Five9 is one of the most popular cloud contact center solutions on the market, but it’s not right for everyone. Whether you’re a growing business or an enterprise-level operation, exploring Five9 competitors may help you find the right solution for your business.
In this guide, we’ll give you all the details you need to know about Five9, including pricing, features, and pros and cons. Plus, we’ll discuss some of the top Five9 alternatives for you to consider. Whether you’re looking for Five9 competitors or are interested in pricing, our Five9 guide will give you all the information you need to find the right provider.
What Is Five9?
Founded in 2001, Five9 is a leading provider of cloud-based contact center software, but what exactly does that mean? A contact center–as opposed to a call center, which only handles voice calls, is designed to help organizations manage customer interactions across multiple channels, including voice, chat, email, business texting, and social media messaging. By providing multiple ways to contact you, customers can reach you in the way that’s most convenient for them. Plus, all interactions are tracked in one place so that customers don’t have to waste time repeating themselves.
Five9 provides a Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), operating on a subscription-based model with different plans targeted for different business needs. It’s designed to replace traditional on-premise call centers with a more flexible, scalable, and intelligent system that works for both in-house and remote teams.
From SMBs to enterprises, Five9 serves customers in various industries, including retail, healthcare, finance, telecom, and travel and hospitality. It’s commonly used for customer service centers, sales teams, tech support operations, and remote agents.
Five9 Pricing
As mentioned above, Five9 offers its CCaaS software on a subscription-based model. With five tiers available, you can choose the features you need without paying for those you don’t.
Both the Digital and Core plans start at $119/user/month with a 36-month contract. The Digital plan comes with chat, email, business texting, and social messaging, but does not provide voice calling. On the other hand, the Core plan only offers voice calling without the digital channels.
The Premium, Optimum, and Ultimate tiers are more comprehensive bundles. Premium combines voice with email and chat capabilities, Optimum adds some work engagement functionality, and the Ultimate has all that plus advanced analytics. Unfortunately, Five9 doesn’t provide pricing online and you’ll need to call them directly for a quote.
What Customers Love about Five9
As one of the top CCaaS providers, Five9 has a number of benefits that customers love. Here are some of the top advantages of Five9:
- Cloud-based flexibility: With cloud-based service, Five9 requires no on-premise hardware. This makes it accessible from anywhere you have an internet connection and enables remote and hybrid work environments.
- Omnichannel support: Five9 provides an omnichannel contact center, with voice, email, chat, SMS, and social media. With a unified agent dashboard, you can track all customer interactions in a single place to provide a better customer experience. Omnichannel routing ensures that, no matter what channel your customer uses, they are routed to the right agent from the beginning.
- CRM integration: With seamless CRM integration with software like Salesforce, Zendesk, Oracle, and more, agents can access customer history and context easily when handling a customer interaction.
- Scalability: Five9 is easy to scale, letting you add more users and features as your organization grows and changes.
- Advanced analytics and reporting: Five9 provides analytics and reporting to help you managers monitor KPIs and agent performance. With both real-time dashboards and historical reports, you can make data-driven decisions to improve the customer experience.
- Security: Whether you work in healthcare or simply handle customer payments, security is essential for protecting vulnerable data. Five9 has robust security measures in place, like firewalls, two-factor authentication, data encryption, and more.
Why Customers Might Consider Five9 Competitors
While Five9 is a great product, it might be right for everyone. Here are some of the disadvantages that might cause you to consider Five9 competitors:
- Difficult setup: The initial setup and configuration can be complex, requiring training to fully utilize it. There are tons of settings to choose from, which can be daunting at first, especially if you don’t have a dedicated IT team.
- Steep learning curve: With so many features, there’s a big learning curve when first using Five9.
- Costs: Compared to some Five9 alternatives, Five9’s pricing is on the higher end. Plus, add-ons like AI, analytics, or IVAs can be expensive.
- Limited historical data: Although Five9 provides analytics and reports on historical data, it only holds onto the data for 60 days or less. For those looking for long-term reporting, this can be frustrating.
- Difficult user interface: Unlike some of the Five9 competitors, Five9’s UI is not the most intuitive and can be difficult to navigate without training.
Five9 Features
One of the reasons Five9 reigns as one of the top CCaaS providers is its feature-rich platform. Some of Five9’s top features include:
- Active blending: Five9’s active blending automatically switches agents between answering inbound calls and placing outbound calls. When there are a high number of inbound calls, for example, active blending automatically pulls outbound agents into the queue to handle customers more efficiently.
- Omnichannel contact center: Five9 provides seamless switching between channels, including voice, email, web chat, SMS, and social messaging. No matter what channel customers use to contact you, all their interactions are recorded in one place.
- AI integration: Five9 has tons of AI features built into the platform, including AI assist to help agents in real-time, Intelligent Virtual Agents, which use natural language processing to answer basic customer inquiries, and more.
- Workforce optimization: Workforce optimization tools, available on the Premium plan and higher, help you better manage your workforce. Five9 offers scheduling, forecasting to plan for the right number of agents, adherence reporting, agent performance dashboards, and gamification to encourage agent productivity.
- Call recording: Five9’s call recording helps you stay compliant with HIPAA and PCI regulations to keep sensitive customer data safe.
- Predictive dialer: Whether for outbound sales or market research calls, the predictive dialer increases your team’s efficiency. By analyzing available agents and predicted call time, the dialer automatically calls multiple customers and reduces the time agents spend waiting for customers to answer.
- Advanced IVR: Five9’s IVR (Interactive Voice Response) uses advanced speech recognition to better serve customers. When customers first call, they’re greeted by a pre-recorded menu. Based on the customer’s response–a voice response or keypad input–the IVR sends them to the right agent to handle their needs. The Call Flow Designer gives you tons of flexibility in customizing your IVR settings.
- Digital outreach: Digital outreach automatically sends out a text or email when a call drops. This add-on feature helps you follow up with customers to stay better connected.
Top Five9 Competitors
Five9 is a top contact center provider with tons of features, but it may not be exactly what your business needs. Luckily, there are some great Five9 alternatives to consider.
NICE CXone
NICE CXone (which used to be called InContact) is a cloud contact center provider with robust features and industry-leading AI. Like Five9, CXone offers digital-only, voice-only, or omnichannel options to meet all your contact center needs. CXone also has tons of customization options, so you can set up your contact center to best fit your organization’s needs. And while most contact centers come with a bit of a learning curve, customers report that CXone has an intuitive interface that makes the platform easy to use.
Strengths: If you’re looking for AI-driven insights, CXone offers strong analytics and reporting. CXone uses call transcription and AI to monitor historical data, including customer interactions, contact center performance, and agent productivity. The analytics and reporting dashboards display data as statistics as well as in graphs for easier visualization.
Notable features: CXone’s AI employee virtual attendant (called NEVA) helps employees perform better by watching their screen as they work and anticipating their needs. NEVA offers real-time assistance during customer interactions with next-best-action guidance and pulls up essential customer information agents might need.
Pricing: CXone’s pricing ranges from $71/user/month for their digital-only bundle to $249/user/month for their Mpower Ultimate suite.
Ideal for: Enterprises needing advanced customization, analytics, and AI capabilities.
Why Is NICE CXone a Strong Five9 Competitor
CXone is a strong alternative to Five9 because it offers an all-in-one cloud contact center platform with powerful AI, workforce optimization, and analytics tools. It’s especially known for its advanced Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) suite and deep automation capabilities.
Genesys Cloud CX
Known for rapid innovation and a strong global presence, Genesys Cloud CX offers a cloud contact center platform that helps businesses deliver seamless, personalized customer experiences across every channel. With Genesys Cloud CX, you can manage voice calls, chats, emails, texts, and social media interactions all within a single, unified interface.
Strengths: Genesys Cloud CX offers an excellent user experience, with an intuitive design that balances functionality with ease of use. Customers report that it is simple to deploy and with a breadth of features that allows them to seamlessly handle contact center needs.
Notable Features: One of Genesys Cloud CX’s strengths is its advanced use of artificial intelligence. With AI-powered bots, predictive engagement, and real-time agent assistance, Genesys helps you improve resolution rates and reduce customer effort. Built-in WEM helps managers forecast demand, schedule agents, and monitor performance, all in one location.
Pricing: Genesys Cloud CX starts at $75/user/month for their voice-only contact center and goes up to $240/user/month for a feature-packed plan packed full of AI functionality.
Ideal for: Mid-size to large businesses looking for end-to-end customer experience tools and strong AI integration.
Why Is Genesys Cloud CX a Strong Five9 Alternative?
Genesys Cloud CX offers a cloud-native contact center that’s similarly powerful to Five9 with a distinct advantage in AI capabilities, user experience, and global reach.
Talkdesk
Talkdesk is a cloud-based contact center platform with a strong focus on helping customers deliver better customer service through automation, AI, and flexible communication tools. It’s built to deploy quickly, with tons of customization features and an interface that’s easy to use.
Strengths: With fast setup and minimal IT involvement, Talkdesk is a great option for organizations without a dedicated IT department. Its clean, modern UI is easy for agents and managers to navigate. Plus, AI features like virtual agents, agent assistance, and predictive routing help you work more efficiently to better serve customers.
Notable features: Talkdesk comes with over 60 native integrations, like Salesforce, Slack, and Zendesk, that allow agents to work seamlessly without switching between tabs. Workplace Designer lets you tailor your interface to meet your organization’s needs with both no-code and low-code options.
Pricing: Talkdesk starts at $85/user/month for their digital customer experience package. Prices go up to $225/user/month for feature-rich packages with industry-specific solutions for finance, healthcare, retail, and government.
Ideal for: Mid-size to large businesses looking for enterprise-grade features without the complexity.
Why Is Talkdesk a Strong Five9 Alternative?
With its more modern interface and easier deployment, Talkdesk offers a strong alternative to Five9. Talkdesk brings speed, innovation, and a focus on automation to businesses prioritizing digital transformation and rapid scaling.
CloudTalk
CloudTalk is a cloud-based call center solution designed for modern support and sales teams. It focuses on delivering a flexible, user-friendly experience with powerful voice features, real-time analytics, and smooth integrations. AI-powered insights help you automate processes, identify customer sentiments, and improve the overall customer experience.
Strengths: CloudTalk offers a quick onboarding process with minimal technical effort needed. It’s accessible for SMBs and fast-growing businesses, but it also has a global voice infrastructure with local and toll-free numbers in over 160 countries.
Notable features: CloudTalk provides advanced calling features, like call queuing, IVR, skill-based routing, call tagging, and real-time monitoring. Smart dialer and power dialer automate outbound calling for sales teams to boost productivity, while real-time analytics give instant insights into agent activity.
Pricing: CloudTalk starts at $25/user/month for basic call center features and goes up to $50/user/month for the Expert plan. They also offer custom plans, but you’ll need to call CloudTalk for a quote.
Ideal for: SMBs that want advanced call center features and basic digital channels like live chat and SMS, and sales teams focused on outbound calling.
Why Is CloudTalk a Strong Five9 Competitor?
While Five9 is built for large, enterprise-level contact centers with complex omnichannel needs, CloudTalk is a great alternative for smaller organizations that mainly rely on voice communication. It’s easier to set up and more cost-effective with the essential features you need.
Aircall
Like CloudTalk, Aircall is a cloud-based solution with a heavy focus on voice communication. It’s known for its simplicity, ease of use, and seamless integration with popular CRM and helpdesk tools.
Strengths: Aircall is cloud-native with no hardware or IT support needed for an easy setup. Its UI is clean and simple, making it easy for agents to manage calls, voicemail, and contacts.
Notable features: Click-to-Dial and power dialer boost agent productivity by streamlining outbound calling. Call routing and IVR let you set up smart call flows without complex configuration. Real-time call monitoring lets managers listen in, whisper advice, or join calls.
Pricing: Aircall offers two plans: the Essentials plan, which starts at $30/user/month, and the Professional plan, which starts at $50/user/month. They also offer custom plans, but you’ll need to call Aircall for a quote.
Ideal for: Startups and SMBs looking for an easy-to-use call center solution.
Why Is Aircall a Strong Five9 Alternative?
While Five9 is a robust, enterprise-grade contact center platform, Aircall is a great alternative for teams that don’t need the complexity or cost. It excels in simplicity, quick setup, and CRM connectivity.
Five9 Competitors: How to Choose?
Five9 is a feature-rich contact center solution that offers everything you need to keep track of customer interactions across multiple channels and improve the customer experience. But if Five9 isn’t right for you, you may be looking into some of the top Five9 competitors.
Choosing a contact center solution can be difficult, especially with so many options on the market. That’s where OneStop Communications comes in. We’ll help you compare plans and pricing so you can find the right provider to handle your contact center needs. Contact us today to get started!
