We recommend Nextiva for most people trying to decide between the two because it’s easy to use, deploy, and scale no matter how you plan to use it. If you’re smaller, Nextiva’s phone plans are cheaper, simpler, and still come with a wide range of collaboration tools to keep your team connected. As you grow, Nextiva’s better equipped to handle your needs with infinite scalability and customization options for large teams that handle high volumes.
While Dialpad can support larger teams, it’s best for small businesses with less than 100 users who need more advanced functionality and are willing to pay a bit more plus sacrifice simplicity to get it.
Nextiva and Dialpad Compared to Their Closest Competitors
Nextiva is our favorite call center software and VoIP phone system. Across the board, Nextiva’s unmatched reliability, call quality, customer service, and competitive price point make it a great choice, no matter your size or how you plan to use it.
On top of that, its phone systems are cheaper than most. It’s approachable for everyone, from very small teams with basic requirements to large enterprises with complex needs.
Dialpad is a tech-forward solution that integrates AI capabilities into all of its communication products. It’s contact center tools shine for AI coaching and advanced insights, which are particularly useful for outbound sales. Dialpad’s standard phone system offers a handful of advanced features–even if you’re a small business, you can still get strong call management tools, including custom call routing, queues, ring groups, and call recording, at an affordable price.
If you need even more powerful call routing features, Cloudtalk may be a good fit. For the same price as Dialpad, you’ll get automated call distribution and a call flow designer but fewer built-in AI capabilities, less scalability, and limited integrations.
Cloudtalk’s next tier is $5 more per user per month and includes far more routing options, including skills-based, caller-based, preferred-agent, and IVR.
For midsize or larger teams, RingCentral and TalkDesk are great options. RingCentral offers advanced phone systems as well as powerful contact center plans. TalkDesk shines for its highly customizable contact center solution with built-in low and no-code builders.
Check out our complete list of the best call center software or business phone systems to learn more about how Nextiva and Dialpad stack up in the market.
Nextiva and Dialpad Similarities
Cloud call center software: Nextiva and Dialpad are both cloud-based call center solutions, which is appealing for modern businesses looking for a system that’s more flexible and affordable compared to on-premise deployments. As a cloud calling system, you can deploy Nextiva and Dialpad in traditional call center environments or across multiple virtual locations. You don’t need to purchase expensive equipment and user provisioning has never been easier.
All-in-one business phone system: Aside from its contact center products, both providers also offer UCaaS (unified communications as a service) suites. You’ll get unlimited calling, team messaging, video conferencing, and more. These plans come with strong internal collaboration features, but they can also be used to handle internal and external call center needs on a smaller scale.
Easy to use and deploy: You don’t have to worry about complex rollouts and weeks of installation with a third-party partner if you go with Nextiva or Dialpad. You don’t need technical expertise or internal IT resources either. Beyond initial setup, there’s a very short learning curve with both.
Suitable for remote work: Remote agents can easily set up their own devices. For hardware-free deployments, they can use either providers’ mobile and desktop apps to access everything they need at home.
Automation and team productivity tools: Both providers offer plenty of tools to maximize agent efficiency. Nextiva has a built-in auto dialer, automated outbound campaigns, AI-powered task automation to optimize workflows, and more. Dialpad uses AI to provide live coaching, transcriptions, call summaries, real-time agent assistance, and similar features that reduce the amount of time your team needs to spend on tasks when they’re not on a call.
Inbound, outbound, and blended capabilities: Some business phone systems are only designed to support certain types of call centers. But that’s not the case with Nextiva or Dialpad. You can use either for outbound dialing, inbound support, sales, or a combination of all three.
Flexible call routing capabilities: Automatic call distribution (ACD) comes standard with every Nextiva and Dialpad call center plan. You’ll also have access to call flow builders and IVRs that let you truly customize the path of an inbound call. Whether it’s routing them to a particular agent or department based on their need, time of day, day of the week, or something more specific—you have limitless options at your fingertips.
AI-powered bots for self-service: Nextiva and Dialpad both leverage AI to help reduce the amount of time people need to spend connecting with a live agent. Nextiva has intelligent virtual assistants that can be deployed across voice, chat, and messaging channels to solve common problems and provide self-service for inbound communication. Dialpad has a similar feature that connects with your knowledge base to instantly deliver answers to common questions. Both can seamlessly transfer customers to a live agent if necessary.
Where Nextiva Shines
Omnichannel customer communication: Nextiva’s omnichannel communication suite is arguably the best in the industry, and it definitely has the edge. Dialpad’s contact center plan only comes with a single digital channel–you’ll have to pay extra to access all of them. With Nextiva, every channel is built into the core of the system. You’ll get complete routing options for phone, SMS, chat, email, social messaging, web forms, and more without having to pay extra.
Built-in workforce management tools: We love that Nextiva provides built in workforce management and workforce optimization tools. At scale, this is a must-have for any modern call center. It ensures you get the most of your call center resources without hindering the customer experience. Rather than relying on a third-party tool for managing your team’s schedules and tracking performance, you can get it all under one roof.
Dialpad doesn’t offer workforce management or optimization tools at all.
Versatile use cases: Nextiva can do everything you could possibly need and supports really any type of business or call center. Its business phone system is one of the best tools on the market for team collaboration with enough power to deploy virtual call centers on a smaller scale. Companies with hundreds or even thousands of employees can use Nextiva’s call center software to handle outbound sales, internal support, or any combination you can imagine.
Dialpad isn’t as versatile. While it also supports blended contact centers and has some room to grow, it’s better for sales teams and call centers with closer to 100 agents.
Customizable call flow builder: Beyond ACDs and IVRs (which Dialpad also has), Nextiva has a highly customizable call flow builder that lets you route different calls through a specific path for any possible use case. Maybe you want toll-free calls tied to a particular campaign routed to your best sales reps or maybe you want to prioritize billing calls ahead of customer support. Whatever the case may be, you’re in total control over everything without having to write code or deal with anything technical. Nextiva lets you customize everything with a drag-and-drop builder. And you can even tie it to other touchpoints, like email and SMS.
Auto dialers: Nextiva’s auto dialer software comes standard with its contact center software. This allows you to increase agent efficiency by connecting them with more people, which is particularly useful for outbound campaigns and sales calls. We love that Nextiva just includes this with every call center plan. In contrast, Dialpad has a power dialer that’s available in select plans and as a paid add-on.
Internal collaboration: If you’re looking for a business communication solution that combines voice, video, and team chat under one roof, Nextiva has the clear edge over Dialpad. While Dialpad has similar features, it’s much more limited. For example, Dialpad limits you to just ten participants per meeting, whereas Nextiva supports 40 participants on a comparable plan. Nextiva also comes with perks like video conference recording, threaded conversations, shared contacts, team presence status indicators, and team collaboration rooms.
Where Nextiva Falls Short
Usage rates aren’t published online: Beyond the starting rate for each plan, it’s not exactly clear what you’re paying for Nextiva’s omnichannel contact center software. Dialpad’s pricing is much more transparent. It clearly states it’s per-user and usage rates.
Pricier than some alternatives: Nextiva’s call center software starts at $99 per month for voice and $119 per month for the omnichannel suite. This isn’t an exorbitant amount by any means, but it’s worth noting that solutions like Cloudtalk and Aircall start closer to the $30 per user per month range. Simply put, Nextiva isn’t the cheapest solution on the market for those with really tight budgets.
Phone plans aren’t as feature-rich: Nextiva’s standard phone system is simple and straightforward. Dialpad offers more advanced features you’d have to upgrade to Nextiva’s call center plans to get. With that said, Dialpad charges more and is harder to use because it’s not as simple.
Check out our full Nextiva review to learn more.
Where Dialpad Shines
AI-powered features: AI is ingrained into everything Dialpad does. So much so that the platform has essentially been rebranded to Dialpad AI. Nextiva has also jumped on the AI train, but Dialpad is slightly further ahead. Dialpad uses AI to provide live coaching, transcripts, customer sentiment analysis, agent productivity, customer self-service, and so much more. While you need to pay to access some of these features, they’re available if you want them.
Sales-specific calling needs: Dialpad has a slight edge over Nextiva for outbound sales teams. Nextiva can definitely handle this use case, but Dialpad has sales-specific plans with specialized features. You’ll get powerful AI coaching, pre-recorded voicemails, real-time assistants, and even adherence insights.
The sales software also comes with live monitoring, whisper, and barging capabilities for managers. Paired with its AI scorecards and reports, Dialpad has some of the best call center training tools we’ve seen for sales reps.
Local presence dialing: Dialpad can automatically match your area code with a local area code of the recipient. This drastically increases the chances of someone answering the phone. Say your business is based in Texas but you have an agent working in Florida calling a customer in New York. The software can recognize the recipient’s location and automatically use a New York area code as long as you’ve purchased the number.
Uptime SLA: Every Dialpad contact center solution is backed by a 99.9% uptime SLA. Businesses that sign up for an enterprise business communication package benefit from a 100% uptime SLA. We love to see service providers stand behind their platforms like this. And while we haven’t had any issues with Nextiva, it doesn’t have a standard SLA like Dialpad does.
Customer sentiment analysis: Dialpad’s AI is great at analyzing a customer’s emotions during an interaction. In fact, it provides live sentiment analysis that helps agents and managers alike. For example, a manager can quickly glance at a screen that shows if any live calls have a negative sentiment and the reason behind it. Managers can start listening in and providing real-time coaching or take it over entirely to help turn things around.
PII redaction: To help companies achieve compliance with strict privacy regulations, Dialpad is using AI for PII (personally identifiable information) redaction.
If a customer is sharing sensitive data over the phone, like a social security number or credit card, Dialpad will automatically redact that information from the transcript and call recording. So it keeps the customer’s information safe while simultaneously protecting your business from the fallout associated with a potential breach.
Where Dialpad Falls Short
Lots of add-ons: While Dialpad has a lot of powerful features, you’ll need to pay a premium to access them. Things like access to all digital channels, AI scorecards, CSAT, screen recording, queue callbacks, and automatic call distribution cost extra, depending on the type of plan you choose. Dialpad already isn’t the cheapest option. These add-ons can easily raise the price even more.
Faxing costs extra on a business phone system: Dialpad’s base business communication software is more expensive than Nextiva, despite not offering online faxing with any of its plans.
Limited integrations: Dialpad’s entry-level phone system only integrates with Google Workspace. At the next two tiers, you can integrate with tools like Zendesk, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, and MS Teams. But the majority of your integrations will rely on connections via Zapier, open APIs, and webhooks.
Refer to our Dialpad review for a more in-depth breakdown of its pros, cons, features, and pricing.
Nextiva vs Dialpad: The Final Verdict
Nextiva has the edge for most businesses. It’s better for businesses seeking an omnichannel contact center solution, and it’s also the clear winner for any brand that needs a VoIP phone service. Nextiva can really handle any potential use case for businesses of all sizes without sacrificing ease of use and simplicity for small teams.
However, Dialpad is worth considering for outbound sales teams and small businesses that need a few advanced features.
Decided neither is right for you? See our favorite call center software and business phone systems to learn more about all of your options.
