If you’re looking into Five9 to handle business messages and calls, you’ll likely have a hard time figuring out how much it’ll cost. Getting the features you want from this cloud contact center software can require purchasing multiple add-ons — which can get expensive fast.
In this guide, we’ll give you all the information you need to understand Five9 pricing. We’ll go over the platform’s features, limitations, and additional fees you should be aware of. We’ll also share an alternative that could be a better fit for serving your customers.
Five9 pricing and plans at a glance: What you get and what you’re missing
Take a look at this chart to see what Five9’s plans include:
| Plan name | Price | Channels | Key features | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Digital | $119 per user per month with a 36-month contract | Chat, email, SMS/MMS, social messaging | Agent desktop that lets your reps see all customer conversations in one dashboard, 24/7 support, and geographical redundancy | Teams that don’t need to make phone calls |
| Core | $119 per user per month with a 36-month contract | Voice | Auto dialer that automatically dials customers | Teams that handle all conversations over the phone |
| Premium | Contact sales for pricing | Chat, voice, email | Essentials Quality Management tools that review interactions across all channels to spot issues and improve the customer experience | Growing teams that want digital and phone channels, plus a way to track and manage call data |
| Optimum | Contact sales for pricing | Chat, voice, email | Enterprise Quality Management and Enterprise Workforce Management tools that let you forecast, schedule, and adjust shifts in real time | Large teams that handle high call volumes and complex schedules |
| Ultimate | Contact sales for pricing | Chat, voice, email | Interaction analytics that transcribe and analyze every conversation to uncover trends, emotions, and rep behaviors | Businesses that want more insight into team performance and customer behaviors |
Digital plan
Pricing: $119 per user per month, requires a 50-user minimum
Best for: Large or growing teams that don’t need to make phone calls
Five9’s Digital plan gives you tools to handle customer communications across four channels: live chat, email, SMS/MMS, and social messaging platforms. On this plan, you’ll also get access to the following features:
- Blended inbound/outbound: Reps can handle both incoming and outgoing messages
- Geo-redundancy: Minimize downtime during disruptions with back-up data centers in different locations
- Agent desktop: Reps can see all customer conversations from different channels in a single dashboard
- Call recording: Automatically records your calls so you can play them back later
- 24/7 customer support: Reach Five9’s support team at any time
- Workflow automation: Connect Five9 with third-party apps
No voice options are included in the Digital plan, so it’s only useful if your business handles customer service entirely online or through texting. If you do take phone calls using another tool, you won’t be able to see those call histories alongside conversations in Five9.
Core plan
Pricing: $119 per user per month, requires a 50-user minimum
Best for: Small teams that need help making and receiving daily phone calls
Five9’s Core plan is built for businesses that want a VoIP phone system to manage incoming and outgoing calls. With this plan, you get access to all the features available in the Digital plan, plus its dialer, which lets you automatically dial the next customer.
Since the price of this plan only includes outbound and inbound calling, this means you can’t send or receive text messages. Plus, you also won’t be able to route customer messages from social media apps and live chat into your Five9 dashboard. And if you want to access the platform’s Essentials Quality Management (QM) features, you’ll need to upgrade to the Premium plan.
Premium plan
Pricing: Contact sales for a quote, requires a 50-user minimum
Best for: Growing teams that want to track and manage call data
The Premium plan lets you handle voice, email, and live chat conversations in the Five9 app. Plus, it introduces its Essential Quality Management feature that provides tools to help improve your team’s interactions with customers. Let’s take a closer look at what you’ll get access to:
- Digital channels: Send and receive email and chat messages
- Security controls and permissions: Decide who can access sensitive data and features. For example, you can set up permissions that let admins configure summaries and guidance cards, and view reports and transcriptions
- Extended media storage: Includes 1TB of storage so you can keep media like screen recordings, without running out of space
- Audio and screen recording: Record calls and screen activity together so you see how each interaction happened
- Chat and email transcript collection: Save written conversations so you can review how reps handle chats and emails
- Event search and playback: Search past conversations and replay them to get the full context
- Evaluation template pack: Score recorded calls, chats, and screen activity with ready-made templates so you can quickly review rep performance
- Employee performance dashboards: Track key metrics in simple dashboards so you can spot trends and make improvements
- Training and implementation support: Get help setting up and training your team so you can easily start using Five9’s Essentials Quality Management feature
This plan doesn’t offer text messaging or social messaging, so you can’t use Five9 to handle customer conversations through those channels. Trying to manage conversations across different platforms makes it hard for reps to get the context they need to quickly solve customers’ problems.
Optimum plan
Pricing: Contact sales for a quote, requires a 50-user minimum
Best for: Large teams and growing businesses handling high call volumes
Five9’s Optimum plan introduces its Enterprise Quality Management and Workforce Management features. In addition to everything in Premium, you’ll also get tools like:
- WFM agent portals: Reps can personalize their portal with custom themes, layouts, and more, so it’s engaging and easier for them to use
- Scheduling: Reps or admins can manage schedules and request or approve changes
- Intraday management: Automatically adjust schedules to respond to unexpected changes
- Forecasting: Anticipate call and message volumes to guide scheduling and staffing decisions
- Real-time agent monitoring: See what’s on your reps’ screens as they work and step in right away if they need help
- Agent assistance tools: Reps can review their own calls, see evaluations, get training materials, and share knowledge with teammates so they can keep improving without waiting on a manager
- Unlimited evaluation form creation: Create scorecards to review every rep’s calls and digital conversations. Each one gets a score, and all of them are combined into one overall percentage so you can see how a rep is performing
Despite being an upgrade, the Optimum plan doesn’t include text or social messaging apps. This could cause friction between communication channels and slow your team down.
Ultimate plan
Pricing: Contact sales for a quote, requires a 50-user minimum
Best for: Businesses that want more insight into team performance and customer behaviors
The Ultimate plan includes all of the features available in the Optimum plan. Plus, you’ll get access to its Interaction Analytics, which provide detailed metrics for an in-depth view of how your team interacts with customers. Here are the tools you can expect to get:
- Call transcription with conversational and emotional analysis: Turn calls into transcriptions that also show tone and emotion so you understand what was said and how the customer was feeling
- Tracking of multiple languages and channels: Follow conversations that switch between languages or move from email to chat to voice, all in one view
- Trend and root-cause analysis: Spot patterns in conversations and find the reasons behind common issues
- Automated quality management: Review every conversation automatically for compliance, script use, and service quality
While this feature can be helpful, interaction analytics can’t be applied to every channel because the Ultimate plan still excludes access to text and social. Paying an additional fee is the only way to get these features outside of the Digital plan.
Speaking of extra fees…

You’ll notice that most of the Five9 pricing plans leave out features that businesses rely on — and customers want. If you’re still considering Five9 as an option, you should know that you’ll pay extra to get those features.
Here are eight hidden fees and paid add-ons that can increase the cost of using Five9. Keep in mind that Five9 doesn’t disclose the cost of its add-ons on its website:
- Texting limits: Digital is the only Five9 plan that supports SMS and MMS messaging. However, you’ll be charged for every message you send. Remember, Five9 doesn’t share these rates publicly. What if you’re on another plan and want to text? You’ll need to pay for the SMS Messaging add-on, which will let you send and receive messages and track usage.
- Intelligent Virtual Agent, or IVA: Five9’s Intelligent Virtual Agent can answer calls and handle basic tasks. These include appointment scheduling, order tracking, and responding to FAQs.
- Digital Outreach: Digital Outreach is an add-on that lets you automatically send emails, texts, and social messages to customers when they miss your phone call.
- CRM Connectors: With this CRM add-on, you can sync all of your customer interactions from Five9 to your CRM. This means your reps don’t have to spend time switching apps or worry about forgetting to log customer data.
- Interactive Voice Response, or IVR, with Speech Recognition: Some of your customers may prefer the self-service features that IVR systems offer. Five9’s IVR add-on includes speech recognition, which allows your customers to say “sales” or “support” when on the phone to ensure they reach the right rep or department.
- Social: The social messaging add-on routes all the messages you send and receive on social media platforms into the Five9 dashboard. This lets your reps manage conversations without switching between apps.
- AI Agent Assist: Agent Assist adds artificial intelligence tools like real-time call transcriptions and summaries. It can also help your reps solve issues faster by providing checklists and guidance cards they can read while serving customers.
Trying to piece together add-ons to get the features you need from Five9 can be confusing. To get more details about the features, you’ll also need to download “data sheets” or dig through Five9’s confusing support resources.
If you have a small or growing team, you might want to consider Five9 alternatives. Many of these alternatives offer a better set of business features and predictable pricing options with no hidden fees.
Quo: A more effective alternative to Five9
Large enterprises that need a cloud contact center solution might do fine with Five9’s plans and add-ons. But with a starting cost of $119 per user per month and a 50-user minimum for every plan, it’ll be difficult to sign up if you’re a small or growing business.
Quo is a Five9 alternative that offers business phone and messaging tools that scale with your business. Here are just six of the features and benefits you can get by choosing Quo:
1. Transparent and uncomplicated pricing

Quo offers transparent and flexible pricing, so you never have to hunt for information to know how much you’ll pay at the end of the month. If you have a question about features that require additional fees, you can quickly find answers in its Resource center.
Here are the features you’ll get with each plan.
- Starter: $15 per user per month for one new local or toll-free phone number, unlimited calling and messaging to US and Canadian numbers, voicemail transcriptions, Quo API, and more
- Business: $23 per user per month for AI call summaries and transcriptions, group calls, custom ring orders, call transfers, and more
- Scale: $35 per user per month for AI call tags, dedicated onboarding support, priority live chat, and email ticket support
Quo’s shared numbers let multiple team members call and text from the same phone number, which isn’t possible with Five9.
A shared number also lets your reps review all customer conversations and work together to solve any issues.
3. Unlimited calls and texts to the US and Canada on every plan
Quo lets you make, send, and receive unlimited calls and texts to US and Canadian numbers on every plan. This means you never have to upgrade or pay extra fees to accommodate increased volumes when calling and texting domestically.
4. CRM integrations to help you save time

With Quo (formerly OpenPhone), you can use its HubSpot and Salesforce integrations to automatically log all call activity in your CRM.
For example, call transcripts and summaries automatically sync with HubSpot, so your reps don’t have to waste time switching between apps to see what was said on calls. Plus, you’ll be able to make calls using Quo without leaving your CRM.
You can also use the Make or Zapier integration to streamline your workflows by connecting Quo with apps like Microsoft, Oracle, and Zendesk. That way, you can trigger follow-up messages and automate other common tasks, like sending a text when someone fills out a form.
5. Send texts faster with automated texting
Quo’s texting automations help your team respond faster with features like auto-replies, scheduled texts, and reusable snippets.
You can use auto-replies to let customers know you’ve seen their call and offer self-service options for them to try until a rep is available to call back. Scheduled messages let you send replies during your customers’ business hours, even if you’re closed for the day. And snippets let you create reusable templates for common responses so reps can answer FAQs with just a few clicks.
You also use the Quo API to automatically send appointment confirmation texts when someone books time with you in an app like Calendly. That way, your team doesn’t need to spend time following up manually.
6. Never miss a call with Sona, your AI voice agent

Quo’s AI-powered voice agent, Sona, can handle calls when no one is available, including after hours. Sona answers every call, making sure you never miss an important sales opportunity. Sona can also answer FAQs about basic information like your location and hours, capture information from new leads, or take messages for follow-up.
Switch from Five9 to Quo (formerly OpenPhone)

Is Five9 the cloud-based contact center that’ll meet your business needs? It depends on the features you want. Only one of the platform’s pricing plans offers SMS and MMS support. You’ll also have to pay more for a lot of add-ons if you want your team to have a basic business phone system.
Quo offers a flexible alternative with straightforward pricing, easy-to-use collaborative features, and time-saving tools like integrations and texting automations. Start a free seven-day trial to see how Quo can help your business.
FAQs
Five9 offers several tools for handling calls and messaging. It also comes with features that help businesses manage their call center teams across different channels. These include:
1. Omnichannel communication: Five9 users can communicate with customers through voice, web chat, email, SMS, MMS, and other digital channels like social messaging apps. Messages across channels are routed into Five9 so reps can monitor and respond to conversations directly from the call center software. Having a record of every conversation in one place maintains context and enables faster communication with customers. However, many of these multi-channel features aren’t included in Five9’s plans and must be purchased as add-ons.
2. Workforce management: Five9’s workforce management tools enable CRM integrations to sync data between Five9 and platforms like Salesforce. Additional features include contact volume forecasting, detailed schedule management, and automated workforce optimization. These options enable businesses to increase agent productivity, optimize agent performance, and provide faster customer service.
3. Virtual agent: Five9’s virtual agent provides voice recognition, making it possible to handle customer inquiries over the phone without human reps.
Ask yourself what your team needs day-to-day. Five9 was built for enterprise call centers, so small businesses often pay extra for add-ons and deal with long setup times. If you need something lighter, look for an option that makes calling and texting easy from any device. You can also check whether it offers features like texting and CRM integrations without extra and hidden fees.
Quo is the best alternative to Five9 for small and growing businesses since it includes more features in each plan. All plans offer unlimited calling and texting to the US and Canada. It also doesn’t require a minimum number of users, so it’s accessible to businesses of any size. Scalable plans and features mea Quo grows with your team — without confusing add-ons or hidden fees.
