RingCentral vs. Five9: Which Contact Center Platform Is Better?

Choosing a contact center solution for a business requires a ton of research, especially in the late stages of narrowing down your choices. Amped-up marketing makes solutions appear almost similar until you dive a little deeper.

When you’re comparing RingCentral vs. Five9, you can focus on a few areas to make your decision easier. Here, we will highlight these areas and compare the platforms in detail to uncover the pros and cons of each.

We’ll also take a look at how Nextiva stacks up against these two popular contact center solutions.

RingCentral vs. Five9: Comparing the Benefits

Let’s explore RingCentral and Five9 and their respective strengths according to our research and the customer feedback we found online.

RingCentral: The pros

Established in 1999, RingCentral allows teams and businesses to connect anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Its benefits for users are listed below:

Outbound calling

RingCentral’s outbound calling features include progressive, predictive, and preview dialers to boost agent productivity and reduce manual dialing. Intelligent call suppression makes real-time adjustments to the dialing list when a customer takes action, which could be completing their payment or submitting a do-not-call request.

RingCentral allows admins to reserve customers for a specific agent using agent filtering. Simply ensure that you have an updated lead list to compile, upload, and assign to different outbound calling campaigns. You can enable this at a dial group level.

Omnichannel features

RingCentral routes customer queries across various channels, including emails, SMSs, social media, voicemail, and live chats. Incoming calls are sent to interactive voice response (IVR) to determine customers’ concerns. For example, when you hear, “press 1 for account details,” that’s an IVR in action.

The automatic call distributor then queues inbound calls based on the IVR response and the agents’ expertise and experience. You can configure omnichannel routing based on an agent’s availability, capacity, and custom routing strategies.

Analytics and reporting

RingCentral offers detailed analytics, including speech, text, and predictive analytics to show what’s happening in real time. These reports allow businesses to identify and troubleshoot urgent issues, reducing overall ticket volume and time-to-resolution through alerting and quality scoring.

RingCentral’s reports highlight historical patterns and workflows, making it easier for businesses to recognize bottlenecks and gain insights into customer journeys. The reports cover a global system’s health, network, endpoints, rooms, and devices.

Integration across platforms

RingCentral integrates with over 300 business applications, including Google WorkSpace, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and popular CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce. It adds communication workflows to the tools businesses use daily through APIs to increase productivity.

The automation speeds up the sales cycle and ensures you get insights into every call. Integrations bring admin and operational processes together on the customer support front to improve your company’s support delivery.

Five9: The pros

Two years after RingCentral’s inception in 1999, Five9 arrived, offering a competitive cloud-based contact center solution. Here’s what customers like about the platform.

Outbound calling

The platform’s predictive dialer automates outbound dialing, saving agents time. It calculates how many calls to dial, considering the connection rates, real-time data, and historical agent statistics. It allows a progressive dialer to place calls based on agent availability so you can see the order in which your agents will work on calls.

This is done in compliance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which prevents any automated dialing that is not compliant with the regulations.

Omnichannel features

Five9 allows organizations to engage with customers across multiple channels, including voice, email, SMS, web chat, video, social messaging apps, and more, from a single desktop. This helps increase customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing agent effort.

It also offers self-service and gathers customer intent over a call with speech-enabled IVA or on a mobile device with visual IVR.

Analytics and reporting

Five9 offers comprehensive, real-time call center analytics and reporting tools. It provides over 120 pre-made reporting templates and custom analytic parameters. You can use data visualization and drill-down capabilities to gain insights and make data-driven decisions.

The interaction analytics feature uses natural language processing to process conversation insights. This feature works with 28 different languages, helping you analyze sentiments in your customer’s language.

Integrations

Five9 seamlessly integrates with leading CRM software such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle, and Zendesk. These integrations help companies deliver a remarkable customer experience while increasing agent productivity.

Such integrations help agents work seamlessly across apps without endlessly switching platforms.

Check out: Nextiva’s Five9 integration that enables seamless VoIP connectivity between the two systems

Five9 vs RingCentral: Comparing the Drawbacks

While both platforms have some of the best features and benefits available, they also have shortcomings.

RingCentral: The cons

Although the RingCentral contact center solution offers a range of features, there are some cons that you should look out for, including: 

• Complexity: While RingCentral’s interface may look relatively easy to use, it’s easy to get lost between several submenus and widgets. This makes it tricky to find the page you’re looking for. The wide range of features can also overwhelm smaller teams with limited IT support.
• Pricing: The basic RingCentral plan is reasonably priced, but it excludes many essential features, such as 24/7 support, unlimited audio conferencing, and integrations. With its comprehensive features, the premium plan comes with a hefty price tag, making it unaffordable for many small and medium businesses.
• Integration: Despite its 300+ integrations, some users have reported difficulties setting up and customizing these integrations for their existing workflows. Some have also experienced below-par customer service while dealing with the RingCentral team.

Five9: The cons

Below are some of Five9’s notable cons. Consider these when choosing a contact center solution for your business.

• Steep learning curve: Five9’s user interface is comparatively easy and intuitive, unlike RingCentral’s. However, the more advanced features often require more detailed and in-depth training to get agents up to speed. This makes it more challenging to train new users or teams with limited contact center software experience.
• Cost: Like RingCentral, Five9’s premium features, such as analytics capabilities, come with a hefty price tag. Their Core and Digital plans require businesses to choose between voice and digital, and companies must pay more for the omnichannel solution.
• Technical issues: Businesses using Five9 occasionally report technical glitches and reliability issues that affect their call quality and system performance. Also, due to its complexity, setting up Five9 for businesses can require a significant time investment.

Related: Five9 Pricing: How Much Does Its Cloud Contact Center Cost?

Exploring a Third Option: RingCentral vs. Five9 vs. Nextiva

Nextiva entered the market in 2006, offering a more competitive contact center solution than RingCentral and Five9. Below are some features and capabilities that make Nextiva a preferred solution for users:

Feature	Nextiva	RingCentral	Five9
Monthly price (20–99 users)	Starts at $30 per user	Starts at $20.00 per user	Starts at $175 per month
Ease of use (G2)	8.7 out of 10	8.4 out of 10	8.4 out of 10
Ease of setup (G2)	8.3 out of 10	7.7 out of 10	7.8 out of 10
Quality of support (G2)	9.0 out of 10	7.8 out of 10	8.4 out of 10
Communication channels	Voice, text messaging (SMS), video conferencing, team messaging, internet fax, social media, voicemail	Voice, text messaging (SMS), video conferencing, team messaging, internet fax, voicemail	Chat, voice, email, SMS/MMS, social messaging
Reliability	99.999% uptime	99.999% uptime	99.994% uptime
Unlimited online fax	Included on all plans	Available on Advanced and Ultra plans	Includes fax as one of the channels
Mobile app	iOS and Android apps with full-featured calling, messaging, and video conferencing capabilities	iOS and Android apps with calling, messaging, and video conferencing. Some advanced features may be limited on mobile compared to the desktop app	iOS and Android apps with visual IVR and visual customer surveys
Integrations	Outlook and Google Contacts; additional integrations based on tier	Available based on tier	CRM and UCaaS integrations available
Customer support	24/7 email, chat, phone support	Phone support and live chat	24/7 via phone or email

Comprehensive suite

Nextiva offers businesses a one-stop shop for managing customer communication. It streamlines your VoIP phone system, CRM, and customer experience management to deliver a complete solution to customer-facing teams. This way, teams avoid the complexities of navigating fragmented and siloed applications.

User-friendly interface

RingCentral and Five9 make it challenging for businesses with comparatively less extensive IT support to adopt and use the solution.

However, Nextiva provides a user-friendly and intuitive interface, making it easier for the customer-facing team to ramp up quickly and focus more on delivering a better customer experience. It’s also easy to set up and implement, making it less hassle for admins.

Exceptional customer support

Nextiva’s support teams are available 24/7 to offer decent customer support. Whether you have an issue setting up your system or a feature-related query, you can ping Nextiva’s support anytime for quick resolution.

Nextiva stands for exceptional customer service, empowering businesses to support their customers promptly and efficiently.

Competitive pricing

Unlike other options, Nextiva’s pricing is cost-conscious. It offers advanced features like auto dialer, call recording, call routing, and analytics, and when paired with its affordability, it supports businesses of all sizes. The solution eliminates expensive hardware or heavy maintenance and provides a cloud contact center solution. It can be highly cost-effective for diverse business needs.

Reliability and scalability

Nextiva offers a reliable service that you can scale as your business grows and its communication needs evolve.

The solution promises a 99.999% uptime to help enterprises always be approachable to their customers. The platform updates real-time network status, so if there are any system performance issues, you’ll instantly receive notifications.

Nextiva also delivers a broad knowledge base and FAQs to support self-service users facing difficulties or confusion.

Related: RingCentral vs. Nextiva: Which VoIP Provider Is Best?

Verdict: Add Nextiva to Your Contact Center Shortlist

RingCX and Five9 offer competitive call center software and have their strengths. However, if you’re looking for more functionality, ease of use, and support at a lower cost, Nextiva is the best choice.

We’ll bottom line it for you:

• Fact: Nextiva has higher customer satisfaction than RingCentral and Five9 (G2)
• Fact: Nextiva is the best-rated contact center infrastructure solution (G2)
• Fact: More users recommend Nextiva over RingCentral or Five9 (Gartner Peer Insights)

That’s why we consistently receive an overall higher rating than RingCentral or Five9:

Nextiva offers a holistic and integrated communication solution for businesses of all sizes. It is easier for admins to set up and customer-facing teams to use, making it a go-to contact center solution for top brands.