Dialpad Alternatives For Small Businesses

5 top Dialpad alternatives to level up your business comms 📞

Naturally, the “best” Dialpad alternative will vary from one business to another based on your budget and goals. Are you looking to streamline customer support? Implement a new VoIP solution? Boost sales productivity? Make sure you understand exactly what you’re looking to achieve – and how much you can afford to pay for it – before starting your search.

1. Rosie AI: Best Dialpad alternative for AI call handling

🤔 What is it: Rosie AI is an AI call answering service that learns about your business through your website, Google Business profile, and key documents. Your Rosie AI agent is on hand 24/7 to deal with FAQs, book appointments, take messages, and more. If you’re looking for a hands-off customer support solution, Rosie is an excellent alternative to Dialpad Connect.

🥊 Rosie vs Dialpad:

• Inbound call handling: Rosie is built for answering customer calls, capturing leads, and booking appointments. Dialpad’s AI saves you time by sharing summaries and action points, plus it has a built-in auto attendant and call routing functionality, but it can’t handle calls from start to finish.

• Setup: Getting started with Rosie is super simple, with intuitive workflows and no requirement to build complex interactive voice response systems. Just plug in your website and Google Business profile and you’re pretty much ready to go! Dialpad’s setup is more technical and can be time-consuming for smaller teams.

• Lead capture and scheduling: Rosie gathers whatever customer information you ask her to collect. She can even book appointments during live calls and notify the customer via SMS before they’ve hung up. Whereas Dialpad doesn’t offer built-in, real-time appointment scheduling during calls – so you’ll have to follow up separately.

• Simultaneous call handling: Rosie can handle multiple calls at the same time, with no need to pay for additional seats or users. Dialpad relies on user-based call queues or routing to deal with multiple calls, which may require more paid uses as call volume increases.

• Predictable pricing: All Rosie plans include unlimited usage and flat-rate prices, so you never need to worry about unexpected charges. By contrast, adding new users or features to Dialpad can increase your costs fast.

• Small business functionality: While Rosie is scalable enough to serve even the largest enterprises, our core functionality is geared toward one issue that many small businesses struggle with – answering every incoming call professionally. Dialpad is a wider-ranging platform with a lot of features that small businesses just don’t need when it comes to handling inbound calls.

💵 Price: From $49 per month for unlimited minutes.

📣 Testimonial: “We needed a way to stop calls from going to voicemail because everyone just hangs up. Now Rosie picks up 24/7 and I feel confident callers aren't just going to the next competitor on their list.”

👉 Start your free seven-day Rosie trial with unlimited minutes and all features – no credit card required!

2. Nextiva: Best all-in-one UCaaS alternative

🤔 What is it: Nextiva describes itself as a unified customer experience management platform with use cases spanning outbound dialing, intelligent call routing, call analytics, and more. If you’re looking for an all-in-one customer communications solution, it’s a strong alternative to Dialpad.

🥊 Nextiva vs Dialpad:

• Number porting: Both platforms allow you to port local numbers in the US and Canada free of charge. However, Dialpad charges for porting toll free numbers, whereas Nextiva does it for free.

• Pricing: Nextiva is slightly cheaper for small business users, with its entry-level plan priced at $23 per user per month. Dialpad’s starter plan costs $27 per user per month.

• AI transcription: With Dialpad, you get real-time, AI-powered call transcriptions on all plans, whereas Nextiva hides this functionality away behind its Power Suite CX plan, priced at $75 per user per month.

💵 Price: From $23 per user per month.

📣 Testimonial: “The VoIP features and call center tools work smoothly, and having everything in one UCaaS platform makes it much easier to run daily operations.”

3. RingCentral: Best enterprise-grade solution

🤔 What is it: RingCentral is an AI-powered business communications solution predominantly aimed at enterprise-grade users. It offers business phone, instant messaging, SMS, video, and contact center tools.

🥊 RingCentral vs Dialpad:

• AI call handling: RingCentral has a dedicated AI receptionist tool. It’s expensive, priced from $59 per month for up to 100 minutes of call handling time (plus the cost of your standard RingCentral plan). But it’s better than Dialpad, which doesn’t offer any AI call answering functionality.

• Reliability: Both platforms are pretty watertight. However, RingCentral offers a 99.999% uptime SLA for all business phone users, whereas Dialpad has a 100% uptime SLA for enterprise customers.

• Enterprise integrations: All RingCentral plans include integrated telephony for Microsoft Teams and popular integrations like Google, Office 365, and Slack. Dialpad only offers Microsoft Teams integration on its Pro plan and above ($35+ per user per month).

💵 Price: Business phone plans start at $30 per user per month.

📣 Testimonial: “A reliable and feature-rich communication solution that supports the needs of both our in-office and remote teams.”

4. Zoom Phone: Best for video-first businesses

🤔 What is it: Since the pandemic, everyone on the planet has known about Zoom. It’s not just a video calling platform, offering AI-powered VoIP phone services, instant messaging, scheduling in, and more. But it’s still a popular choice among businesses that prioritize video-based comms.

🥊 Zoom Phone vs Dialpad:

• Video meetings: Zoom is best known as a video conferencing tool, and it still excels here, allowing users to run meetings for up to 100 participants (or up to 5,000 with the Large Meeting add-on). Dialpad does video meetings too, but at present you’re limited to 10 participants per meeting on all plans.

• Affordability: If you’re just looking for a business calling solution, Zoom is actually cheaper, with phone plans priced at $15 per user per month for unlimited calls. Dialpad pricing starts at $27 per user per month.

• Integrations: All Zoom plans include integrations for Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Slack, and contact center tools, whereas Dialpad’s entry-level plan only offers a Google Workspace integration.

💵 Price: Phone-only plans cost $15 per user per month for unlimited calling in the US/Canada, while plans including Zoom’s workplace video conferencing functionality start at $21.99 per user per month.

📣 Testimonial: “Zoom Phone has been incredibly valuable when it comes to keeping our teams connected. The one-click option to elevate calls to meetings allowed our users ease, and reduced time spent, alleviating the need to juggle multiple platforms.”

5. Grasshopper: Best low-cost virtual phone system

🤔 What is it: With its affordable and highly scalable pricing, Grasshopper positions itself as the perfect virtual phone system for entrepreneurs and small businesses. It lacks the all-round functionality of a UCaaS platform like Dialpad or Nextiva – but if you just need a cost-effective solution for calling and texting, it’s a great fit.

🥊 Grasshopper vs Dialpad:

• Affordability and scalability: Grasshopper is the only business phone solution in our roundup to offer flat pricing, rather than charging per user (like Dialpad). The ability to add unlimited users at no extra cost makes it a popular choice for growing businesses that want predictable pricing.

• All-round functionality: The trade-off with Grasshopper is that it doesn’t do any of the extra stuff that Dialpad offers, like the ability to host meetings or message colleagues through the platform.

• AI support: Dialpad’s built-in AI can transcribe voicemails and meetings, and even supports real-time call transcription. By contrast, Grasshopper lacks any AI tools, so you’ll have to find another tool to do all that stuff for you – which may carry an extra cost.

💵 Price: Grasshopper starts at $18 per month for a single user or $32 per month for unlimited users.

📣 Testimonial: "Grasshopper lets my company scale like never before. Now, my entire team is accessible to our customers since all employees can answer calls despite their location or time zone."

What’s the best Dialpad alternative? 💪

To reiterate, there’s no such thing as the best Dialpad alternative for every business, it all depends on the specific functionality you need. 

But if you’re specifically looking for an affordable and efficient way to answer incoming calls, capture leads, and book appointments, there’s a clear winner: Rosie AI.

With Rosie AI, you get unlimited call handling minutes, bilingual agents, and message taking with custom questions – plus the option to add call transfers, appointment links, advanced agent training, and more.