Ecsow Auto Dialer Blog

Five9 publishes its prices, which puts it ahead of most of this market. The published number for Core — all channels, dialer, recording, CRM adapter choice — is $159 per concurrent user per month as of September 2026. The entry plan at $119 does not include voice at all; it is chat, email, SMS and social only.

Then you read the footnote. Five9’s published plans carry a 50 concurrent-seat minimum. Not fifty users, fifty simultaneous seats.

Which means that for most people searching for a Five9 alternative, the question is not “is Five9 too expensive”. It is “Five9 is not for sale to me”. A ten-agent team cannot buy it at any price.

If you do qualify, Five9 is probably right

Let me be clear about this before going any further. Five9 is a serious product built for serious operations, and the things it charges for are things that cost money to provide.

• Compliance. HIPAA with a BAA, SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR. If your buyers are hospitals or banks, those certifications are not decoration — procurement will ask, and a competitor without them cannot answer.
• Scale and resilience. Geo-redundancy, multi-region deployment, uptime commitments with money behind them. At 200 seats, an hour of downtime is a real number and you want a contract that reflects it.
• Omnichannel. Voice, chat, email, SMS, social and WhatsApp coming, routed through one queue with unified reporting.
• Workforce management. Quality management, forecasting, scheduling, speech analytics, agent assist. Above about 50 seats these stop being luxuries and start being the reason your staffing model works.
• Support. 24/7 with named technical account management on enterprise tiers.
• Integrations. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Dynamics, Zendesk, Oracle, Microsoft Teams and Google CCAI, all adapter-supported rather than community-maintained.
• Multiple billing models. Named agent, concurrent user, or pay-per-use, which matters if your headcount swings seasonally.

One 2026 pricing guide estimates Five9 implementation at $25,000 to $150,000+ depending on complexity, with professional services adding 15% to 30% on top of subscription annually. At a hundred agents that is a rounding error against the salary bill. At five agents it is the entire software budget for a decade.

What the 50-seat floor does to a small team

It is worth seeing what the per-seat maths looks like at your own size, even though you cannot buy it that way. It tells you what the per-seat model values.

Team size	Five9 Core, per month	Purchasable?
10 concurrent seats	$1,590	No — below the 50-seat minimum
25 concurrent seats	$3,975	No — still below minimum
50 concurrent seats	$7,950	Yes — this is the floor

The reason a small team finds per-seat pricing strange is not that $159 is unreasonable for what an enterprise gets. It is that an outbound team of ten is not buying enterprise anything. They are buying a dialer, and the dialer is one line of a platform built around workforce management, omnichannel routing and compliance documentation.

The alternatives, at their real prices

Once you are out of the enterprise bracket, the market splits three ways.

Three buckets, in plain terms:

Per-seat dialers. CallTools around $102 to $120, Convoso around $90, ReadyMode $199 to $249. Real products with real support. Cheaper than Five9 by a wide margin and still charging you per human.

Open source with hosting. VICIdial, free software, roughly $50 to $75 a seat hosted, or self-hosted if you have someone who can run Asterisk. Deeper than anything else here and correspondingly more work.

Per-line software. Ecsow at $10 to $100 a month by concurrent line. Smallest capability set, smallest bill, and no inbound at all.

Where Ecsow is plainly worse than Five9

The honest list. If any of these is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, Ecsow is the wrong purchase.

• No inbound. Five9 handles blended inbound with ACD and IVR. Ecsow dials out. Nothing else.
• No compliance certifications. No HIPAA BAA, no SOC 2. If a procurement review asks, we fail it.
• No omnichannel. No chat, email, SMS or social routing.
• No workforce management or analytics. Per-campaign and per-agent reporting only.
• Windows desktop only. No browser client, no Mac, no Linux. Remote agents need a Windows machine.
• 32 concurrent lines is the ceiling. Fine for roughly 100 agents, hard stop beyond that.
• No SLA, no 24/7 desk, email support answered within about a day.
• Manual billing. No card on file, no auto-renewal.

If you have fifty seats, a compliance obligation, inbound volume or a support contract requirement, you should be buying Five9 or its peers, and the cost is the cost. That is not a market I can serve and I would rather tell you in a blog post than in a sales reply.

When the per-line model is the right answer

Outbound only. Three to about a hundred agents. You already pay for a SIP trunk, or you are willing to buy one for a few dollars a month. You do not need omnichannel, you do not have a procurement department, and your biggest problem is that a ten-seat team is being quoted enterprise software.

Ten lines is $50 a month. That covers thirty agents at normal pacing ratios. There is no setup fee, no minimum seat count, no contract, and a 15-day refund. The single-line price has not changed since 2017.

Download it and put your own list through it — the trial dials up to 20 contacts per campaign and does not ask for a card. If the per-seat question is the part you are still chewing on, the full cost breakdown and the cheapest-options ladder both go deeper than this page can.

Frequently asked

What is the cheapest Five9 alternative?

Among published prices, Ecsow starts at $10 per month per concurrent line and does not charge per agent. Self-hosted VICIdial has no licence fee at all but needs a server and an Asterisk administrator, which usually costs more than the software saves.

Does Five9 have a minimum seat requirement?

Yes. Five9’s published pricing lists a 50 concurrent-seat minimum across its plans, so smaller teams cannot purchase it directly at any published rate.

How much does Five9 cost per month?

Five9’s published rates are $119 per concurrent user for Digital — which excludes voice — and $159 for Core, as checked in September 2026. Usage-based AI minutes and SMS are billed on top, and implementation is quoted separately.

Can Ecsow replace Five9?

Only for outbound-only teams. Ecsow has no inbound IVR, no omnichannel, no compliance certifications and no workforce management, so it replaces Five9’s dialer and nothing else about it.

CallTools is a good product with a bad fit problem, and the fit problem is invisible from the outside because CallTools does not publish a price.

I will save you the click. As of October 2026, the figures reported consistently by buyers and by third-party price trackers are about $119.99 per agent per month on month-to-month terms and about $101.99 per agent per month on a twelve-month contract. On top of that, reviewers report setup fees somewhere between $250 and $1,500, and one 2026 review reports CRM integration surcharges of $2,000 to $5,000 for anything complex.

Take those numbers seriously and a pattern shows up. CallTools is priced per agent, so it scales with your headcount. That is fine for a twenty-seat floor where the dialer is the cheapest thing in the room. It is painful at five seats, and five seats is where a lot of outbound teams actually live.

First, the case for staying on CallTools

There is a real one, and it is not mainly about features.

CallTools’ support is the best in this category by a wide margin. Capterra has them at 4.8 from around 155 reviews, G2 at 4.8 from about 72, Trustpilot at a clean 5.0 from more than 220. Those are unusual numbers for any dialer company. Reviewers repeatedly mention issues resolved in minutes, and I have no reason to doubt it.

Then the product itself: ten-line simultaneous dialing, unlimited domestic minutes included, native SMS and email so an agent can text a lead without leaving the screen, a built-in CRM with contact history and caller ID reputation monitoring, free manager seats, no minimum seat count, and month-to-month billing available. Salesforce, HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Zoho and Dynamics connectors sit across all tiers.

If you are running ten or more agents on high-volume outbound and you want the vendor to configure and support it, CallTools is a reasonable place to be. The support alone justifies a lot.

The three places small teams get stuck

The per-seat multiplier with a five-person floor. At five seats you are paying for five seats whether or not five people dial at once. In an outbound team, they usually do not — the dialer is placing multiple calls per free agent precisely so that a handful of agents keeps a handful of conversations going. Per-seat pricing charges for the humans; per-line pricing charges for the conversations. Those two numbers are not close.

The setup fee nobody mentions until the quote. $250 to $1,500 sounds manageable in isolation, but it is 25% to 150% of a small team’s entire first-month software cost, and it is quoted separately from the licence. Ask for it as its own line on the quote, in writing, before you compare totals.

The twelve-month term is where the discount lives. $101.99 versus $119.99 is the price of being able to leave. If your call volume is seasonal or your business is young, that discount can be the most expensive $18 a month you ever save.

What you give up if you switch

This is the section I would want to read if I were you, so I will be specific rather than vague.

• Inbound. CallTools does blended inbound — ACD, skill-based routing, queue management, IVR — with no extra per-minute charge. Ecsow is outbound only. No IVR, no queue, no blended campaigns. If inbound is more than a rounding error in your volume, you should not switch.
• Native SMS and email. CallTools lets an agent follow a call with a text or an email without leaving the platform. Ecsow does not. You would need a separate tool, which is real friction.
• Unlimited minutes included. CallTools bundles domestic minutes. Ecsow does not touch minutes at all — you buy your own SIP trunk and pay a carrier, which is cheaper in most markets but is an extra relationship to manage.
• The built-in CRM. CallTools ships contact records, dispositions, callback scheduling and interaction history. Ecsow imports leads from CSV, Excel or MySQL and gives you campaign reporting. If you want a CRM in the same screen, CallTools is the better answer.
• Support depth. Ecsow support is email, usually answered within a day. There is no chat window and no phone line. CallTools is genuinely better here and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
• Integrations. A catalogue of one-click CRM connectors versus file imports. If your workflow depends on a native integration, check first.
• Windows desktop versus browser. Ecsow is a Windows application. CallTools runs in a browser on anything, which matters if your agents are on mixed or thin-client hardware.

There is also a shared problem worth naming, because it affects both products and neither vendor controls it. High dial volume burns caller ID reputation. Carriers start flagging numbers at roughly a hundred calls per number per day, and once a number is labelled “Scam Likely” it can take sixty to ninety days to recover. There is a well-known account of a team whose 20% answer rate fell to 4%, and then to 2%, after switching to heavy dialing. When that happens the fix is number rotation and cleaner lists, not a different dialer.

How to decide in one afternoon

Do not compare feature lists. They converge, and the differences are mostly preferences.

Get one written quote from CallTools for your exact seat count and call volume, including setup, integration and any per-minute fees. Annualise it. Then annualise the per-line alternative for the number of concurrent conversations you actually run. Multiply the difference by the number of years you expect to keep the business.

If the number is small, stay where you are — the support is worth something and so is not moving. If it is the difference between hiring another agent and not, the calculation has already made your decision.

Where Ecsow fits, precisely

Outbound only. Three to thirty seats. Windows. You already pay for a SIP trunk, or you are willing to buy one, and you do not want a telephony hardware purchase. You want it working this afternoon rather than after an onboarding project.

Licences run $10 a month for one line up to $100 for 32, with no setup fee, no contract and a 15-day refund. The single-line price has not changed since 2017. If you want the wider per-seat picture before deciding, the cost breakdown puts the whole market on one page, and the cheapest-option piece covers what the free and near-free routes really cost.

Or just download it and put a small campaign through. The trial dials up to 20 contacts per campaign and does not ask for a card. Twenty contacts is enough to know whether the dialer behaves the way your team needs it to.

Frequently asked

How much does CallTools cost per agent?

CallTools does not publish its prices. Buyers and price trackers report about $119.99 per agent per month on month-to-month terms and about $101.99 on an annual contract, with setup fees reported between $250 and $1,500.

What is the cheapest CallTools alternative for a small team?

It depends on the pricing unit. Per-seat alternatives start around $29 to $99 an agent. Per-line alternatives such as Ecsow start at $10 a month for one concurrent line regardless of how many agents log in, which is usually the cheaper structure below ten seats.

Does Ecsow support inbound calls like CallTools?

No. Ecsow is outbound only — no IVR, no queue, no blended inbound. Teams that need blended calling should stay with a platform like CallTools or VICIdial.

Can I keep my lead lists and recordings if I switch?

Yes. Export contacts as CSV or Excel and import them into Ecsow; format phone columns as text so leading zeros survive. Call recordings are ordinary files and travel independently.

Every time I go looking for what the competition charges, I end up in the same place: a web form. Five9 will not tell you. Convoso will not tell you. ReadyMode will not tell you. RingCentral shows you a number, then hands you to a sales rep.

I get why. Per-seat pricing only survives contact with a spreadsheet if you cannot build the spreadsheet first.

So here is the other approach. Everything below is either a price the vendor publishes itself, or a figure reported consistently enough by independent price trackers that I am comfortable repeating it in public. I have dated it, because this market reprints its price list every few months and I would rather you catch me being out of date than catch me being vague.

Numbers checked October 2026.

What the published prices look like

Some of those are the vendors’ own published numbers, some are the figures third-party price trackers report consistently, and a few are mine. Hosted VICIdial is the one I would treat as softest — hosts quote $50 to $75 a seat but the real number depends on how much configuration work you hand them.

Five9 will not sell to you anyway

Worth knowing before you get attached to a comparison: Five9’s published plans carry a 50 concurrent-seat minimum. Not 50 users, 50 concurrent seats. A ten-agent team is not a customer they are set up to take.

I do not say that as a dig. Five9 is built for contact centres with compliance teams and workforce management people. It has HIPAA and SOC 2 processes, geo-redundancy and a 24/7 support desk, and that costs money to run. Their entry plan is $119 and it does not even include voice, only chat, email and SMS. Voice starts at $159.

The point is narrower than “expensive is bad”: if you are a small outbound team, most of what per-seat platforms charge for is infrastructure you will never touch. You are paying enterprise rates for a five-person room.

Per seat and per line are different units, and that is the whole story

Per-seat pricing bills every human who logs in. Per-line pricing bills how many conversations can happen at the same time.

Those numbers are not close, and a dialer is exactly the tool that makes them diverge.

Two reasons. One, a predictive dialer places several calls for every agent who frees up, so that busy signals, nobody-home and answering machines get filtered out before an agent picks up a handset. Two, agents are not on calls all day. They are writing notes, setting callbacks, taking a breath after a rough one. On a real campaign, ten agents usually want three to five lines, not ten — and if they genuinely need ten simultaneous conversations, you buy ten lines and it still costs $50.

That is the uncomfortable part for per-seat vendors. A per-line price for a ten-person team lands in the same bracket as software for one or two people, which is why you will not find a per-line option on their pricing page.

The costs that never reach the pricing page

The number on the page is the most optimistic version of the truth. Before signing anything, get a written answer to these. In my experience the answers are usually provided, just never volunteered.

• Setup and onboarding. CallTools reviewers report $250 to $1,500 one-off. CloudTalk’s 2026 review reports CRM integration surcharges of $2,000 to $5,000 for complex connections. Five9 territory runs to five figures on enterprise deployments.
• Minimum seats. Five9’s 50-seat floor is the extreme version, but five- and ten-seat minimums are common. If you run three agents you are buying seats nobody sits in.
• Contract length. Annual, billed monthly, is the norm. CallTools is $119.99 month-to-month or $101.99 on a twelve-month term. That $18 difference is the price of being able to leave.
• A platform per-minute fee on top of your carrier. You pay your carrier for minutes in every model. The question is whether the software adds its own layer.
• Numbers and storage. DIDs, extra concurrent channels, recording retention. Individually small, additive overall.
• Feature gating. Predictive pacing, recording and useful reporting are frequently the reason you buy the tier above the one you signed up for.
• Can you leave? Ask explicitly whether you can export leads, recordings and reports. The answer tells you how they think about customers.

A worked example, with real arithmetic

Twelve agents doing insurance renewals, five concurrent conversations. They compare a per-seat platform at roughly $110 a seat against Ecsow at $30 a month for five lines.

One caveat, because it is the obvious question. A per-seat vendor is not charging forty-eight times more for the same phone calls. They are charging per human, and your team has more humans than concurrent lines. If that unit works for your business, buy it. If it does not, the arithmetic above is the whole argument.

Where being cheap stops being good

A page that only lists advantages is an advertisement, so here is the other side. All of these are real limits of Ecsow, and some of them have cost us sales I would have liked to keep.

• Windows only. It is a Windows desktop application. No Mac, no Linux, no browser version. If your team is on Chromebooks, we cannot help you.
• Outbound only. No inbound IVR, no blended queue, no omnichannel. Calls go out.
• No compliance certifications. If you need a signed HIPAA agreement or SOC 2 evidence for a procurement review, this is the wrong product and I would rather say so now than in a support ticket.
• Manual billing, on purpose. We do not store your card and debit you. You renew when you renew. Half our customers tell us they like it, and the other half find it a monthly chore.
• Support is email. Usually answered within a day. There is no phone line and no named account manager.
• Fewer integrations. Import is CSV, Excel or MySQL, not a catalogue of one-click CRM connectors.
• You own the SIP trunk. That is why the price is what it is, and it is also why setup is on you. It takes about ten minutes, but it is still your ten minutes.

If you need inbound, enterprise SLAs or a compliance certificate, a per-seat vendor is the right purchase and you should go make it. If you need outbound calls made by a team of three to thirty at a price that does not assume you are an enterprise, the per-seat model is charging you for something you are not using.

Eight questions worth asking every vendor

Ask all of them, ask in writing, and put the answers in one spreadsheet. The price argument usually ends there.

1. What is my total monthly cost for exactly my seat count and concurrency, in writing?
2. Is there a setup, onboarding or implementation fee?
3. What is the minimum number of seats I have to buy?
4. What is the contract term, and what happens if I cancel in month three?
5. Does the platform charge per minute on top of my carrier?
6. Which features cost extra: predictive pacing, recording, reporting, CRM integration?
7. Can I export my leads, recordings and reports if I leave?
8. What does support actually look like — which channel, which hours, what response time?

Try it before you believe me

Download Ecsow Auto Dialer and run a live campaign before you pay anything. The trial dials up to 20 contacts per campaign and does not ask for a card. Licensing starts at $10 a month for one line, scales to $30 for five and $50 for ten, bills by concurrent line rather than by seat, has no contract and carries a 15-day refund. The single-line price has not moved since 2017.

If you want to run the numbers for your own team first, the cheapest auto dialer piece has the full cost ladder including the free options, and the VICIdial comparison covers what you give up if you go that route instead.

Questions I get asked about this

How much does a predictive dialer cost per month?

Published per-seat prices run from about $65 to $249 per agent per month, and implementation is usually quoted separately. Per-concurrency pricing starts much lower: Ecsow is $10 a month for one line and $26 for four.

Why does nobody publish their prices?

Because on a call you can size the quote to the budget, bundle the features you would have bought anyway, and anchor on the highest tier the buyer will accept. A published price list removes all three moves. It is also why a per-line option never appears next to a per-seat price.

How many concurrent lines does a 10-agent team need?

Three to five in most campaigns. The dialer is already placing multiple calls per available agent to filter out no-answers and answering machines, and agents spend part of every hour on notes and callbacks rather than talking. Ten agents and ten lines is usually wasted capacity.

Is the SIP trunk and per-minute calling included?

No, and be suspicious of anything that claims otherwise. In every model you buy your own SIP trunk and pay your carrier for minutes. Ecsow talks to any SIP provider, IP PBX or SIP trunk, which is why there is no telephony hardware and no per-minute markup from the software.