The Best Nextiva Alternatives+Why They're Better

Nextiva is a CX, UCaaS, and omnichannel contact center provider known for its reputation and social media management features, 24/7 customer service, and AI workflow optimization tools. With a 30-day free trial and 7 plans ranging from $20-$199/user per month and up, Nextiva is an excellent option for teams prioritizing a scalable communications solution with real-time customer collaboration, built-in workforce management, and conversational analytics.

That said, Nextiva’s limited integrations, higher price tag, and time-consuming sales process makes some seek Nextiva alternatives.

This post outlines unified communications Nextiva alternatives like RingCentral RingEX, Dialpad Connect, and Zoom Workplace. It also covers Nextiva contact center alternatives like NICE CXone, Genesys Cloud CX, and Five9 Intelligent CX.

The Best Nextiva Alternatives: An Overview

The comparison table below provides a quick overview of the top Nextiva alternatives.

Why Look For A Nextiva Alternative?

Nextiva is a highly scalable CX platform with solutions designed for small businesses and enterprises alike. While Nextiva provides flexible pricing options, 24/7 customer service on all plans, and best-in-class reputation management tools, there are a few drawbacks.

Businesses seek Nextiva alternatives due to:

• Higher Pricing: Nextiva’s most affordable plan starts at $20/user per month, and its top-tier plan starts at $199/agent per month. Nextiva pricing much more expensive than competitors like Dialpad, Vonage, Genesys, and Zoom. Additionally, the most basic Nextiva plan includes only social media messaging and email–lacking voice and video calling, team chat, SMS texting, and website chat. Comparably-priced alternatives like RingCentral include voice calling, business texting, video meetings, team chat, and audio conferring on all plans.
• Limited Integrations: Nextiva integrates with a variety of social media platforms and review management sites. However, integrations with third-party software are extremely limited. Nextiva Small Business plans include integration with only Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Google Contacts–and users must pay an add-on fee to access CRM integrations and APIs. While all Nextiva Enterprise plans include API access, they only integrate with about 15 third-party applications.
• No Need For Social Media+Reputation Management: Nextiva’s unique social media and reputation management features set it apart from competitors. However, businesses that don’t need these capabilities are likely to select a more affordable cloud communications platform that offers voice calling and more extensive collaboration tools instead.
• Complex Sign-Up Process: Businesses cannot purchase any Nextiva plan without first booking a consultation with a sales representative. Potential users can’t even access a Nextiva demo without booking a one-on-one consultation. These requirements are a non-starter for busy executives and feel designed to pressure users to purchase extra features.

How We Evaluated Nextiva Alternatives

We used the following criteria to select and evaluate the best Nextiva alternatives:

• Pricing and Plans: We evaluated the affordability, flexibility, and overall value of each provider’s pricing
• Included Features: We looked at each alternative’s available communication channels, team collaboration tools, workflow automation capabilities, AI-powered features, workforce management systems, and more
• Scalability: We explored platform scalability, including the number of available plans and individual add-ons, to ensure these alternatives can grow alongside your business
• Analytics and Reporting: We studied the quality of each platform’s available real-time and historical analytics, insights from conversational AI, KPI alerts, and custom reporting tools
• Third-Party Integrations: We reviewed each provider’s available third-party integrations, API access, and developer community
• Security and Network Reliability: We looked at each platform’s SLA uptime, global points of presence, security and network monitoring protocols, and compliance certifications
• Customer Support: We reviewed each provider’s available customer support channels, hours, and premium support add-ons
• Ease of Use: We evaluated each alternative’s overall ease of use on desktop and mobile devices, the complexity of the onboarding process, available training materials, and interface intuitiveness
• Use Cases: We determined the ideal user base for each provider, considering business type, industry, size, target market, revenue goals, and more

UCaaS Nextiva Alternatives

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) software combines standard business communication channels like voice calling and text messaging with team collaboration features like video meetings, instant chat messaging, virtual whiteboards, and file sharing.

UCaaS platforms are designed to improve internal communications, lower operational costs through VoIP calling, and provide basic customer self-service via IVR. Unlike contact centers solutions, unified communications don’t usually include workforce management, advanced performance management, campaign management, or digital channels like website chat and social media.

Below, we compare Nextiva Small Business to unified communications providers including RingEx by RingCentral, Zoom Workplace, and Dialpad Connect.

RingCentral RingEX

RingCentral RingEX is a smart unified communications platform with unlimited VoIP calling, video meetings, team chat, unlimited virtual faxing, and SMS/MMS. It has a 99.999% uptime guarantee, provides 24/7 customer support for all users, and recently debuted a series of AI-powered features to increase agent efficiency and improve the customer experience.

Nextiva supports slightly more video meeting participants than RingCentral, but RingCentral offers more advanced video features, plus SSO and 99.999% uptime across all RingEX plans. Both providers offer 24/7 chat and phone support, but only Nextiva includes unlimited SMS and customer-to-team texting. This makes it a stronger pick for teams focused on text-based communication. However, RingCentral stands out with AI-powered texting features, including SMS translation and generative message editing, which Nextiva lacks.

RingCentral Pricing 

RingCentral offers three RingEX plans that range from $20 to $35 monthly per user. The $20 plan starts with unlimited calling in the US, team chat, video conferencing, and IVR. The higher-tier plans add call monitoring, call recording, CRM integrations, and real-time business analytics.

Read our RingCentral pricing review for more information.

What We Like About RingCentral 

• Advanced video meetings: RingCentral offers in-browser and app-based AI video conferencing for up to 200 participants, plus access to smart meeting features like in-meeting public/private chat, screen recording+remote screen control, whiteboards, breakout rooms, AI meeting summaries+transcripts with speaker differentiation, meeting recording, and collaborative note
• Personal AI Assistant: RingSense AI for RingEX (add-on feature) automatically transcribes and summarizes voice calls, takes smart call notes, creates action items, and highlights key conversation topics for every call
• High-level integrations: RingCentral EX offers pre-built integrations with 300+ third-party applications including Salesforce, Zendesk, Hubspot, and ServiceNow–plus integration webinars for easy setup. Users can make calls directly in their CRM apps, view real-time CRM call pops, and benefit from two-way data syncing/automatic call logs

Where RingCentral Needs Improvement

• Call Quality: Users report inconsistent call quality and frequent dropped calls in the RingCentral desktop app–plus excessive software updates that slow down business processes
• Limited SMS: Although RingCentral Enhanced Business SMS is easy to set up and enables real-time, two-way communication between clients and agents, all RingES plans have significantly lower number of included monthly text messages than competitors, and pricing for additional monthly text messages is not publicly available

Who Should Use RingCentral?

• SMBs needing advanced analytics: RingEx offers some of the most advanced analytics tools in the UCaaS space, including real-time and historical interactive reports, custom KPIs, pre-built reporting templates, live QoS alerts, comparative analysis, report filtering, and meeting insights
• Call centers with extensive hardware needs: RingCentral hardware packages include Device as a Service (DaaS) options that bundle hardware and software solutions, extensive BYOD compatibility, and RingCentral phones for rent or sale

Dialpad Connect

Dialpad is a UCaaS and AI contact center solution centered around its proprietary AI engine, Dialpad Ai, which provides real-time transcriptions, live coaching, sentiment analysis, and post-call summaries in all plan offerings.

While both Nextiva and Dialpad offer 24/7 customer support, Dialpad limits phone support to Pro plan users and above, while Nextiva includes 24/7 phone, email, and chat support in all plans. Nextiva and Dialpad both offer limited app integrations, meaning neither is a good fit for teams already using multiple third-party platforms.

Dialpad Pricing

Dialpad has three paid plans starting at $15 per user, per month. All plans include unlimited calling and texting in the U.S. and Canada, voicemail transcription, real-time AI call transcriptions, and productivity integrations. Higher tiers add CRM integrations, global number support, advanced analytics, and enterprise-grade admin tools.

Custom pricing is available for large teams with advanced needs. Explore our full Dialpad pricing breakdown to compare features across plans.

What We Like About Dialpad

• AI features on all plans: Real-time coaching, call summaries, and transcription help reduce manual admin tasks and boost agent productivity
• Easy mobile-first design: The desktop and mobile apps are lightweight, modern, and simple for users to pick up without much training or oversight
• Built-in SMS/MMS messaging: All plans include unlimited business texting within the U.S. and Canada

Where Dialpad Needs Improvement

• International calling limitations: International calling requires separate add-ons, and calling costs vary widely by country
• Limited third-party integrations: Compared to competitors like RingCentral or Nextiva, Dialpad’s ecosystem is still growing

Who Should Use Dialpad?

• Startups and small businesses who want voice intelligence: Dialpad’s AI tools provide real-time call transcriptions, sentiment analysis, and live agent coaching without requiring third-party integrations
• Teams working on the go: Dialpad’s mobile app mirrors the desktop experience and offers full functionality, making it ideal for teams that take calls and collaborate from anywhere

Zoom Workplace

Zoom Workplace streamlines Zoom Meetings (video conferencing), Zoom Phone (voice calling+SMS), email, chat messaging, and team collaboration tools into a single platform. These capabilities are enhanced by Zoom AI Companion, which provides voice, chat, and video call meeting summaries, suggests action items, drafts email and message responses, and suggests topics and content for whiteboard-based brainstorming sessions.

Nextiva offers stronger customer support than Zoom Workplace, with 24/7 phone, email, and chat support included in all plans. In contrast, Zoom limits chat and phone support to higher-tier or premium monthly plans and doesn’t offer round-the-clock assistance. That said, Zoom Workplace is better suited for fully remote or highly collaborative teams, offering similar scalability to a full contact center with tools like agent performance tracking, conversation intelligence, and workforce management.

Zoom Pricing

Zoom Workspace offers one free plan and three paid tiers, ranging from $13.32 to $22.49+ per user per month. The free Basic plan includes 40-minute meetings for up to 100 participants, along with local recording, screen sharing, breakout rooms, collaborative notes, and team chat. Paid plans expand functionality with features like longer meetings, AI Companion, cloud storage, transcription, Scheduler, and live support.

Custom pricing is available for large teams (250 or more users). Read our full Zoom pricing breakdown to explore which plan best fits your needs.

What We Like About Zoom 

• Free plan: One of the most complete free plans in the UCaaS space, ideal for entrepreneurs and new businesses that need to maintain low operating costs while connecting remote teams
• Robust third-party integrations: All plans integrate with Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Hubspot. All paid plans include 1 year of free access to premium, in-meeting apps that take meeting notes, engage attendees, and provide high-level meeting insights
• Superior security: End-to-end encrypted video meetings, meeting lock, waiting room, SSO, anonymous call blocking, advanced participant permissions/access management, HIPAA compliance, 99.999% Zoom Phone uptime

Where Zoom Needs Improvement

• Mix-and-match pricing: Mix-and-match pricing is only available for Business Plus and Enterprise users (the two most expensive plans), so SMBs may end up paying for features that not all users need
• Zoom Phone analytics: Essential call center analytics, including real-time call queue updates and historical KPI monitoring, require all users to buy the Zoom Phone Power Pack for an additional $25/license/month
• CRM features: While competitors like Nextiva offer native CRM features for in-call access to key customer data, Zoom does not–meaning users will have to pay extra for an integrated third-party CRM system

Who Should Use Zoom? 

• Fully remote teams: Zoom is the gold standard for remote unified communications, providing excellent value alongside advanced collaboration tools that connect and engage teams across different time zones, language barriers, and work schedules
• Teams prioritizing scalability: Zoom’s scalability is unparalleled, with plans for every phase of business growth from startup to global enterprise. Use Zoom’s free plan for basic video calling, add voice calling and SMS when you’re ready, or upgrade to Zoom’s omnichannel contact center with AI-powered WFM at your own pace

CCaaS Nextiva Alternatives

While Nextiva Small Business is geared towards newer and growing teams that don’t need omnichannel contact center capabilities, Nextiva Enterprise streamlines CCaaS, WFM, marketing tools, and CX management into one platform.

Below, we compare Nextiva Enterprise to CX and CCaaS competitors including NICE CXone, Genesys Cloud CX, and Five9 Intelligent CX.

NICE CXone

NICE CXone is an AI-optimized contact center platform supporting omnichannel communication across 30+ channels, conversational analytics, outbound dialers, workforce management, and advanced performance tools. Compared to Nextiva Enterprise, which includes features like WFM, customer surveys, and CX analytics, NICE stands out with more advanced capabilities such as GenAI-powered agent assist, interaction summaries, and industry-specific AI trained on real customer service data.

While Nextiva uses AI to streamline live agent interactions, NICE CXone enables full automation of even multi-intent customer conversations, thanks to its robust knowledge management, AI virtual agent (Autopilot), and live coaching assistant (Copilot). Both platforms offer scalable contact center solutions, but NICE is designed for enterprise teams with complex needs, particularly in high-volume environments.

NICE CXone Pricing

NICE CXone plans start at $71 per agent, per month, with omnichannel plans ranging up to $249 per agent for the Ultimate Suite. Pricing tiers include options for digital-only, voice-only, or blended contact centers, each with increasing levels of AI, analytics, workforce optimization, and self-service automation. While Nextiva Enterprise tops out at $199/user monthly, NICE CXone delivers more value at the high end with AI-powered tools and vertical-specific automation. Full pricing details are available in our NICE CXone pricing guide.

What We Like About NICE CXone

• Best-in-class AI features: From GenAI-powered summaries to fully automated omnichannel conversations, NICE leads in AI depth and breadth
• Enterprise-ready WFM tools: Includes 40+ forecasting models, gamification, live and automated coaching, and agent scheduling
• Powerful knowledge management: CXone Expert organizes and updates help content from internal and external sources for both agents and customers

Where NICE CXone Needs Improvement

• Higher cost at scale: NICE’s advanced capabilities come at a premium price point compared to platforms like Nextiva
• Steeper learning curve: With so many features and customizations, CXone may require additional onboarding and training

Who Should Use NICE CXOne

Large, global contact centers with high volumes across voice and digital channels. Organizations that need advanced self-service, AI assistance, post-call analytics, and customizable dashboards will get the most value from CXone. It’s also ideal for teams requiring deep knowledge management and industry-specific automation.

Genesys Cloud CX

Genesys Cloud CX is an AI-powered contact center platform offering digital, voice-only, and omnichannel solutions with advanced tools like knowledge management, customer journey mapping, and co-browsing. Like Nextiva Enterprise, Genesys includes Agent Assist, predictive engagement, and omnichannel messaging but also goes further with more granular analytics, journey tracking, and campaign tools. Nextiva, however, remains more user-friendly and includes a built-in mini CRM and stronger interaction summaries.

Genesys is also more budget-friendly, with plans starting at $75/user per month, though some advanced tools like forecasting and conversation analytics are only available in its top-tier plans. In contrast, Nextiva Enterprise includes many of these features by default, offering better overall value for teams that don’t need extreme customization.

Genesys Cloud CX Pricing

Genesys offers five core plans, ranging from digital-only to full omnichannel capabilities. Plans start at $75/user per month for voice-only and $95/user for digital. Higher tiers add advanced analytics, employee performance management, and AI-based scheduling. While Genesys is more affordable than Nextiva upfront, some of its most powerful tools are locked behind higher-tier subscriptions. See our full Genesys pricing guide for detailed comparisons.

What We Like About Genesys

• Customer journey mapping: Visualize and optimize each step of the customer’s path with AI-powered insights and journey milestones
• Campaign tools for outbound teams: Mass SMS marketing, predictive dialers, and lead scoring tools support robust outbound campaigns
• Advanced real-time analytics: Live sentiment, behavioral changes, and topic analysis make Genesys ideal for fast-moving contact centers

Where Genesys Needs Improvement

• Key features behind top-tier plans: Forecasting, performance management, and deep analytics require more expensive subscriptions
• Steeper learning curve: Compared to Nextiva, Genesys has a more complex UI and setup process

Who Should Use Genesys?

Outbound-focused and high-growth contact centers needing advanced scheduling, campaign management, and AI-driven engagement will benefit most from Genesys Cloud CX. Teams struggling with agent performance can also take advantage of its gamification and coaching features, while organizations needing detailed customer journey analytics will appreciate its unique visual mapping tools.

Five9 Intelligent CX

Five9 Intelligent CX connects agents with customers via voice, SMS, chat, email, and social messaging while optimizing operations with built-in WFM, quality management, and AI analytics. Like Nextiva, Five9 supports customer-facing video, but it adds screen sharing for real-time visual support. Five9 also provides more advanced AI tools than Nextiva Enterprise, including sentiment analysis, CSAT tracking, and automation opportunity detection.

However, Five9 lacks native collaboration tools like team chat or file sharing, instead requiring a Microsoft Teams integration for internal communication features available natively in Nextiva.

Five9 Pricing

Five9 plans start at $119/agent per month for both digital and voice-only tiers, with higher-tier omnichannel plans available by quote. While slightly more affordable than Nextiva, not all Five9 omnichannel plans include social or SMS messaging by default. Customization options, such as mixing and matching digital channels or selecting WFM tools à la carte, offer flexibility not available in Nextiva’s bundles. Explore our full Five9 pricing guide for more detailed breakdowns.

What We Like About Five9

• Advanced auto dialers: Includes predictive, power, preview, and progressive dialers with built-in TCPA compliance and call prioritization
• Custom AI assistants: Five9 Genius AI enables virtual agent customization and prompt testing through a built-in GenAI Studio
• Secure authentication: Voice biometrics and imposter detection offer enterprise-grade identity protection

Where Five9 Needs Improvement

• No built-in team collaboration tools: File sharing, internal chat, and whiteboards require third-party integrations
• Quote-based pricing for key plans: Makes it harder to directly compare costs with competitors like Nextiva

Who Should Use Five9?

Sales-driven and compliance-focused teams will benefit most from Five9’s robust auto-dialer tools, real-time agent coaching, and AI-powered fraud prevention. It’s also a great choice for large contact centers that need to scale digital channels on demand or operate under strict industry regulations like finance, government, or healthcare.

Which Nextiva Alternative Should You Choose?

The best Nextiva alternative for your business depends on if you need a unified communications or contact center platform, the specific problems you’re trying to solve, and common-sense factors like budget and required features.

Below are our final thoughts on the top alternatives to Nextiva covered in this post:

• RingCentral: Compared to Nextiva, RingCentral provides a truly all-in-one UCaaS tool with robust video conferencing, deeper third-party integrations, and stronger omnichannel AI automation.
• Dialpad: Compared to Nextiva, Dialpad has more advanced voice calling features with local number support in 70+countries, better team collaboration tools, and stronger real-time analytics (including live call transcript in all plans)
• Zoom: Compared to Nextiva, Zoom provides more advanced team collaboration tools like Zoom Docs and Tasks, stronger AI-powered video calling, and more flexible voice calling options that let users choose metered, unmetered, or bundled pricing.
• NICE: Compared to Nextiva, NICE provides a better value, far more advanced AI-powered workflow automation and analytics tools, more communication channels, and stronger WFM solutions.
• Genesys: Compared to Nextiva, Genesys offers more advanced agent scheduling tools, more affordable plans, and better features for omnichannel outbound sales teams like predictive engagement.
• Five9: Compared to Nextiva, Five9 has stronger security measures, greater scalability, better sales tools, and more customizable AI-powered automation.

FAQs