Best Five9 Alternatives - Pricing & Features Compared

While Five9’s contact center software offers strong AI features and dozens of communication channels in a user-friendly interface, it’s one of the most expensive solutions on the market. Further, some alternatives offer stronger workflows, routing options, and quality management features that Five9 doesn’t provide.

We’ve tried many other contact center products to determine the best alternatives.

TLDR: The Best Five9 Alternatives 

• Talkdesk: Best for custom routing, workflows, and SLA
• Nextiva: Best for AI, chatbots and self-service, UCaaS+CCaas
• NICE CXone: Best customer journey orchestration
• Genesys: Best for voice-only or digital-only
• Dialpad: Most comprehensive AI features
• 8x8: Best for team collaboration

At-a-Glance Overview

Talkdesk

Talkdesk’s contact center software offers voice-only, digital messaging-only, and omnichannel plans with email, live chat, SMS texting, and social media messaging. The provider’s highlights include cost-effective plans and easy customizability. Create IVR flows, workflows, and custom integrations with drag-and-drop designers that require minimal coding.

Customize the Talkdesk user dashboard, and integrate live chat and self-service into your website or customer-facing mobile app.

Talkdesk is a Good Five9 Alternative if You Need:

• Low-code customizability: Talkdesk lets you customize your routing flows, IVR menu, IVA and chatbot support, and workflows with a drag-and-drop designer that requires low code or no code
• Quality management: All Talkdesk plans include quality management tools like call recordings, streamlined coaching and evaluations, and a supervisor portal that displays daily call activity and trends. Higher-tier plans add AI-based agent evaluations and screen recording.
• Workflow automations: Use the drag-and-drop designer to link multiple tools into workflows. Synchronize surveys, agent-support scripts, task assignment and status updates, and more.
• Customer feedback: Create custom automated surveys to deploy on any channel. Customer experience analytics, available on the high-tier Elite plan, dig even deeper.
• On-the-go agent tools: Talkdesk uniquely offers a Conversations mobile app that lets agents handle calls from their mobile device
• Custom user dashboard: Talkdesk is one of the only providers on our list that lets you customize the agent interface–choosing which channels, customer data, tasks, and connected apps are displayed in each panel

Pros

• Low cost: Talkdesk offers some advanced features at a lower cost than virtual competitors. These features include quality management tools, surveys, and workflow customizations.
• Customizability: Talkdesk lets you customize virtually everything about it–workflows, IVA and IVR, customer journey, and the agent workspace–with minimal or no code
• Choice: The Elite plan lets you choose between Agent Assistance, Customer Experience analytics, Outbound Engagement auto-dialers, and Workforce Management. Teams who want just one of these add-ons will be able to get the functionality much cheaper than with an alternative

Cons

• High-tier plans lack comprehensive features: Since the high-tier plans make you pick between add-ons like Agent Assist and Workforce Management, teams will have to pay extra to have all of these features
• Weak AI capabilities: While Talkdesk has AI-based conversation analysis and agent assistance, Five9 offers stronger AI tools. Five9 AI also provides call summaries and insights
• Less conversational chatbots: I felt that Five9 enabled more lifelike chatbots, capable of providing richer services and communication than Talkdesk chatbots

Talkdesk Pricing

Talkdesk offers four plans ranging from $85 to $145 monthly per user when charged annually, with voice-only and digital-only options. The provider offers a free trial upon request and per-hour pricing.

For more information, see our Talkdesk pricing guide.

Nextiva

Nextiva’s Customer Experience Suite offers a contact center with proactive outreach, campaign and contact management, and a built-in CRM system. Choose a voice-only, digital, or omnichannel contact center that bundles voice, SMS, email, social messaging, and live chat.

Each Nextiva plan includes dynamic agent scripts, voice bots and digital bots, and a full workflow system to automate processes and task assignments. Advanced plans include screen recording and advanced customer experience analytics.

Nextiva is a Good Five9 Alternative if You Need:

• Voice bots and digital messaging bots: Create automated chatbots and virtual agents for voice and live chat. Embed chatbots into your website or app, to handle rich services like routing, appointment booking, even secure payment processing.
• Custom workflows: Nextiva offers a rich workflow engine to customize bot-to-agent task assignment and automate proactive responses based on triggers. The drag-and-drop designer is user-friendly.
• Intricate routing options: Choose between several different routing options from IVA and IVR menus–list-based, round-robin, least occupied, time-based, skill-based, relationship-based, or AI-based
• Custom surveys: Create forms and surveys across multiple communication channels, including voice, email, SMS, and live chat. Combine these with workflows to automatically elicit customer feedback, viewing this data in the analytics portal.

Pros

• Feature-rich basic plan: While many alternatives offer minimal features in their lowest pricing tier, Nextiva offers agent scripting, campaign management, auto-dialers, and the full workflow engine
• Payment processing: Nextiva enables payment processing via live chat, which is a unique rich service that many others on this list don’t provide
• Sales use cases: Nextiva offers progressive and predictive outbound dialers to make the sales-calling process more efficient

Cons

• High price floor: While Nextiva’s lowest-tier plan offers rich features, it costs about 25% more than voice-only or digital-only call centers from some alternatives
• Few native integrations: While Nextiva integrates with other systems via REST API, it does not include any out-of-the-box integrations–while some other CCaaS platforms offer dozens or hundreds of prebuilt integrations chatbots

Nextiva Pricing

Nextiva offers three Customer Experience plans from $99 to $139 monthly per user when charged annually. The provider does not offer a free trial for their contact center software.

For more information, see our Nextiva pricing guide.

NICE CXone

NICE CXone is AI-powered call center software that unites dozens of channels: voice, video, email, SMS, collaboration platforms like Slack, streaming sites like YouTube, and social media messaging sites like FB Messenger.

It utilizes a global, meshed network with dozens of outbound and inbound carriers across every continent. Enlighten AI, part of CXone, uses 200 pre-built AI models that work out of the box to empower solutions across your app: routing based on agent personality and analytics, real-time agent interaction guidance, service quality and performance management, and smart self-service tools optimized for your contact center’s data.

NICE CXone is a Good Five9 Alternative if You Need:

• AI-based customer support: CXone’s Enlighten Experience Optimization analyzes historical voice and text interactions, tracking sentiment and frequently mentioned topics, using these to improve automated support.
• Personalization customer journey orchestration: Transition customer conversations seamlessly across over 35 different automated and in-person channels–including voice, email, chat, video, collaboration platforms like Slack, and social media
• Agent omnichannel display: In the agent dashboard, agents can handle dozens of conversations at once. Customer profiles compile contact information, recent notes, and the customer’s multichannel conversation history.
• Supervisor support tools: CXone Supervisor combines a wide bank of manager capabilities–an overview of queue insights and data, live monitoring dashboards, real-time sentiment metrics, skills management tools, and reports

Pros

• Easy-to-use omnichannel routing: NICE CXone supports many communication channels, with drag-and-drop tools to connect them and AI enhancements to create a powerful customer experience.
• Customizability: Nice CXone’s collection of over 450 REST APIs provides a framework of diverse functionality, providing your developers with databases and resources to compose tons of aspects of your contact center.
• Rich self-service capabilities: CXone’s multichannel self-service tools–built with a drag-and-drop designer–can offer discounts, facilitate account-management actions, book appointments, and more.

Cons

• Best features are add-ons: Our favorite NICE CXone features, like AI analytics and agent assistance, are reserved as add-ons that will increase the cost
• Lack of AI coaching: Some alternatives, like Dialpad and Talkdesk, offer AI features that evaluate agents and provide feedback. NICE does not offer this functionality.

NICE CXone Pricing

NICE CXone pricing plans range from $71 to $209 monthly per user. The lower-tier plans include a messaging-only contact center, a voice-only call center, and an omnichannel option.

For more information, see our review of NICE CXone pricing.

Genesys Cloud CX

Genesys Cloud CX offers a cloud-based call center software with VoIP telephony, SMS, email, web chat, video meetings with screen sharing, and social media messaging across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The Conversations inbox organizes all of an agent’s tasks across channels. During an interaction, agents access a knowledge base, customer profiles with journey information, conversation history, and information pulled from CRM or database integrations. Genesys supports agents with AI tools like predictive routing, custom self-service options like IVR and chatbots, and live speech and text analytics that help agents identify critical engagement opportunities.

Genesys is a Good Talkdesk Alternative If You Need:

• Workforce management: Use AI to forecast staffing demands and generate adaptive agent schedules. Automatic call recording and customer insights help supervisors monitor agent performance, with real-time queue insights and KPIs.
• Speech and text analytics: Genesys AI offers complete transcription for all interactions across channels, analyzing these transcripts for customer satisfaction and keyword trends
• AI-driven predictive engagement: Agents have a variety of display- and AI-based tools at their disposal to engage customers. AI tracks customer journeys and identifies ways to engage them proactively–recommended actions, offers, and the best channels to use
• Knowledge management tools: Write articles and build a knowledge base. Answer Q&As, sort articles into categories, and format articles with fonts, bullet-point lists, and images. Customers can search by keyword, and agents and chatbots can share articles in live conversation.

Pros

• Digital and voice-only options: Genesys uniquely offers digital-only plan options–even on higher-tier plans with advanced features–in addition to voice-only and omnichannel options.
• AI tools: Genesys provides a well-rounded suite of AI-based agent-support and routing capabilities.
• Deep customer profiles: Access rich customer profiles with historical data, cross-channel interactions, customer journeys, and predicted outcome scores. Pull data from CRM integrations and other data sources.

Cons

• Complicated UI: I needed a few days to get the hang of the Genesys dashboard, routing menus, and agent support tools. The interface may feel overwhelming for new users.
• Underdeveloped AI in some areas: Some of Genesys’ tools, like live-agent assistance and workforce management, don’t integrate AI as well as competitors do. The AI features seem either non-existent or weak in these areas.

Genesys Cloud CX Pricing

Genesys Cloud CX offers five pricing plans that range from $75 to $155 monthly per user. The provider offers digital-only, voice-only, and omnichannel plans with a 14-day free trial.

To learn more, check out our guide to Genesys pricing.

Dialpad

Dialpad’s AI contact center offers an omnichannel dashboard uniting VoIP phone, SMS, social messaging platforms, video conferencing, customer-facing web chat, and internal team chat channels.

Dialpad transcribes all voice calls in real-time, offering a variety of AI live-support tools: coaching suggestions, sentiment updates, and canned responses. Supervisors retain a live view of queue performance, agent activity, and sentiment scores. Supervisors can hop into conversations, leave notes on a transcript, and view real-time and historical queue reports.

Dialpad is a Good Five9 Alternative if You Need:

• AI-generated customer sentiment: Dialpad identifies customer sentiment and CSAT scores for 100% of your customer interactions, using this information to provide agent feedback and generate predictive analytics.
• Real-time agent feedback: Real-time coacting suggestions include pacing and word-choice feedback, knowledge base information, and canned responses
• Supervisor and coaching assistance: AI scorecards, a feature unique to Dialpad, automatically evaluate each interaction based on predetermined criteria you design. Choose the criteria and scoring system, then AI handles the evaluation.
• Post-call summaries: After each call, Dialpad automates post-call summaries with the recording, transcript, action items, topics, and key moments

Pros

• Advanced AI tools: Dialpad offers a diverse array of unique AI tools–not just sentiment detection and agent assistance but AI scorecards, sales assistance, auto-generated summaries after calls
• Supervisor support and visibility: The supervisor dashboard provides a live view of queue happenings, seeing conversation participants, live call durations, sentiment scores, and live transcripts. Click on a call to listen in or join the call via audio.
• Video meetings: All Dialpad contact center plans include video meetings for internal or customer-facing use cases. Generate and send invite links and collaborate with features like chat, screen sharing, breakout rooms, and polls.

Cons

• No voice-only or digital-only offerings: Dialpad only offers omnichannel contact center plans starting at $115 monthly, so companies seeking a simple call center can find a more cost-effective alternative
• May be too feature-rich for some: The software includes tons of AI support features, which may feel overwhelming for companies seeing a more basic contact center setup

Dialpad Pricing

Dialpad offers AI contact center plans starting at $115 monthly per user, and AI sales center plans starting at $95 monthly per user. The provider offers a 14-day free trial.

For more information, read our guide to Dialpad pricing.

8x8 Contact Center

8x8’s cloud contact center bundles voice, web chat, SMS, email, social media messaging, and messaging apps like WhatsApp.

The call center solution doubles as a UCaaS platform by including internal team chat, video conferencing, and file sharing. 8x8 offers toll-free and DID numbers globally, routing and auto attendants, and call queues. Supervisor tools include customizable analytics, a live-monitoring dashboard with whisper and barge.

8x8 is a Good Five9 Alternative if You Need:

• Omnichannel routing: Build an intelligent, self-service IVR system that utilizes AI, speech recognition, and natural language processing to route inbound customers to the right agent or queue.
• Workforce engagement management: Supervisors can drill down into each conversation with transcripts and audio playback, with the option to make comments.
• Speech analytics: Speech analytics identify sentiment and repeated words, and automated customer services gather detailed feedback
• Trends and business analytics: 8x8’s Analytics tab offers dozens of dashboards and hundreds of KPIs, filterable by agent and historical timeframe. View live queue summaries, agent activity, and other KPIs in statistical, table, or graph form.

Pros

• Easy routing setup: Set up IVR menus and IVA query distribution using a drag-and-drop designer, which makes it easy to customize task flows
• Multichannel team collaboration: 8x8 includes collaborative video meetings and team chat, along with mobile app access that enables teams to communicate from anywhere
• Easy-to-use agent workspace: The omnichannel workspace organizes all active tasks in one dashboard, separating each conversation into a tab. New tasks pop up on an agent’s screen, with the option to accept or reject.

Cons

• Lack of advanced features: One of the simplest omnichannel solutions on our list, 8x8 lacks workforce management and scheduling features, AI agent evaluations, and automated live-agent assistance
• Basic analytics: While 8x8 provides KPIs for queue activity and agent status, it doesn’t offer the same depth as competitors with customer sentiment, keyword usage, and trends

8x8 Pricing

8x8’s CCaaS platform offers three pricing plans, including a voice-only call center and omnichannel options. They don’t publicize pricing information but offer a free trial upon request.

To learn more, check out our 8x8 pricing guide.

Which Five9 Alternative Should You Choose?

When selecting a Five9 alternative, choose a contact center software and plan that offers the channels and features you plan to use, with minimal extras you don’t need.

Here’s a quick guide to help you decide on the best platform:

• Live Agent Support: Dialpad and NICE CXone offer AI features for real-time AI assistance
• Workflows and routing: Nextiva and Twilio Flex have highly customizable workflow engines for omnichannel routing and task assignment
• Digital-only or voice-only call centers: Genesys Cloud CX and Talkdesk offer cost-effective options for those seeking digital contact centers or voice-only call center software
• Team collaboration: 8x8’s contact center not only supports omnichannel customer service but internal collaboration via video and team chat