Comparing NICE CXone: 9 Alternatives for Ai-Powered Contact Centers

The contact center software landscape has evolved significantly in recent years, with businesses looking for more robust, flexible, and scalable Ai-powered solutions for managing customer interactions and workforce operations.

NICE, known for its CXone MPower platform, is a popular name in this space, offering advanced features for workforce management, analytics, and omnichannel support.

But you might be considering alternative solutions that better fit your budget or unique needs. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at NICE CXone MPower, the most common concerns customers mention, and some of the top competitors offering similar functionalities for contact center and workforce management.

What is NICE? Key features

NICE CXone MPower is a cloud-based contact center platform that’s designed for customer service communications. It offers omnichannel support, which lets contact center teams engage with customers across various communication channels like voice, live chat, social messaging, and SMS.

Another key feature is its workforce management suite. This includes tools for scheduling, forecasting, and real time monitoring, which helps contact center schedulers and supervisors optimize agent performance and resource allocation.

The platform also provides Ai-powered analytics that offer insights into agent performance, and operational efficiency.

Why you might want an alternative contact center solution to NICE: What users say

While NICE CXone MPower is widely recognized for its advanced features, there are several main concerns raised by customers in reviews across third-party sites. Here’s a quick look at some of the most commonly reported issues.

User interface (UI)

Some users have noted that the interface of NICE CXone can be overly complex, especially for those who are new to the platform or have limited experience with complex contact center solutions.

Source: G2

Cost

NICE CXone’s pricing model can be a concern for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) looking for affordable solutions, especially for customers in Asian countries. Several users have reported that the platform can become quite expensive:

Source: G2

Difficulty of use

Another recurring theme in customer feedback is the platform’s overall complexity. While the depth of features offered by NICE CXone is impressive, some users have found it challenging to navigate the system and make full use of its capabilities:

Source: G2

Top 9 competitors and alternatives to NICE, ranked

While NICE CXone is a strong player in the contact center and workforce management space, several competitors offer similar or even superior features for businesses in need of alternative solutions. Below are some of the top alternatives, including their key features and advantages over NICE CXone.

1. Dialpad Support: An Ai-powered customer intelligence platform

Dialpad is an Ai-powered customer intelligence platform powered by a unique proprietary Ai and LLM—DialpadGPT—that’s trained on over eight billion minutes of business conversation data.

Agents and supervisors can access everything they need to handle customer inquiries and collaborate with each other on Dialpad’s platform, which combines the latest contact center features with award-winning UCaaS capabilities. That means they can message and have video calls with teammates, answer a customer’s question on live chat, and even look up a customer’s Salesforce profile—all on the same interface.

What makes Dialpad Support a good alternative to NICE?

Besides offering all your essential core features like call recording, IVR, and analytics, Dialpad Support can also provide valuable conversation intelligence and insights based on the customer conversations you’re already having every day.

For example, Dialpad Ai can analyze customer interactions in real-time for sentiment—which lets supervisors quickly see if a conversation with a customer is going poorly from their dashboard. If it is, they can just click into the live transcript and quickly get context before deciding if they need to jump in to help the agent:

Dialpad Ai also helps agents get the information they need to answer customers’ questions correctly in real time, by searching all your connected knowledge sources instantly to pop the relevant information, documents, or links onto the agent’s screen:

Not only does this reduce average handle time, it also cuts down on ramp-up times for new hires (while helping seasoned agents stay up-to-date on recent product changes or industry shifts).

Dialpad Ai also solves one of the most common challenges that businesses face when they’re trying to provide a good customer experience: low response rates on CSAT surveys. What makes these low response rates worse is that usually only the angriest and happiest customers bother filling them out, which skews your results. Dialpad’s Ai CSAT feature analyzes up to 100% of customer calls to predict CSAT scores accurately meaning you get a more holistic (and accurate) understanding of how satisfied your customers are:

From a staffing perspective, Dialpad Support also has many WFM features, from analytics on shrinkage and adherence, to automations for shift scheduling:

2. Calabrio ONE

Calabrio ONE is a “workforce optimization suite for contact centers” that is heavily focused on tools for workforce optimization, including workforce management, quality management, and performance analytics.

If you’re looking for deep WFO functionality like interaction recordings and built-in gamification, Calabrio ONE is a more robust option than NICE.

3. Vonage Contact Center

Vonage offers an integrated communication solution with cloud-based voice, video, chat, and SMS support. The platform comes with features like call recording, IVR, and analytics.

If you’re looking to combine your internal team communications and external customer-facing communications tools in one place, Dialpad Support and Vonage Contact Center could be good options. However, Vonage doesn’t seem to have a basic real-time transcription feature.¹

4. 8x8 Contact Center

8x8’s cloud-based contact center solution is another alternative for businesses looking to consolidate their communications in one place, with key features including omnichannel routing, workforce engagement management, and Ai-enabled self-service.

If you don’t want to go the legacy contact center route and prefer an option that gives you UCaaS functionality, 8x8 is another option—though unlike Dialpad Support, it doesn't provide pricing on its website so you’ll have to reach out to their sales team to find out how much it costs.²

5. Webex Contact Center

Powered by Cisco, Webex is known for its video conferencing solutions but also offers robust contact center functionality. Its platform includes omnichannel support for voice, email, chat, SMS, and messaging channels. But while you can build conversational flows, Webex calls its interaction flow builder “low code,” meaning you’ll still need some basic coding skills.³

Solutions like Dialpad Support let you put together flows using a simple drag-and-drop builder, no coding needed:

Webex’s strength lies in its video conferencing capabilities, making it an excellent choice for businesses with a need for high-quality video support. If you’re already using other Cisco products, it could be a more convenient option than NICE. (Learn more about the best Webex alternatives.)

6. Avaya AXP Public Cloud

With roots in telephony and PBX, Avaya offers a combination of contact center and business phone features. Its contact center product, the Avaya AXP Public Cloud (formerly known as Avaya Experience Platform), has standard communication channels like voice, email, and web chat.

The Digital plan starts at $35 per user per month, while the Voice plan starts at $60 per user per month.⁴ If you can’t fully get rid of on-prem and need that option, then Avaya would be a good alternative to NICE. (Learn more about the best Avaya alternatives.)

7. Talkdesk CX Cloud

Talkdesk CX Cloud is a cloud contact center platform with features like omnichannel communications, automatic call distribution, and call monitoring.

While Talkdesk CX Cloud does have the option of Ai-powered features like Talkdesk Copilot, Talkdesk Autopilot Assist, and Talkdesk Navigator, these are all paid add-ons.⁵

And like NICE, Talkdesk CX Cloud is mainly a CCaaS solution, not UCaaS, which means if you want to incorporate your internal collaboration channels with your customer-facing communications, it may not be a cost-effective alternative compared to Dialpad Support or 8x8 Contact Center.

That being said, Talkdesk CX Cloud is comparable in price to NICE, with its combined voice and digital package starting at $115 per user per month ⁶, compared to NICE’s CXone Mpower Omnichannel Agent plan at $110 per user per month.⁷ (Learn more about the best Talkdesk alternatives.)

8. Genesys Cloud CX

Genesys Cloud CX is a contact center platform that, like NICE, has been around for many years.

Like NICE, Genesys provides all your core contact center capabilities such as automatic call distribution (ACD) and self-service IVR routing options. It also has a workforce engagement management (WEM) platform and integrates with CRMs such as Salesforce.

Where Genesys differs from NICE is how it handles UCaaS needs. You can bring your own voice carrier, or use Genesys Cloud Voice to make phone calls, but the calling charges can get a bit complicated. For example, every call is billed in six second increments. ⁸ So, if you want a more simple unlimited domestic calling type of plan, you’ll want to look at some of the other options higher on this list.

9. Five9

Five9 is another popular name in the CCaaS space. Again, it is mainly a call center solution for customer-facing teams. You'll get your key customer support channels, but it doesn’t give you unified communications for internal team convos—if you want to host video meetings or message teammates, you'll need to pay for, and manage, a separate tool.

Another potential disadvantage of using Five9 is that its plans are listed with pricing based on 36-month contracts—which is highly unusual since almost every other competitor gives you the option of monthly or annual subscriptions. 9 If you’re okay with being locked in for three years at a time, then Five9 does offer some potentially interesting features like an IVA (intelligent virtual agent) but that is also charged as an add-on. (Learn more about the best Five9 alternatives.)

Looking for the best NICE competitor?

Every option has a range of pros and cons, and you’ll have to determine how each one affects your business’ customer experience.

However, if you want the most value for money, we recommend that you equip your contact center with a customer intelligence platform that can solve multiple business needs without compromising on quality, agent experience, and customer engagement.

Why not book a product tour of Dialpad Support to see how it compares?

¹vonage.com/contact-centers/plans/
²8x8.com/products/plans-and-pricing
³pricing.webex.com/us/en/hybrid-work/contact-center/
⁴avaya.com/en/products/experience-platform/public/pricing/
^{5, 6}talkdesk.com/pricing/
⁷nice.com/websites/pricing
⁸help.mypurecloud.com/articles/genesys-cloud-voice-pricing/
⁹five9.com/products/pricing