Choosing the right software is a crucial decision for any contact center. Today’s tools are designed—or are supposed to be designed—to help you make the most of interaction with your customers and leads.
For outbound sales and lead generation teams, it’s all the more important to access a dedicated, purpose-built solution. If you’re leaning on software that’s primarily built for service and support agents, then you’re not only missing out on leading-edge features and functionality—you’re missing out on more sales and more growth.
With that in mind, in this guide, we take a look at the popular contact center solution Five9, and explore potential alternatives that may better suit the needs of your team. We break down a variety of top Five9 alternatives and competitors to consider in your search for the best dialing solution.
The Essential Checklist
How to Choose Contact Center Software
Where Five9 Excels
Five9 is a well-established, leading provider in the contact center space, offering a robust and versatile solution. The CCaaS giant is, no doubt, a market leader with its inbound solution, which excels with the help of AI-driven routing, robust reporting tools, omnichannel capabilities, and a full workforce optimization platform.
Meanwhile, Five9 also offers a collection of features that outbound teams can use alongside those myriad inbound functions. Five9 users gain access to a predictive dialer and a range of automation solutions that streamline lead management, campaign setup, and back-end sales processes. However, a closer look at the platform begs the question: Are these the best solutions a sales or lead generation team can get?
Why Look for an Alternative to Five9?
With its diverse blend of inbound and outbound capabilities, Five9 appears to be a convenient choice for many businesses looking to deliver service as well as close sales. However, the platform’s increasing emphasis on customer service capabilities may leave sales teams in the lurch.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise: the contact center industry has evolved and rapidly expanded in recent years. As many businesses place an ever-increasing emphasis on customer service and satisfaction, providers like Five9 have responded in kind, focusing their feature development on inbound and service-centric functionality. As a result, sales and lead generation teams relying on Five9’s software may enjoy its time-saving automation and top-notch reliability—but at the same time they’re missing out on essential sales-centric solutions such as:
- Intelligent lead prioritization and speed to lead: Without the ability to reach leads before their competition, sales teams are missing out on a competitive advantage.
- Comprehensive caller ID reputation management: Today’s teams need to be able to monitor and swiftly respond to call flagging and blocking issues that severely harm contact rates and revenue potential.
- Highly accurate answering machine detection (AMD): Without the most innovative AMD for sales and lead gen, agents will spend their time coding for answering machines instead of talking to ready-to-convert customers.
- Dynamic scripting: When customers demand personalization and regulations are getting increasingly complex, agents need consistent—and real-time—support to maximize the effectiveness of their conversations.
Best Five9 Alternatives and Competitors
If you’re thinking that Five9 may not be the ideal fit for your outbound sales or lead generation contact center, rest assured that there’s a wide range of excellent alternatives. Each provider below offers a mix of strengths, feature sets, and pricing models. Let’s dive into some of the top solutions that can elevate your outbound operations and empower your teams.
1. Convoso: The Best Five9 Alternative for Outbound Sales and Lead Generation
We admit we’re a little biased, but Convoso objectively offers the industry’s fastest and most powerful dialer for sales and lead generation teams—making it the very best Five9 alternative available for reaching and converting leads.
Of course, teams that switch to Convoso get so much more than just the most powerful dialer engine available. Customers talk about the value they get from the comprehensive caller ID reputation management tools and managed services; granular, real-time reporting on the metrics that matter most for sales and lead gen; customizable dashboards; dynamic scripting; omnichannel workflow automation; and so much more.
It’s no wonder why teams that have switched from Five9 to Convoso have seen such incredible results—including up to 4X increases in contact rate and 30% increases in sales. Reaching more leads, and quickly, widens the gap between results they achieve with Convoso vs Five9.
Strengths:
Weaknesses:
- Convoso features are best suited for teams with 20 or more agents, rather than small teams
- Full suite of features comes with higher price tag than other simple and low-cost options
What users say:
- “Convoso has really been a game-changer for us as a company, in terms of how much our agents can output to our teams [in the field]. We’re seeing levels of appointments and demos that we’ve never seen before.” – Brian Spurgeon, Long Home Products
- “Five9 didn’t have any solutions for us to address the spam likely for our DIDs. We can make up to a million dials a day sometimes, and our DIDs were going to ‘spam likely’ very quickly…Convoso has been such a game-changer for us… It’s been pretty miraculous.” – Jesse Daniels, One Health Direct
- “We weren’t connecting to people on the phone with Five9. With Convoso, we’re seeing a huge difference. It’s the fact that more agents are talking on the phone rather than waiting and listening to answering machines.” – Ariel Ayalon, Senior Healthcare Advisors
2. Dialpad
Dialpad is a cloud-based communications platform with robust contact center functionality integrated within a broader UCaaS suite. Its strengths lie in its native AI features, which provide real-time coaching for agents, sentiment analysis, and intelligent call transcriptions. Dialpad emphasizes integrating phone, video, messaging, and contact center operations, alongside the use of AI insights to improve agent performance and the overall customer experience.
Strengths:
- Dialpad Ai technology integrates artificial intelligence for content creation, data analysis, sentiment analysis, and more.
- Sales platform integrates with UCaaS tools for seamless transition between internal and external communications
- Integrated sales coaching tools streamline agent management
- Native integrations with array of common CRMs, communications, and productivity apps
Weaknesses:
- Lacks predictive dialer mode optimal for high-volume dialing
- Access to full breadth of features, integrations, and support comes with high price tag
- Lacks accurate answering machine detection for outbound calls
- Service and support are sometimes found to be unsatisfactory
What users say:
- “Dialpad has a great product. However, they will hold you hostage should you want to make any changes to your account. We have doubled the number of users but our price has gone up more than 10x what we were originally paying in 2020…The people on our account have not been wonderfully helpful.” – Garrett O. on Capterra
- “Sometimes the phone number that I use comes up as a strange number on our customers’ Caller ID and people won’t answer my calls. Sometimes the Dialpad freezes on me, but not very often.” – Bridget N. on G2
- “Dialpad Talk allows our company to convert more leads because of the different options for reaching a client. The texting feature allows us more quick, efficient communication regarding those day-to-day tasks that don’t warrant an email or a phone call.” – Small business user on G2
3. RingCentral
RingCentral is an established, legacy provider of unified business communications as well as cloud contact center solutions. RingCentral markets itself as a choice for businesses of all sizes, providing good value at various price points. Its core strength lies in integration with the overall RingCentral communications platform, offering essential features for managing calls, queues, and omnichannel interactions. It should be noted, however, that the RingCentral CCaaS offering is a white-labeled version of NICE CXone.
Strengths:
- Leading omnichannel and business communications supports 30 channels
- Strong security certifications and uptime, with a 99.99% SLA
- Robust IVA solution
- Separate workforce management, quality management, and performance management products
Weaknesses:
- Users sometimes report poor or slow customer service and support when facing issues
- Focus on inbound and customer care leaves outbound capabilities lacking
- Slow dialer and limited speed-to-lead functionality
- Time-consuming list management and campaign setup process for outbound teams
- Potentially costly setup process and fees
What users say:
- “I really like the call recording aspect. It allows for us to review sales calls and learn from them.” – Small business user on G2
- “The actual phone service, when it works, is good…When any issues arise, the customer service is terrible.” – Small business user on G2
- “It’s probably good for really small businesses, but it doesn’t appear scalable for large organizations due to the amount of issues, outages, and poor quality our organization has been experiencing.” Mid-market user on G2
CallTools is a cloud-based contact center platform focusing on outbound calling capabilities that’s typically best-suited for teams with up to 10 agents. The low-cost platform includes features for predictive dialing, campaign management, and lead distribution. CallTools also offers limited compliance management tools, integrations with various CRMs, and administrative reporting.
Strengths:
- Highly responsive support team
- Robust real-time analytics for dialing and inbound activity
- Built-in CRM helps teams manage outreach efforts
- Comprehensive basic dialer functionality suits needs of many smaller outbound operations
Weaknesses:
- Dialer not designed to handle quick ramp up and large volumes of leads
- Wait times may be longer than on solutions like Convoso
- Limited reporting functionality
- Lack of dynamic scripting capabilities
- Historical issues with call audio quality
What users say:
- “CallTools saved our inside sales team TONS of time by allowing them to make several phone calls at once versus hand dialing. The efficiency level of our team has drastically increased and continues to increase as we become more familiar with the system.” – Chris on G2
- “If you have 2-5 agents only and are taking a minimal number of calls, Calltools is definitely an ideal platform to use.” – Maria on G2
5. ReadyMode
ReadyMode, formerly known as Xecall, is a cloud-based contact center platform offering an all-in-one predictive dialer solution. ReadyMode’s low-cost solution includes features for inbound queue management, advanced dialing modes, and a built-in CRM. Organizations may choose ReadyMode for its emphasis on dialing speed, ease of setup, and customizable reporting features; however, the budget-friendly nature of the solution may come with some trade-offs on performance and optimization.
Strengths:
- Relatively low pricing offers upfront cost savings
- Dedicated onboarding team and reporting specialist for new customers. Teams with 50+ seats get a dedicated customer support manager
- Scripts can be customized based on lead data
Weaknesses:
- Predictive dialer may lack necessary power and speed for high-volume operations—and may not deliver greatest possible ROI, despite low cost
- Lacks ability to monitor health of caller IDs that may be flagged or blocked
- Poor list management and prioritization capabilities may lead to low lead efficiency and slow speed to lead
- Lacks native DNC scrubbing tools for compliance support
- Limited automation capabilities and lack of custom dashboards for analysis
What users say:
- “Customer service is top notch from response time in emails to online chatting. They did an amazing job helping us get set up and the software is very user friendly.” – Small business user on G2
- “They’ve always been able to quickly assist in answering questions or concerns. It means a lot to know that I have a reliable system to count on and a team of experts to support me in anything I need. I would highly recommend this CRM if you’re starting out…The only thing I dislike could be occasional system outages.” – Small business user on G2
- “I don’t like that there isn’t a feature as of this review that lets us monitor the health of DIDs on ReadyMode.” – David R on G2
6. VICIdial
VICIdial is a widely-used open-source contact center solution known for its extensive feature set and flexibility. It can function as an ACD for inbound calls, support outbound campaigns, and even handle blended call environments. VICIdial is highly customizable, with options for remote agents, and integrations with other systems and applications. It is often chosen by organizations seeking a cost-effective contact center solution with robust capabilities and a large user community, however, this low cost comes at the expense of features—and, for some, even basic functionality.
Strengths:
- One of the lowest-cost options on the market
- Open-source enables diverse customization options through third-party development
Weaknesses:
- Many users report unreliable uptime, regular crashes, and bugs
- Support must be purchased from third-party
- Lack of scripting tools to support sales reps
- Limited reporting options
- Unable to handle high-volume usage
What users say:
- “The autodialer is as simple as they get, There’s not much to personalize and for the end user it is very straightforward, I also like that it is compatible with pretty much every browser and computer on earth…The user interface leaves a lot to be desired, it is as spartan as it gets, there’s no customization, and the call in, call-out sounds can feel very outdated.” – Moe on G2
- “Vicidial is a basic dialer primarily designed for cold calling. It lacks the advanced features found in other solutions and offers limited benefits beyond being an affordable and user-friendly VoIP option.” – Luis G on G2
- “It’s a simple dialer to use on a small to medium call center setup…I had issues with the queue whenever I had more than 25 agents.” – David H on G2
- “The ease of use is wonderful. It’s easily designed to be switched from auto dial to manual dial, it’s easy to make calls and keeps track of the lead’s phone numbers and contact info all in one place.” – Olivia F on G2
Learn how the Convoso dialer helps dramatically increase contact and conversion rates
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