
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- Defense One, “Common Office Desk Phone Could Be Leaking Info to Chinese Government, Report Alleges” — defenseone.com
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- Follow the Money, “Governments, universities, police, newspapers and businesses use Chinese communication devices with security problems” — ftm.eu
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