Aircall’s call center software offers customer service and sales features like call queueing and auto-dialers. However, some companies may feel limited by the software’s lack of communication channels and advanced features.
In this article, we’ll discuss our favorite Aircall alternatives.
8 Best Aircall Alternatives
- Five9 - Best for live-agent assistance
- Nextiva - Best for customer journey orchestration and workflows
- Talkdesk - Cost-effective digital-only and voice-only plans
- Dialpad - Best for AI features
- NICE CXone - Best for intelligent bots
- Freshdesk - Best ticketing platform
- 8x8 - Best for team collaboration
- RingCentral - Best for customer surveys
1. Five9
Five9 is a cloud contact center software that uses AI-powered tools, workforce optimization, and automations to offer companies a complete CCaaS solution. Service channels include voice, email, chat, SMS, or social messaging.
The software includes AI features like call summaries, live-agent assistance, and insights generated from each call’s transcript. Build workflow automations for routing, monitor calls, and record each agent’s screen for coaching and evaluations.
Five9 is a Good Aircall Alternative if You Need:
- Workflow automations: No-code intelligent workflow automations with multi-event triggers, custom business rules, and in-dashboard connectivity with 50+ third-party apps. Include automated proactive omnichannel outreach, tasks, agent assignment, etc.
- SMS: Filter and intelligently route SMS messages to the best available agent
- Reporting and analytics: Real-time and historical reporting tools including 120 out-of-the-box reports and custom dashboards
- Workforce management dashboards: Agent wallboards, multichannel forecasting, automated scheduling, adherence monitoring
- Live-agent assistance: Five9 uses AI to provide agents with real-time call transcriptions, relevant customer information, canned response suggestions, and suggested actions
Pros and Cons
- AI features: Five9 has more robust and widespread AI features than Aircall, including live-agent assistance and auto-generated insights
- Supervisor support: Five9 supports supervisors with routing automations, flexible evaluation forms, automated scheduling, and AI insights about agent performance
- Omnichannel: While Aircall only has voice and SMS, Five9 is an omnichannel contact center that integrates email, social media, and live chat
- Expensive: Five9’s pricing plans are the most expensive of any provider on our list
- Complicated analytics: Five9’s analytics dashboard felt clunky and overwhelming, and it took me several days to feel comfortable navigating it
Pricing
Five9 has five pricing plans that range from $175 to $325 monthly per user, with an annual commitment.
To learn more, read our Five9 pricing review.
2. Nextiva Contact Center
Nextiva offers an AI-focused call center with single-channel and omnichannel plan options bundling email, SMS, live chat, and social media. Each pricing tier includes auto-dialers, a workflow automation engine, and voice or digital bots. The platform hosts a built-in mini CRM that links with quality management tools like multichannel surveys.
Create advanced bots with rich services, and support agents with dynamic and adaptive scripting.
Nextiva is a Good Aircall Alternative if You Need:
- Workflow automations: Nextiva offers a full workflow automation engine for routing and task assignment, with a drag-and-drop builder
- Intelligent bots: Nextiva AI powers conversational IVR and IVA bots
- Rich services: Live agents and bots can perform a variety of rich customer-service capabilities like payment processing, appointment booking, reservations, and account information retrieval and updates
- Built-In CRM: Manage campaign lists, customer lead status, and customer journey information in rich customer profiles within a built-in CRM system
- Auto dialer: Each plan includes multiple types of outbound dialers–quarterback, progressive, and predictive dialing
Pros and Cons
- Feature-rich basic plan: While many alternative providers offer barebones basic plans, each Nextiva plan has rich features like bots, agent support, and auto-dialers
- Customer information management: The built-in CRM system and lead-management tools make Nextiva a great option for companies looking to have more control over the customer journey
- Easy-to-use automations: We found it very easy to build workflows using the drag-and-drop automation engine, which comes with every plan
- No out-of-the-box integrations: Nextiva offers CRM integrations as an add-on, but the platform doesn’t include any other prebuilt integrations with third-party software
- High price floor: While some Aircall alternatives offer low-tier prices as cheap as $71, Nextiva’s cheapest plan is $99–which is justified given the rich set of capabilities it offers
Pricing
Nextiva offers three contact center plans that range between $99 and $139 monthly per user, including low-tier plans with your choice of one channel–voice or digital.
For more information, read our Nextiva pricing guide.
3. Talkdesk
Talkdesk is an omnichannel contact center known for its AI-powered workflows, synchronized databases, and advanced customer self-service capabilities like identity authentication powered by voice biometrics. Low-code, no-code, or custom-code development tools make Talkdesk’s platform extremely flexible.
It offers digital-only, voice-only, and omnichannel plans bundling email, chat, SMS, and social media messaging. Build custom routing workflows, analytics dashboards, and customize the agent workspace.
Talkdesk is a Good Aircall Alternative if You Need:
- Agent assistance: Uses AI and machine learning to provide in-conversation agent support like next-best-action recommendations, knowledge base integration with multilingual search, CRM data screen pops, and automated pre-and-post-call work
- Mobile app: iOS and Android app (included in CX Elevate plan and above) connects agents to the contact center, enabling them to handle inbound and outbound calls from anywhere
- Screen recording: Enables supervisors to capture agent desktop activity during calls, synchronizes screen and voice recordings for enhanced call monitoring and performance quality analysis
- Customer experience analytics: 900+ real-time and historical KPIs, root cause analysis, searchable transcripts with Conversational Analytics, automated interaction scoring, sentiment analysis, automated SLA alerts
- Customer feedback: Create and send surveys on any channel, gaining unique insights and input from customers
Pros and Cons
- Cost-effective: With single-channel plans starting at $85 monthly per user, Talkdesk is an affordable option
- Feature choice: Talkdesk’s high-tier Cloud Elite plan lets you choose from Agent Assistance, Workforce Management, and Outbound Engagement–letting you choose the advanced features you want, without paying for those you don’t
- Flexible dashboard: Talkdesk offers the most flexible agent workspace of any provider on our list, letting you customize the panels, channel display, integrations, and customer profile display
- Lack of comprehensive AI features: While most alternatives provide a suite of AI features, Talkdesk makes you choose between them–agent assistance, CX analytics, or outbound dialers
- Weak analytics: Talkdesk’s reporting dashboards don’t provide the same depth as alternatives in regard to customer experience and trends
Pricing
Talkdesk offers four pricing plans ranging from $85 to $145 monthly per user. Choose from digital-only, voice-only, and omnichannel plans with your choice from add-ons for Workforce Management, Customer Experience Analytics, Agent Assistance, and Outbound Engagement.
Check out our Talkdesk pricing guide for more information.
4. Dialpad
Dialpad’s voice and digital CCaaS platform uses AI and NLP-powered tools like real-time sentiment tracking, AI coaching, and self-service digital agents to improve the customer experience across voice calling, webchat, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and more.
Dialpad is a Good Aircall Alternative if You Need:
- Custom call queues: Set call queue maximums for wait time and number of callers waiting, upload custom greetings and hold music, and create custom routing rules (longest Idle, fixed order, round robin, etc.)
- Speech coaching: In-call, AI-powered agent speech quality reminders are automatically triggered when agents speak too quickly or speak uninterrupted for too long
- Sentiment analysis: Real-time phone call sentiment (positive or negative customer mood) detection tool that identifies the specific sentence used to classify a conversation as good or bad
- Manager alerts: Custom in-dashboard, email, SMS, and Slack performance monitoring alerts for KPIs and SLA thresholds (calls received, agent duty status, queue size, wait time, etc.)
- AI scorecards: Create agent scorecards with multiple metrics and scoring types. DialpadGPT uses call transcriptions to evaluate each interaction, providing more feedback for agents
Pros and Cons
- Robust AI: DialpadGPT, Dialpad’s proprietary AI system, comes with all plans and powers tools like agent assistance, scorecards, call transcription, summaries, and call insights
- Video meetings: All Dialpad plans include video, for internal team collaboration or customer-facing use cases
- Coaching support tools: Dialpad offers several tools that make a supervisor’s life easier, including monitoring, screen recording, and AI feedback for agents
- Some of the best features are add-ons: Some of our favorite AI features, like scorecards and customer satisfaction detection, are add-ons that will increase the price
- Learning curve: With all its AI features, Dialpad is not a good fit for companies seeking a simple call center. It may take a few weeks for teams to get into the flow of using the analytics and AI tools.
Pricing
Dialpad’s contact center plans start at $115 monthly per user, with voice and one digital channel. Add all digital channels for an additional monthly cost.
Learn more by reading our Dialpad pricing guide.
5. NICE CXone
NICE CXone is a virtual call center and communication platform designed to create seamless customer journeys. Channels include voice, SMS, web chat, email, and social media messaging.
Users have several self-service features like conversational AI chatbots, virtual agents, and AI-powered call routing. The platform also includes a robust stack of analytics tools including customer journey tracking, voice of the customer, performance analytics, and interaction analytics.
NICE CXone is a Good Aircall Alternative if You Need:
- Conversational AI bots: No-code chat and voice bots free up agents by handling routine self-service requests such as password resets, balance transfers, status updates, and scheduling
- Multichannel service: 30+ communication channels in a unified digital inbox (voice, SMS, MMS, web chat, Twitter, Youtube) plus interaction history, sentiment analysis, CRM integration data, etc.
- Quality management: CXone Core and Complete plan users can access advanced agent coaching tools based on insights from customizable quality management dashboards that monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like agent scorecards, average handle time (AHT), and average customer sentiment
- Workforce management: AI-powered omnichannel forecasting and agent scheduling based on preset agent skill sets, qualifications, availability, and other business rules
- AI agent support: Enlighten Copilot is an intelligent Agent Assist tool that recommends responses, relevant articles, and relevant actions like booking websites or customer account information
Pros and Cons
- Customer insights: NICE offers multiple ways to gather customer information–from custom forms, to CSAT detection, to Voice of the Customer (VOC) analytics
- Low-cost digital plan: At $71 monthly per user, the Voice Agent plan is the cheapest digital-only contact center plan on our list
- Coaching support: NICE CXone’s Essential Suite includes some useful coaching support tools like omnichannel interaction playbacks, rich evaluation forms, and screen capture for all agents
- Expensive advanced features: While NICE’s low-tier plans are cost-effective, they only have basic features. Adding advanced features like coaching tools, WFM, and AI quickly increases the price
- Outdated interface: We felt that NICE CXone’s dashboard and analytics pages felt more outdated than many alternative CCaaS software systems
Pricing
NICE CXone offers six contact center plans that range from $71 to $209 monthly per user, with an annual commitment. Choose from voice-only, digital-only, or omnichannel plans.
Read out NICE CXone guide for more pricing information.
6. Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a helpdesk ticketing software with several unique customer support tools: a knowledge base, analytics, workflow automations, and intelligent task routing. The platform centers around an agent dashboard, with automatic omnichannel ticket tagging and routing. Customize and track customer journeys, create and automate canned forms, and deploy CSAT surveys for customer insights.
Freshdesk does not include any built-in channels like voice, SMS, or live chat. However, the dashboard integrates with external software for these channels, plus others like email and social media. Freshdesk also offers add-on products for voice, live chat, and chatbots.
Freshdesk is a Good Aircall Alternative if You Need:
- Real-Time analytics: 360-degree-view of KPIs with visible data restriction, incoming call assignment, custom views and filters, call monitoring, and call barge
- A ticketing system: Freshdesk is a help-center software that unifies ticketing for external and add-on communication channels like voice, email, SMS, social media, and live chat
- Task management dashboard: The Freshdesk dashboard unifies an agent’s tickets and channels across apps
- Knowledge base: Write, publish, and organize articles to create a knowledge base for customers and agents
- Chatbots: The Freddy AI add-on provides an intelligent chatbot that you can deploy across all channels, including live chat on your website or app
Pros and Cons
- Omnichannel task routing: Freshdesk lets you customize your routing style, including options for round-robin or skills-based routing
- Unique features: Ticketing, a knowledge base, and hosting a customer-facing community forum are unique features not offered by any other providers on our list
- Customer insights: With custom forms, reports, CSAT surveys, and customer journey tracking, generate deeper customer insights
- No built-in channels: Freshdesk includes a ticketing and routing system, but no native channels. You can purchase VoIP telephony, live chat, and SMS as add-ons and integrate your social media and email for unified ticketing.
- Confusing to set up: The Freshdesk dashboard unifies data sources, communication channels, agents and phone numbers, and other tools. Linking these sources together can be overwhelming for first-time users.
Pricing
Freshdesk offers four plans, which range from free to $79 monthly per user–with the option for a 14-day free trial. Freshdesk plans do not include any communication channels, but they offer live chat and telephony add-ons starting at $15 monthly per user.
Check out our Freshdesk guide for more information.
7. 8x8 Contact Center
8x8’s contact center software offers voice-only and omnichannel options with social media, web chat, SMS, email, and video. The platform includes skill-based routing across channels, virtual bots and IVR, and customer experience analytics.
Video and team chat enable internal collaboration, while features like co-browsing unlock unique customer-service use cases. Customize routing with IVR and call queues, with automated queue callbacks.
8x8 is a Good Aircall Alternative if You Need:
- Video meetings: Unlimited meeting duration with up to 500 participants plus features like screen sharing, virtual background, audio/video/desktop recording, audio sharing, live streaming via YouTube, end-to-end encryption, meeting lock, participant lobby, and participant restrictions
- Team chat: Universal team chat space that automatically adds users from the company directory, enables one-click voice and video calling, and offers features like conversation threads and file sharing
- Advanced analytics: Customizable, AI-powered intelligence and reporting like topic trending, customer behavior analytics, automated SLA notifications, etc.
- Intelligent IVR: Powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP), includes pre-built and customizable IVR templates for scheduling appointments, sending bill reminders, etc.
- Advanced queuing: Set up automated queue callbacks that allow customers to hang up and receive a callback, with post-call surveys
Pros and Cons
- Team collaboration: With team chat and video meetings, 8x8 supports internal team collaboration better than any other platform on this list, including Aircall
- Unique video features: Live streaming and co-browsing are unique video features that no alternatives provide, unlocking use cases like webinars and hands-on customer assistance
- User-friendly: The 8x8 interface feels simple and easy to use, even for first-time users
- Lack of advanced features: 8x8 doesn’t stack up to the AI features that many alternatives provide–including workforce management, call transcription, and live-agent support
- Price: 8x8 is substantially more expensive than Aircall’s CCaaS system
Pricing
While 8x8 does not publicize CCaaS pricing information, the provider offers three plans: a voice-only X6 plan, omnichannel X7, and the X9 with speech analytics.
See our 8x8 pricing review for more information.
8. RingCentral Contact Center
RingCentral’s contact center solution is highly secure, reliable, and packed with advanced features including conversational AI, workforce management, and real-time AI coaching. RingCentral offers over 30 communication channels like webchat, social media and messaging apps.
Plans include strong AI features like virtual agents, call scoring, notifications for agents about performance, and automated feedback. The platform has intelligent analytics like post-call speech analysis and keyword tracking.
RingCentral is a Good Aircall Alternative if You Need:
- Smart routing: RingCentral’s smart call routing tools enable users to route inbound calls to queues based on agent skill, language, or channel. Admins can also set up automatic callbacks to reduce hold times.
- Custom surveys: Create surveys across all channels and automate their deployment
- Deep analytics: AI provides a transcript for each call. This enables call summaries, speech analytics like customer sentiment, and automated scoring for each call
- Pre-built and custom reports: Choose from over 100 prebuilt reports or build custom reports, selecting from over 250 out-of-the-box metrics such as average handle time, first contact resolution, queue time, and more
- Auto dialing: RingCentral’s platform includes four types of auto dialers: progressive, preview, predictive, and TCPA safe, a full-featured manual dialer with built-in compliance.
Pros and Cons
- Agent support: RingCentral’s contact center uses AI to support on-call agents. Auto dialers make agents more efficient, real-time response suggestions improve customer service, and summaries help agents refer back to previous interactions
- Supervisor support: The solution also supports supervisors, with AI feedback, coaching, and scoring that automate the evaluation process.
- Clear audio: RingCentral has a strong reputation for its phone system, with clear HD audio and user-friendly routing tools
- Limited integrations: RingCentral only integrates with five third-party platforms, which is far fewer than Aircall and most other alternative CCaaS providers
- Best features cost extra: Most of RingCentral’s AI features, and custom surveys, are add-ons for an extra cost
Pricing
RingCentral’s contact center starts at $65 monthly per user, with advanced and AI features available as add-ons.
To learn more, see our RingCentral pricing guide.
How to Choose an Aircall Alternative
When choosing a call center software system, look for a platform that meets your budget and business needs, without forcing you to pay for features you won’t use.
Here’s a quick breakdown to simplify your search:
- AI features: Dialpad and Nextiva offer robust AI features empowering agent tools, supervisor support, and customer insights
- Virtual agents: NICE CXone and RingCentral offer intelligent and conversation virtual agents across digital channels
- Team collaboration: Freshdesk and 8x8 have strong features that promote internal team communication
- Live-agent assistance: Talkdesk and Five9 offer intelligent AI-based agent support
