Dialpad is a robust call center and business communication platform. It’s packed full of features, including advanced AI-powered insights and real-time AI coaching tools with its call center solution, making it a great choice if you have more than 100 agents and prioritize analytics and in-call training. However, its most powerful tools are only available on its higher tiers, which come at a higher price than simpler alternatives.
How Does Dialpad Compare to the Best Call Center Solutions
If you’re a smaller business, Nextiva is likely the best option for you. It offers a budget-friendly balance of functionality and ease of use for small teams. It’s the most scalable option we recommend for fewer than 100 agents–you’ll never outgrow it.
RingCentral is a closer comparison to Dialpad–it’s a strong choice for midsize call centers that want to focus on workforce optimization and engagement.
Focused on quality management instead? TalkDesk is a highly customizable Dialpad alternative with dozens of tools to help you monitor and boost quality across your call center.
In terms of pricing, Nextiva’s the cheapest option if you have lightweight needs as its standard business phone system offers a few handy features to help you get started. Dialpad’s contact center pricing is comparable to both RingCentral and TalkDesk.
Check out all of our favorite call center solutions to learn more about how it stacks up in the market.
Dialpad: The Good and The Bad
Dialpad stands out from other call centers as a complete business communication system because of its excellent use of AI throughout its platform. It’s affordable if you’re just getting started, yet it’s packed with AI functionality and supports custom integrations. However, the price adds up quickly as you start to scale and integrations aren’t offered with every plan.
The Good
All-in-one business communication platform: While Dialpad has standalone contact center plans, it can also be used as a complete business communications tool. It has everything to connect with customers and leads, plus all the capabilities you need for internal uses. You’re getting unlimited calling, SMS/MMS messaging, team chat, file sharing, unlimited meetings, video calls—all under one roof. Not every business phone system out there offers all of these features.
Built-in AI features that boost team productivity: Artificial intelligence has been integrated into everything Dialpad offers. It’s completely taken over the platform’s branding and makes it unique compared to similar tools on the market that charge extra for AI add-ons. You can leverage AI to transcribe calls, track action items, take notes, analyze caller sentiment, summarize calls, and just make your team more productive.
Plenty of room to grow without switching tools: Dialpad is advanced enough that you’ll never outgrow it. Regardless of your call center type, Dialpad won’t cap usage once you reach a certain number of users, and it even has enterprise-grade solutions for larger organizations. You could start with just a regular business phone system plan, upgrade to a contact package when your inbound call volume increases, and even deploy a separate sales center for advanced outbound dialing.
Affordable if you’re just getting started: If you sign up for a business communications plan instead of a contact center package, rates start at just $15 per user per month. This is a really good deal for unlimited calling, and it’s suitable for small businesses that aren’t handling a huge volume of calls. Dialpad’s phone system is a really good value when you consider all of the features you’re getting, especially with so much AI integrated into the platform.
Customizable APIs: Dialpad plays nicely with all of the business tools you’re already using. You can easily integrate your CRM, sales tools, customer service software, data visualization tools, data compliance tools—basically anything. But what really makes Dialpad unique is that you can build your own custom apps and workflows through the developer API if an integration isn’t pre-built on the Dialpad marketplace. While this obviously takes some technical know-how to configure, it’s great to have that option at your disposal.
Use-case-specific contact center solutions: It’s nice that Dialpad has separate offerings for different use cases. This ensures that you’re only getting the features your team actually needs to succeed without overpaying for things that you won’t use. For example, Dialpad’s sales-specific contact center solution doesn’t come with interactive voice response (IVR) because that’s only needed for inbound calling, but it comes with local dialing, which is a crucial outbound feature. You’ll notice plenty of examples like this throughout Dialpad’s product offerings.
The Bad
Gets pricey: While Dialpad’s entry-level phone plans are cheap, the contact center plans are actually expensive compared to alternatives on the market. These plans start around $80 per user per month and range up to $150. But you could get a contact center plan from Nextiva for just $50 per user per month. It’s tough to consider Dialpad a value pick once you start looking at its higher-tier plans compared to other platforms.
Limited integrations with entry-level plans: If you’re going the budget route, Dialpad only integrates with Google Workspace. You’ll need to upgrade your plan to access additional integrations, open APIs, and webhooks. This won’t matter for those of you who are already looking at those mid and high-tier plans. But you won’t get the most out of Dialpad with just a Google Workspace integration.
Dialpad’s Noteworthy Features
Power Dialer and AI Playbooks
Dialpad’s power dialer automates outbound calling, eliminating the need for call center reps to manually dial. This helps your team reach more callers than they would if they had to make calls on their own. While this feature isn’t necessarily unique compared to other call centers, Dialpad offers ways to make it even more powerful—by integrating with Salesforce and leveraging its AI sales coaching.
First, you can set up your power dialer inside Salesforce so your agents can automate cold calls without bouncing back and forth between multiple platforms. But this gets taken to the next level when AI provides real-time recommendations during sales calls.
It helps sales reps focus on what matters most to the leads while they’re on the phone, and it also provides managers with deep insights into how certain call patterns move people through your pipeline. This is one of Dialpad’s most advanced features.
Simultaneous Ring
This feature ensures your team never misses a call, and it’s perfect if your agents are working remotely or in a hybrid environment. Your contact center reps don’t need to be tied to their desk, as the simultaneous ring feature sends all incoming calls to every device that they’ve connected.
You can answer calls while you’re on your in-office work computer, at home on your laptop, or on-the-go from your smartphone. Plus, you can flip calls at any time—meaning you can answer on your cell phone and then switch to your computer once you’re back at your desk. You can even set this up so that your colleague’s devices will ring at times when you’re unavailable.
All of this just makes things more flexible for your team while also improving the customer experience. Fewer calls will go unanswered or be sent to voicemail with this feature enabled.
Screen Capture
Call recording is crucial for quality assurance and agent training purposes. This is something you’ll find offered on most call center packages—including Dialpad.
But Dialpad has something that’s unique to the market, and that’s its screen capture tool. Rather than just recording the call, the agent’s entire screen is captured. This helps managers better assess what agents are looking at and how their exact actions impact the call quality or result.
Overall, the screen gives managers tons of valuable information and insight into what’s happening on calls from the agent side. So they ultimately provide better feedback and targeted coaching suggestions.
Virtual Receptionist
Instead of paying for a live answering service to answer your phones after hours or when the line is busy, you can rely on Dialpad’s virtual receptionist instead. Answering services are more expensive, and they really can’t do much besides stick to a tight script and take a message. They don’t have any real knowledge of your business and it usually ends up frustrating the caller.
Dialpad leverages AI with its virtual receptionist to automatically route callers to the right department or agent based on their needs. You can filter and program routing based on time of day, days of the week, call prioritization, holidays, and so much more.
Real-Time Speech Analytics and Post-Call Reports
In addition to transcribing calls in real-time, Dialpad also leverages AI to provide real-time feedback on customer sentiment. Certain keywords can even trigger specific notes to help agents progress through the call based on what customers are saying and how they’re feeling.
Getting these types of analytics during a live call is invaluable. In most cases, agents and managers wouldn’t get these types of insights until after, when it’s too late to make adjustments on the fly.
Dialpad does offer post-call analytics as well, so all of this information will be readily available to assess agent performance and quality reports. This can also help you track key call center KPIs and identify areas for improvement.
Local Presence Dialing
To leverage this feature, you first need to purchase a local number bundle. Once you’ve done that, Dialpad will automatically detect the recipient’s number and then ensure your number matches the closest possible area code. These bundles cover the top 100 metro areas in the US, which covers about 80% of the country’s population.
You might have a sales rep based in Texas calling someone in Chicago. But that recipient may not ignore the call if it comes through with a Texas caller ID. By calling people from a number they perceive to be local, it increases the chances that they’ll trust the call and answer it.
Another cool part about this feature is that it also matches the number for returned calls. If the recipient doesn’t answer or calls back later, Dialpad will make sure that it gets routed back to the agent who called them.
Dialpad Pricing, Plans, and Add-Ons
Dialpad has four main product offerings, each good for different situations. Some businesses may even benefit from using more than one of these products, either for different types of agents or for specific departments.
We’ll break each of these down in greater detail below.
Business Communications
The business communication suite covers voice, meetings, and messaging through a single platform. This is a solid, budget-friendly option for any business that wants an internal communication tool and business phone system through a single subscription.
- Standard — Starts at $15 per user per month
- Pro — Starts at $25 per user per month
- Enterprise — Custom quote
For small businesses and brand new call centers, you could get away with signing up for this plan instead of going with a more complex and more expensive contact center plan. Just know that the features here are a bit more limited, and this isn’t really intended for high-volume sales or support use cases.
AI Contact Center
Dialpad’s contact center plans are designed more for inbound calling. If you’ve outgrown the business communication system, these plans will support your needs at scale.
- Essentials — Starts at $80 per user per month
- Advanced — Starts at $115 per user per month
- Premium — Starts at $150 per user per month
These rates are pricey compared to similar options on the market. Although you’re getting plenty of AI features included.
Dialpad also gives you both IVR and ACD with all three of these plans to help you route inbound calls more effectively.
AI Sales Center
As the name implies, these packages are built specifically for sales teams. They can accommodate a high volume of outbound dialing while giving your reps the tools they need to succeed.
- Essentials — Starts at $60 per user per month
- Advanced — Starts at $95 per user per month
- Premium — Starts at $150 per user per month
The sales packages also help managers monitor and train agents through features like call recording, whispering, and barging at every tier.
But to unlock Dialpad’s most advanced AI features, like AI scorecards and real-time assistance, you’ll need to upgrade to the Advanced or Premium levels. These rates can be tough to justify unless you’re really utilizing all the bells and whistles that come with them.
AI Meetings
Dialpad has a free forever video meeting platform for personal use. You host up to ten participants and host meetings for up to 45 minutes.
This is fine for entrepreneurs or companies that don’t really spend a ton of time on video calls. But most of you will benefit more from the Business package, which starts at $15 per user per month.
This upgrade gets you video meetings for up to five hours with 150 participants and comes with AI meeting transcriptions built-in.
Add-Ons
Beyond the main subscription options, you can optionally add on additional perks like:
- Conference Room Line — Starts at $15 per month
- Internet Fax — Starts at $10 per month
- International or Toll-Free Numbers — Starts at $15 per month
- Local Numbers — Starts at $5 per month
- Room License Fees — Starts at $34 per month
- Toll-Free Dial-In For Meeting Rooms — Starts at $20 per month
Getting international and toll-free numbers for just $15 each is definitely reasonable. Local numbers starting at $5 is also a fair price. But the extra $10 per user per month for internet fax is a little frustrating since you can get this included from other business communications platforms.
Is Dialpad Right for You?
Dialpad can work for any business that’s just getting started and needs a business phone system that comes with unified communication tools. It’s tough to beat those entry-level prices for such a feature-packed product.
On the flip side, it also works for businesses with deeper pockets if you want AI built into everything you’re doing within your contact center—especially for sales teams. Just know that once you’re evaluating these plans, Dialpad is no longer budget-friendly.
It’s more suitable for midsize call centers with at least 100 agents.
If you’re looking for the best all-around value, Dialpad probably isn’t for you. There are better options on the market, like Nextiva, that hit that sweet spot of advanced functionality at an affordable price.
For high-volume customer support centers, Dialpad doesn’t have a built-in helpdesk or ticketing solution. So you’d need to rely on a separate tool for this. It’s also not the best solution for providing omnichannel support out of the box. That said, there are plenty of integrations available and you could even set up a custom app with your helpdesk software through the Dialpad API.
Learn more about Dialpad here, and check out our full reviews of the best call center software for other options.
