Top 6 Genesys competitors you should consider

Genesys has long been a go-to platform for businesses that are looking to improve their customer experience and streamline their contact center operations. 

Known for its omnichannel capabilities and Ai-driven features, Genesys nevertheless might not be the perfect fit for every organization. Whether you're looking for better ease of use, more cost-effective solutions, or a platform with specific Ai features, there are lots of great alternatives at comparable prices on the market.

Keep reading to learn more about Genesys’ key features, why you might want to consider a Genesys alternative, and some of the top competitors that offer similar or even better solutions.

Key features of Genesys

Before we explore why you might look for an alternative to Genesys, let's take a quick look at its key features.

Omnichannel customer communication

Genesys offers an omnichannel customer communication platform that lets businesses connect with customers across multiple channels including voice, email, chat, SMS, and social media. 

Ai and automation

One feature that Genesys markets heavily is its Ai-driven automations. The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide call transcriptions, sentiment analysis, topic tracking, and more. (But as we’ll see below, there are other contact center solutions that also offer this type of functionality, and not every platform’s Ai functionality is the same.)

Reporting and analytics

Genesys comes with robust reporting and analytics tools that enable businesses to gain insights into their contact center performance. With real-time and historical reporting, you can track KPIs, measure customer satisfaction, and optimize agent performance.

Why choose a Genesys alternative

While Genesys offers impressive features, it's not without its drawbacks. Here are some common pain points that some Genesys users experience, which may lead them to consider other platforms.

Difficult to use 

Despite its powerful capabilities, some users find Genesys to be cumbersome and difficult to navigate, especially in the beginning:

Reporting/analytics challenges

Although Genesys provides powerful reporting tools, some users have cited frustrations with the system’s reporting and analytics capabilities:

Steep learning curve for Ai tools

And while Genesys does provide a large selection of Ai features, they’re not the easiest to pick up on and may require additional training or support to fully integrate and leverage effectively within your systems:

Top Genesys competitors and alternatives

Now, let’s explore some of the top competitors to Genesys. Because of Genesys’ emphasis on its contact center Ai features, we ranked this list based on how robust their Ai functionality is.

1. Dialpad Support

Dialpad Support is an Ai-powered cloud contact center platform that has gained popularity as an alternative to Genesys. 

Known for its intuitive design and ease of use, Dialpad Support lets your contact center team talk to customers over voice calls, live chat, and social messaging in one unified platform, offering a streamlined experience. 

More importantly, Dialpad Ai is trained on over eight billion minutes of business conversation data, and powers its proprietary LLM, DialpadGPT. This is a major difference when it comes to Dialpad vs Genesys, whose Agent Copilot “uses a combination of Genesys native and AWS Bedrock models, depending on the feature, use case, and dialect.”¹  

Dialpad Ai drives key features including real-time transcription, sentiment analysis, and coaching—and what’s crucial to note here is that even Dialpad Support’s least expensive tier ($80 per user per month, billed annually) includes Ai transcription and keyword tracking, whereas Ai-powered speech and text analytics are listed as an add-on for Genesys’ least expensive CX Cloud 1 plan ($75 per user per month, billed annually).²

Another important thing to note is that while Genesys offers omnichannel customer communications, its team communications features are more complicated and costly. 

You can bring your own voice carrier or use Genesys Cloud Voice to make phone calls, but there are calling charges to consider. For example, every call is billed in six second increments.³ 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.

2. NICE CXone

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.

While NICE CXone does provide Ai customer experience features like conversational intelligence and analytics, there’s no mention of Ai features until you reach the most expensive pricing tiers, CXone Mpower Core Suite ($169 per user per month) and CXone Mpower Complete Suite ($209 per user per month).⁴

3. Avaya AXP Public Cloud

Even though Avaya used to be focused primarily on providing telephony and PBX systems services, today it has expanded its products to provide contact center functionalities as well. Its contact center solution, Avaya AXP Public Cloud (formerly known as Avaya Experience Platform), supports voice, email, and web chat channels.

From an Ai perspective, Avaya doesn’t mention any proprietary Ai functionality, but in some documentation, says customers can “use the default Large Language Models (LLMs) and prompt engineering workflows to generate summaries” or integrate Ai bots with their own genAi services using adapters.⁵

Avaya AXP Public Cloud’s Digital plan starts at $35 per user per month, while the Voice plan starts at $60 per user per month.⁶ If you need an on-prem or partially on-prem contact center setup, then Avaya would be one of the better alternatives to Genesys. (Learn more about the best Avaya alternatives.)

4. Zendesk

Zendesk is well-known for its customer support software, offering a unified platform for ticketing, live chat, and email support. 

While it’s often seen as more of a helpdesk solution, it has evolved over time to include voice channels and Ai-driven features like virtual agents and analytics, making it a powerful alternative to Genesys. 

Its customer service suite plans start at $19 per user per month, but this level is quite basic with limited digital channels (email, ticketing, and posting on Facebook and X) and no Ai features. The Suite Team package at $55 per user per month includes more social channels and Ai agents, but calling and texting charges are additional charges⁷—if you need to provide phone support, then there are less complicated options, like Dialpad Support. Once you factor in the pricing of these add-ons, you’ll likely find that the cost is comparable to some of the other solutions on this list that look more expensive up front. 

5. Five9

Five9 is a well-known provider in the CCaaS industry, primarily designed as a call center solution for customer-facing teams. While it does cover your essential customer support channels, it doesn’t offer unified communications for internal team communication—if you need to host video meetings or send messages to colleagues, you’ll have to use and manage a separate tool.

Another potential disadvantage of using Five9 is that its plans (starting at $119 per user per month) 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.⁸ Even if your Finance team is fine with being locked into a contract for three years at a time, Five9’s potentially interesting Ai features like an IVA (intelligent virtual agent) and agent assists are also charged as add-ons, which means there’s an additional cost to accessing Ai functionality.

There’s also no mention of fundamental Ai features like transcription or keyword tracking on its pricing page, which is why Five9 is farther down this list.

6. Nextiva

Nextiva is a customer experience platform that offers cloud contact center features and some (though they’re more basic) Ai-powered tools. 

It comes with support for voice and digital channels like texting, social messaging, and more. If you’re looking for more reputation management-focused features, Nextiva’s Digital plan (aimed at startups) could be a good option. But if you need more robust phone support and Ai features, you’ll need to go up to the more expensive plans. 

What’s noteworthy though, is that Nextiva’s Ai features are much less robust than the other Genesys competitors on this list, providing only functionality such as “smart call routing (simple IVR),” “priority and skills based routing,” and “Ai voicemail transcription.”⁹ This is reflected in its lower pricing, and for this reason, it’s at the bottom of this list.

Choose the right Genesys alternative

Genesys is a powerful contact center solution, but if it’s not the best fit for your business, there are plenty of great alternatives to explore. 

Dialpad Support, Avaya , Five9, NICE CXone, Zendesk, and Nextiva are just a few of the top Genesys competitors that offer a wide range of CX and Ai capabilities. 

The best way to assess which one is right for your business is to sign up for demos and get a hands-on look at how intuitively each platform is designed, and how they can help you address your unique needs.

¹help.mypurecloud.com/articles/understand-genesys-agent-copilot-ai-models-and-llm-input/

²genesys.com/pricing

³help.mypurecloud.com/articles/genesys-cloud-voice-pricing/

⁴nice.com/websites/pricing

⁵support.avaya.com/css/public/documents/101092281

⁶avaya.com/en/products/experience-platform/public/pricing/ 

⁷zendesk.com/pricing/featured/

⁸five9.com/products/pricing

⁹nextiva.com/nextiva-pricing