Call Center Dialer Software: Contact Center Dialer Pricing

How much does a call center dialer cost per agent?

Between $75 and $240 a month per agent on published list prices, and quote-only above that. Genesys Cloud CX 1 is the cheapest published entry at $75 per named user billed annually, Five9 Core is $159, Talkdesk voice starts at $105 (its $85 tier is digital channels only) and tops out at $225, and PhoneBurner sits at $140 to $183. Orum, Convoso and Kixie publish nothing at all.

That range is misleading on its own, because the three cheapest numbers in it are not available to the same buyer. The $75 Genesys seat is available to anyone, but a predictive campaign on it wants 15 agents, so the realistic entry is $1,125 a month. The $119 Five9 seat cannot be bought at all under 50 concurrent users, which makes the smallest Five9 order $5,950 a month on Digital and $7,950 on Core, and Digital carries no voice channel, so the cheaper of the two is not an outbound option. PhoneBurner at $140 has no floor, so one agent genuinely costs $140.

The practical way to read the table is to sort it by the smallest order each vendor will accept rather than by the per-seat rate. On that sort the order reverses: PhoneBurner at $140 a month for one seat, Genesys at $75 a seat but $1,125 for a working predictive campaign, and Five9 at $7,950. We set out the whole per-seat picture, including the agency and BPO rates, on outbound call center pricing, and the platform-level comparison sits on outbound call center software.

• Published range per agent: $75 to $240 a month, before telephony and usage
• Smallest Five9 order: 50 concurrent seats, $5,950 Digital or $7,950 Core a month
• Smallest realistic Genesys predictive campaign: 15 agents at $75 = $1,125 a month
• PhoneBurner is the only vendor in the table with no seat floor at all
• Orum, Convoso and Kixie publish no price, so the comparison is against an unseen quote

What is the minimum number of agents for a predictive dialer?

Genesys recommends at least 15 agents in a campaign using predictive dialing, and 10 to 15 for power dialing, in its own dialing-modes documentation. That is the clearest published answer anybody in this category gives, and almost no comparison article mentions it.

The reason is statistical rather than commercial. A predictive algorithm estimates how many calls to place ahead of the agents who are free, using average handle time, after-call work, idle time and the historical contact rate. With six agents the sample is too small for those averages to mean anything, so the algorithm either overdials and abandons calls or underdials and leaves everyone idle. Neither failure is visible until you read the abandon report.

There is a trap underneath the number that catches teams who think they have cleared it. Genesys states that if agents log in to other campaigns they are not whole agents in any one campaign, and gives the example of 20 agents logged into both Campaign A and Campaign B, which leaves each campaign with an effective 10. Two simultaneous predictive campaigns therefore need roughly 30 dialing agents, not 15. If your floor is smaller than that, progressive and preview dialing pace one call per free agent and never overdial, and a power dialer does the same at higher speed. The full mode-by-mode economics are on predictive dialer software.

• Genesys recommends 15 or more agents for predictive, 10 to 15 for power
• Agents split across two campaigns count as half an agent in each
• Two predictive campaigns therefore want roughly 30 dialing agents
• Under those counts, progressive and preview are the defensible modes
• The licence floor and the agent floor are separate numbers and both apply

Which call center dialer type should you buy for outbound?

Start from your abandon tolerance and your headcount, not from the feature grid. The four modes trade the same two things against each other: how much agent idle time you will pay for, and how many calls you are prepared to abandon.

Preview shows the agent the record and waits for them to dial or skip. It cannot abandon a call because no call exists until a person starts one, and it is the mode regulated sellers and high-value B2B teams choose. It is also the slowest, at roughly 25 to 75 calls an hour on the vendor figures. Progressive places exactly one call per available agent and never dials ahead of the people who are free, which makes the pacing easy to defend to a compliance officer while still removing the manual dial. Power is the same one-call-per-free-agent logic run faster, and because it structurally cannot dial without a free agent it also cannot abandon, though several vendors market multi-line parallel dialing under the power label and that version can.

Predictive overdials deliberately and is the only mode that needs an abandon-rate policy. The FTC safe harbor in 16 CFR 310.4(b)(1)(iv) allows abandoning no more than three percent of calls answered by a person, measured over each successive 30-day period, where abandoned means not connected to a representative within two seconds of the person's completed greeting. That is a rule you have to configure, staff and audit. If the reason you are looking at predictive is raw connect volume rather than a large floor, a parallel dialer reaches similar throughput with different failure modes, and the compliance tooling side is covered on TCPA compliance software.

• Preview: no abandonment, 25 to 75 calls an hour, best where each contact is valuable
• Progressive: one call per free agent, easy to defend, still pays for ring and voicemail time
• Power: the same logic faster, but check whether the vendor means one line or four
• Predictive: highest throughput, needs 15 plus agents and an abandon-rate policy
• FTC safe harbor: no more than 3 percent of person-answered calls abandoned per 30 days

Can you run inbound and outbound on the same call center dialer?

Yes, and the blended setup is where most of the hidden cost in this category lives. A blended agent takes inbound queue calls between outbound dials, which looks like pure efficiency on a slide and behaves very differently in the pacing engine.

The problem is the same whole-agent rule that applies across campaigns. An agent who may be pulled into an inbound queue is not reliably available for an outbound campaign, so the predictive algorithm is estimating against a headcount that changes without warning. Genesys handles this with a precise mode on progressive dialing that reserves the agent before placing the call, and notes that reserved agents cannot take inbound calls until they are released. That is the honest trade: you can have deterministic outbound pacing or a genuinely blended agent, and not both in the same second.

The pricing consequence is separate and larger. Blended platforms are priced as omnichannel suites, so you buy digital channels, routing and quality management whether or not an outbound program uses them. Genesys is the clearest illustration because it publishes the steps: outbound campaigns are included on CX 1 at $75, and the $40 step to CX 2 buys digital channels, omnichannel routing and quality assurance. At 15 agents that step is $600 a month, or $7,200 a year, for capability an outbound-only team may never staff. We work through the inbound and outbound split in more detail on outbound call center software and priced the hosted options on cloud based auto dialer.

• Blended agents make predictive pacing estimate against a moving headcount
• Genesys precise mode reserves the agent, who then cannot take inbound until released
• Outbound campaigns are included on every Genesys tier, including the $75 one
• The $40 step to CX 2 is $7,200 a year at 15 agents, for digital channels
• Price the outbound-only tier first and add channels when a team will staff them

Call center dialer software comparison: what the pricing pages leave out

Three things, consistently, and each one has changed a real budget for somebody.

The first is the add-on layer. PhoneBurner sells number monitoring, spam flag remediation and advanced answer rate analytics as an ARMOR add-on that appears on all three tiers, which means the answer-rate protection the product is marketed on is not inside any plan price. Kixie sells Do Not Call as a compliance add-on. Orum lists AI coaching under a feature heading that reads like inclusion and then says in the add-ons section that it is available as an additional add-on to any plan. None of these appear in the headline number.

The second is the licence unit. Five9 licenses the platform per concurrent user and its workforce engagement per named agent, and states plainly that when named seats required exceeds concurrent seats sold, the difference is sold as add-ons. Fifty concurrent seats covering 120 staff across shifts is 120 workforce licences. Genesys offers named, concurrent and hourly interacting licence types and publishes a figure for named only, so a quote priced on concurrent or hourly cannot be compared with the list price at all.

The third is retention and caps. PhoneBurner keeps call recordings 30 days on Standard, 90 on Professional and unlimited on Premium, and caps contact imports at 10,000, 20,000 and 50,000 a month respectively. For a team dialing a large list, that import cap decides the tier more than any feature does. The full rate card and the arithmetic behind each tier are in our PhoneBurner pricing breakdown, the Genesys one is in Genesys Cloud CX pricing, and the Five9 rate card is taken apart in our Five9 pricing breakdown.

• PhoneBurner call recording retention: 30, 90 or unlimited days by tier
• PhoneBurner contact import cap: 10,000, 20,000 or 50,000 a month by tier
• Five9 licenses the platform per concurrent user and WEM per named agent
• Genesys publishes a price for named licences only, not concurrent or hourly interacting
• Ask which add-ons are required to reach the answer rate the demo showed

What does a call center dialer not fix?

The agent hour. Every product in the table above optimizes the same scarce resource, which is the number of minutes a person can spend with a headset on, and none of them adds any.

That is worth saying plainly because the buying process rarely does. A predictive dialer at 15 agents raises talk time per agent hour, and it still needs 15 people hired, ramped and retained to produce that hour. The Bridge Group 2025 Sales Development report puts median SDR turnover at 40 percent a year and median tenure at 1.9 years, so a 15-seat floor is rehiring six seats annually and paying ramp on each. Measured against roughly $114,000 a year loaded per rep, the dialer licence is a rounding error and the staffing plan is the budget.

This is the reason the licence floor and the agent floor keep landing on the same page. When Genesys says a predictive campaign wants 15 agents, that is a hiring requirement written in product documentation. An AI dialer changes the shape of that requirement rather than the pacing inside it, because the conversation itself no longer consumes an agent hour: there is no agent to reserve, no idle ring time to pay for, and no abandon rate to tune, since a call is only placed when there is something ready to talk. What remains human is the meeting at the end of it. Our own plans start at $499 a month with roughly 1,500 connected minutes and no seat floor, which is the comparison worth running against a 50-seat minimum.

• Median SDR turnover 40 percent a year, median tenure 1.9 years (Bridge Group, 2025)
• Roughly $114,000 a year loaded per US SDR, against a $75 to $240 licence
• A 15-agent predictive floor is a hiring plan written as a product setting
• Our Starter plan is $499 a month with roughly 1,500 connected minutes, no seat floor
• Compare the smallest order each vendor accepts, not the headline per-seat rate