7 Best Talkdesk Alternatives & Competitors for 2023

Talkdesk is known for its robust artificial intelligence (AI)-powered contact center tools, but its pricing lacks the transparency and flexibility other providers offer. To find the best Talkdesk alternatives, we looked for providers with similar functionalities at more competitive price points and those with specialized offerings. These include extensive self-service capabilities, integrated business phone services, and flexible pricing options.

Based on our research, the best Talkdesk competitors include:

• 8×8 Contact Center: Best overall Talkdesk alternative for businesses wanting to mix and match plans for cost savings
• Nextiva Contact Center: Excellent for collaborative teams that need a contact center with integrated unified communications capabilities
• RingCentral Contact Center: Ideal for businesses wanting to reach customers on a wide variety of digital messaging channels
• Zendesk Suite: Best Talkdesk alternative for companies looking to automate customer support through self-service options
• Dialpad Contact Center: Top Talkdesk alternative with an AI-powered omnichannel contact center platform
• Freshdesk: Suitable for small businesses looking for a budget-friendly contact center solution
• Genesys Cloud CX: Great for sales teams that need comprehensive outbound campaign tools

Talkdesk & Best Alternatives at a Glance

Take the quiz to find out which Talkdesk alternative fits your contact center needs.

8×8 Contact Center: Best Overall Talkdesk Alternative

8×8 Contact Center is the best overall Talkdesk alternative, allowing businesses to mix and match plans to create a solution that best fits their unique requirements. Instead of upgrading to high-tier plans to access extra features, 8×8 Contact Center’s flexible mix-and-match licensing lets you pick the exact capabilities your agents and supervisors require in the most cost-efficient way.

The X6 is a voice-centric contact center plan that combines collaboration and telephony capabilities with contact center functionality for voice-based interactions. The X7 plan is the best package if you’re looking for a multichannel contact center. Meanwhile, the X8 plan offers advanced contact center features such as quality management tools and interaction analytics.

With its monthly plans ranging from $85 to $140 per user, 8×8 Contact Center falls behind in pricing. If you’re looking for a cheaper Talkdesk alternative, check out Freshdesk, which offers a free version and has affordable monthly plans starting at only $18 per user.

8×8 Contact Center Monthly Pricing (per User) at a Glance

• X6: $85 for skills-based routing, unlimited media storage, interactive voice response (IVR), supervisor analytics, and post-call survey
• X7: $110 for co-browsing and omnichannel support for chat, email, SMS, and social media channels
• X8: $140 for quality management, speech analytics, and outbound dialers (e.g., preview, progressive, and predictive)

8×8 Contact Center Features

• Workforce engagement management: Empower your teams to deliver ideal customer experiences with quality management, speech analytics, call and screen recording, and customer surveys.
• 8×8 Analytics for Contact Center: A suite of analytics services that delivers customizable insights into real-time and historical information based on agent, queues, and channel performance.
• Agent Workspace: A dedicated agent platform designed to streamline customer interactions, increase engagement, and collaborate with other agents effectively.

Nextiva Contact Center: Best for Integrated Unified Communications (UC)

Nextiva Contact Center is an excellent Talkdesk alternative for businesses that need unified communications features to empower their teams to work and collaborate remotely. The NextivaONE app ensures complete mobility for your business by providing all collaboration and customer engagement tools in one place. Instantly start a video meeting, send messages, and share files—all of which are available on the web and desktop versions.

One of the major drawbacks of Nextiva is its limited integrations. While most Talkdesk competitors connect with hundreds of third-party apps, Nextiva only integrates with 19 business solutions. Consider Zendesk Suite, which integrates with 1,392 apps, allowing you to extend your contact center’s capabilities for increasing agent productivity and streamlining workflows.

Nextiva Contact Center Monthly Pricing (per User) at a Glance*

• Pro: $50 for unlimited call queues and intelligent call distribution
• Enterprise: $100 for queue management, dialed number Identification service (DNIS), call dispositioning, and priority routing

*Contact the Nextiva sales team to learn the feature inclusions per package

Nextiva Contact Center Features

• Workflow automation: Provide automated outreach to your customers on their preferred channels, such as phone, social media, email, or text. You can also set automated workflows, analyze real-time visualizations, and utilize prebuilt integrations.
• Call center thresholds: Receive live notifications when your call center traffic meets predetermined limits. Yellow and red thresholds signal that a specific metric is unusually high.
• Dialed number identification service (DNIS): Associate multiple phone numbers to a queue or play specific messages. For example, two separate calls within the same queue have different music on hold and wait times.

RingCentral Contact Center: Best for Omnichannel Support

RingCentral Contact Center is one of the top Talkdesk competitors for businesses needing extensive multichannel support. It goes beyond traditional call center capabilities by encompassing over 30 digital channels, including mail, text messages (SMS), social media, and live chat.

RingCentral has an omnichannel digital customer engagement platform that personalizes customer support by combining all customer-facing channels. RingCentral Engage Digital connects with more than 20 digital touchpoints, such as the web, social media, messaging apps, review platforms, as well as custom channels.

One downside of choosing RingCentral Contact Center is that customer relationship manager (CRM) integrations (e.g., Zendesk and Salesforce) come with extra fees, adding costs to your monthly plans. If this is outside your expected budget, 8×8 Contact Center is your best bet. All contact center plans include out-of-the-box integrations with key CRM, productivity, service, and support applications.

RingCentral Contact Center Monthly Pricing at a Glance*

• Essential: Skills-based routing, advanced IVR, real-time and historical reports, and RingCentral MVP capabilities
• Standard: Advanced voice recording and omnichannel support for 30-plus digital channels
• Premium: Quality management and screen recording
• Ultimate: Workforce management and performance management

*Contact the RingCentral sales team to request a quote for each plan

RingCentral Contact Center Features

• Real-time and historical reports: RingCentral Contact Center lets you monitor performance and contact center activity with real-time insights. It lets you customize visual reports and dashboards for a more optimized experience.
• AI digital routing: Automatically understands a message’s intent and routes digital messages thru artificial intelligence (AI) that recognizes 72 languages as well as text semantics and message type (public or private).
• Call deflection: Programs the IVR to provide callers an alternate digital way to reach your business instead of waiting in a queue.

Zendesk Suite: Best for Self-service Capabilities

Zendesk Suite’s contact center solution gives customers the freedom to help themselves—ideal for teams who don’t have enough agents. Its contextual self-service feature lets you embed your help center and suggest relevant articles on your website using a widget and mobile software development kit (SDK). It offers an “Answer Bot” (self-service tool) that uses machine learning to deliver immediate and relevant information so customers can get answers without waiting.

While Zendesk Suite offers many customer support features, it presents a huge learning curve for beginners. A better option is Nextiva Contact Center, a perfect fit for businesses looking for a comprehensive yet easy-to-use platform. It doesn’t overwhelm users with complex features and offers 24/7 phone support with no extra fees, unlike Zendesk.

Zendesk Suite Monthly Pricing (per User) at a Glance*

• Team: $59 for unlimited email addresses, live chat widget, social channels, prebuilt analytics, integrations, automatic ticket creation, and contextual self-service
• Growth: $99 for multilingual help center, customer portal, custom integrations, and 100 automated answers
• Professional: $125 for 500 automated answers, community forum, live dashboard, unlimited department groups, skills-based routing, IVR, and conference calling
• Enterprise: $199 for 1,000 automated answers, 100 custom agent statuses, guided workflows mode, and advanced knowledge and workforce management tools

*Discount for annual billing is available

Zendesk Suite Features

• Unified agent workspace: A conversation-focused platform to help agents manage conversations and their status across digital channels in a single view.
• Community forums: Provide a space for customers to connect and collaborate with your business and each other within the Zendesk ecosystem. Top contributors will receive a badge, while community managers have tools to create safe, on-brand forums.
• Workflow management: Ensure an optimized workflow by creating rules that run immediately once a ticket is created. Other features include skills-based conversation routing, SLA management, and ticket sharing.

Dialpad Contact Center: Best for AI Capabilities

Dialpad Contact Center is your next best option to Talkdesk if you’re looking for an AI-powered contact center solution. With Dialpad Ai, you’re able to deliver the best customer support across channels with live coaching, sentiment analysis, and real-time agent recommendations.

Dialpad’s AI-powered live coaching feature is equivalent to Talkdesk’s Agent Assist. It provides real-time coaching and sales recommendations, helping new agents get up to speed quickly. Sentiment analysis helps you track coachable moments on a call and pinpoint ones that require attention.

One disadvantage of using Dialpad Contact Center is that it only offers a virtual assistant for customer self-service. If having robust self-service capabilities is a priority in your contact center, go for Zendesk Suite. Besides its AI bot, Zendesk has a self-service portal that provides a dedicated space for customers to manage their support requests and community forum contributions.

Dialpad Contact Center Monthly Pricing at a Glance*

• Pro: Online meetings, help desk integrations, multilevel auto-attendant, speech coaching, sentiment tracking, 25 queued calls, and advanced analytics
• Enterprise: Custom analytics, unlimited hold queues, 100% uptime SLA, and custom business rules

*Contact the Dialpad sales team to get a quote

Dialpad Contact Center Features

• Agent activity heatmaps: Understand call volume patterns and wait times in a heat map. For example, darker colors on a specific date and time reveal a higher number of calls.
• Custom wallboards: Displays real-time contact center analytics and provides actionable data to make informed decisions and forecasts.
• In-queue callback: Enables callers to press a button to request a return phone call once an agent becomes available.

Freshdesk: Best for Its Affordability

One of the lowest-priced Talkdesk alternatives, Freshdesk is a great choice if you’re looking for an affordable, voice-focused contact center with a monthly billing option. Unlike other Talkdesk competitors, Freshdesk is an ideal fit for solopreneurs and small businesses as it provides a free version that includes basic call center features, such as custom greetings, caller ID, and call metrics.

If you need a broader feature set, Freshdesk offers low-cost monthly plans starting at only $18 per user. While it is relatively cheap, Freshdesk balances affordability and available features. All paid plans include voicemail, business hours, call recording, reporting tools, and integrations with popular CRM systems.

Note that per-minute pricing applies once the free included minutes have run out. If your business deals with a high volume of inbound calls within your region, you need a solution that lets you make unlimited calls. As an alternative, choose RingCentral Contact Center, which provides unlimited calls within the U.S. and Canada on all plans, including integrated unified communications as a service (UCaaS) features.

Freshdesk Monthly Pricing at a Glance*

• Free: Free for unlimited concurrent calls, custom greetings, call metrics, caller ID, call blocking, call notes, and outbound calling
• Growth: $18 for 2,000 incoming minutes, number porting, call masking, music on hold, CRM integrations, business hours, call recording, and call summary report
• Pro: $47 for bring your own carrier (BYOC), 3,000 incoming minutes, power dialer, conference calling, IVR, call monitoring, and custom reports
• Enterprise $83 for 5,000 incoming minutes, voicebot, call transcriptions, omnichannel routing, abandoned calls report, and speech-enabled IVR

*Discount applies to annual billing

Freshdesk Features

• Call masking: Send and receive calls from your call center by disguising your existing business number with a personal number. This functionality will make your business seem personal and local to your customers.
• Smart escalations: Whether your agents are busy or offline, smart escalations will inform callers of their wait queue position or direct them to a different call queue, external call center, or an agent’s personal number if they have waited long enough.
• Call lifecycle: Captures up to 50 events related to incoming and outgoing calls, providing instant visibility into your customer’s entire call journey.

Genesys Cloud CX: Best for Outbound Dialing Campaigns

Genesys Cloud CX is the best alternative to Talkdesk for businesses that need comprehensive outbound campaign capabilities. It supports agent-assisted and automated outbound call campaigns in different dialing modes, such as power, preview, progressive, predictive, and agentless. It also has a campaigns dashboard that displays active campaigns and indicates each campaign’s dialing mode.

To view statistics for an active campaign, the campaigns dashboard indicates each campaign’s dialing mode with metrics that monitor dialing progress and connect rate. Additionally, Genesys Cloud has a downloadable guide that includes helpful information for configuring an outbound dialing campaign.

Due to its expensive monthly plans, Genesys Cloud is not a good fit for companies on a limited budget. A cheaper alternative would be Freshdesk, which also offers automated outbound dialing tools to improve customer connect rates. The power dialer unlocks at the Pro tier, starting at $47 per user, monthly.

Genesys Cloud CX Monthly Pricing (per User) at a Glance*

• CX 1: $75 for speech-enabled IVR, voicebot, inbound voice routing, outbound call campaigns, unified communications, and real-time and historical views
• CX 2: $110 for chatbot, unlimited chat and email routing, SMS, digital outbound campaigns, screen recording, and quality management
• CX 3: $150 for co-browse, screen share, workforce management, employee engagement, and speech and text analytics
• Genesys DX: Contact the sales team for a custom plan

*Prices are applicable for annual contracts, and fees are paid in full yearly

Genesys Cloud CX Features

• Gamification: Motivate agents to meet performance objectives with a fun, interactive environment. Leaderboards and scorecards provide agent performance visibility and enable evaluation against personal goals and team efficiency.
• Customer self-service: Provide customers with conversational, AI-supported self-service options. Use Genesys AI to design a bot and automatically render it across voice and digital channels.
• Voicebots: Create intelligent voice assistants that understand customer intent using a drag-and-drop flow builder equipped with natural language understanding (NLU).

How We Evaluated the Best Talkdesk Alternatives

Contact center platforms provide features for different use cases and business sizes. To determine the top Talkdesk alternatives, we examined other contact center software with similar inclusions, such as omnichannel routing, call forwarding, and an excellent uptime guarantee. We also assessed the costs of the plans they offer, as well as user reviews and our experience with each platform.

Here’s a breakdown of how we measured each provider:

Bottom Line

Talkdesk is a reliable AI-powered solution for companies that want to automate routine agent tasks. However, it doesn’t work for small businesses looking for a more straightforward contact center platform. We chose 8×8 Contact Center as the best Talkdesk competitor because it allows mix-and-match plans, provides unlimited calls to 48 countries, and maintains enterprise-level security and compliance standards.

Visit 8×8’s website to sign up for a 30-day free trial of its basic communications package.

Visit 8×8 Contact Center