Salesforce Dialer, CRM Dialer and HubSpot Dialer: published limits, pricing and the Sales Dialer retirement

Does Salesforce have a dialer?

Yes, and Salesforce has scheduled it for retirement. Sales Dialer, previously marketed as Lightning Dialer, is a paid add-on license that puts click-to-call, call logging and local presence inside Lightning Experience. Salesforce Help now carries an identical notice on every Sales Dialer page telling customers to move to Salesforce Voice.

The notice reads, word for word: "Sales Dialer is scheduled for retirement. No new features or enhancements are being added to Sales Dialer. Information regarding formal end-of-life for features is posted on Salesforce Active Product and Feature Retirements. To use telephony features directly in Salesforce, we recommend that you modernize your experience by moving to Salesforce Voice." No formal end-of-life date is stated on the product pages, which is the awkward part of the announcement: you are told to migrate without being told by when.

The published limitations matter more than most buyers realise, because several of them rule the product out on their own. Outgoing calls are supported to the United States and Canada only, and Puerto Rico is explicitly not supported. Local Presence works in the US and is not available in Canada. Dialer features run in Lightning Experience on the desktop only, with no support in Experience Cloud sites. Voicemail storage is capped at 20 messages of two minutes each, and those files count against your Salesforce file storage quota. Call Monitoring is not supported in Essentials. You cannot make or receive live calls with Dialer in a sandbox, so the setup you test is not the setup you ship.

One limitation is a migration trap rather than a feature gap: Salesforce documents that Dialer users cannot hold Salesforce Voice permission sets and cannot be part of a Salesforce call center. The product you are being told to move to cannot be run alongside the product you are moving off, at least not for the same user. That makes a phased cutover harder than it sounds and is worth raising with your account team before you plan one.

What Sales Dialer has never been is an outbound sales dialer in the sense a sales development team means. There is no power dialing, no parallel dialing and no predictive pacing in it. If those are what you are shopping for, the mode definitions and the price of each are on power dialer software, parallel dialer software and predictive dialer software.

Does HubSpot have a power dialer?

No. HubSpot ships a calling tool that dials from a record and logs the call, and it does not ship a power dialer, a parallel dialer or a predictive dialer. Teams that want any of those buy a third-party dialer and connect it, which is why the HubSpot marketplace carries so many of them.

What HubSpot does have is a minute economy that catches people out, and it is documented plainly in its own knowledge base. Calling minutes are not allocated per seat. HubSpot states that "each HubSpot account has a pooled limit of available calling minutes that are shared between users," and that when you hit the ceiling you can finish the call you are on but cannot start another until the first day of the next month. Buying more minutes is not available on every plan either: HubSpot documents that "a Sales Hub or Service Hub Professional or Enterprise subscription is required to add more minutes to your pooled amount." A Starter account that runs out is out for the month.

The detail almost nobody knows sits in the same documentation. HubSpot supports calling from your own registered phone rather than through the browser, and it warns that this option "uses twice as many calling minutes because it makes two separate calls." A rep who prefers their desk phone or their mobile is halving the team's shared allowance without anyone noticing, because the meter is pooled and nothing in the interface attributes the burn to them.

The practical consequence is that HubSpot's calling ceiling is a team-level resource that behaves like a shared bandwidth cap. Two reps making unremarkable numbers of calls can leave a third with nothing, and the person who finds out is whoever dials on the twenty-fourth. Check the remaining balance under Usage, limits and subscriptions before you plan a campaign around it, and check it again after you add reps.

If HubSpot is your system of record and the volume is real, the honest options are a third-party dialer with a native HubSpot integration or an AI agent that places the calls itself. PhoneBurner is the clearest of the third-party set on write-back, and the per-seat figures for the whole category are on outbound calling software.

Which tier of a third-party dialer actually unlocks the CRM?

Usually not the one in the headline price. On five of the platforms we opened, the CRM connector sits above the entry plan or is sold as a separate add-on, so the seat you budgeted is not the seat that talks to your CRM.

Ringover is the starkest. Its TALK tier at 20 EUR per user per month lists no integrations at all, and the 100-plus integrations begin on BUSINESS at 47 EUR. Both tiers carry a three-user minimum and a 12-month commitment, so the mistake is expensive for a year. CloudTalk puts Salesforce Ecosystem Integration on Expert only, which is 49 EUR against a 19 EUR entry seat. Aircall starts Salesforce CTI on Professional rather than Essentials, and sells Aircall for Salesforce Voice as a separate product at 30 EUR per licence on top. JustCall omits Salesforce from its lowest plan. Nextiva marks CRM connectors as "Add on" in all three of its business phone columns, which means none of the published prices include one.

Apollo is a different shape of the same problem. Its seats run $49, $79 and $119 per user per month annually, and none of them include the Advanced Dialer, which is $119 per team per month and holds power dialing, parallel dialing, international dialing and local presence. On twenty reps that add-on is trivial. On two it nearly doubles the bill.

PhoneBurner is the counterexample worth naming, because it publishes native integrations for Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Close, monday.com, SugarCRM and GoHighLevel on all three of its tiers rather than gating them. Its own FAQ then draws the line that matters: automatic write-back of notes, dispositions and recordings applies to the native integrations only.

The question to put to a sales engineer is therefore not "do you integrate with Salesforce." Every one of them says yes. It is "on which tier, at what additional cost, and which objects and fields do you write." We work through the same question vendor by vendor on best dialer for cold calling, and the head to head pairs are on our SDR dialer comparison.

Why do some calls never log to the CRM?

Because logging is a separate permission from dialing, and on Salesforce the two can be granted apart. Salesforce documents it directly: users need the Edit Task permission to log calls, that permission is not automatically included with some profiles, and users on those profiles "can make calls, but those calls are not logged."

That sentence is the whole reason activity history goes patchy in ways nobody can reproduce. The rep dials, the conversation happens, the call connects and completes, and nothing lands on the record. There is no error, because from the dialer's point of view nothing failed. The gap only shows up weeks later when a manager runs an activity report and one rep's numbers look impossible.

The same failure mode has a vendor-side twin. A dialer that lists your CRM under integrations may only be pushing a call record, or only a call record with a recording link, or only when the rep selects a disposition. PhoneBurner is unusually clear about the boundary, stating that automatic write-back of notes, dispositions and recordings holds for its native integrations and not for the rest. Most vendors are not that specific in public, which is why the field-level question belongs in the demo.

There are three checks worth running before you sign anything. First, dial from a test user that has the same profile as your least-privileged rep, not from an admin account, because admins have every permission and will never reproduce the bug. Second, look at what appears on the record afterwards: a task, a call object, the recording, the transcript, the disposition, the duration, or only some of those. Third, ask what happens when the call is abandoned, transferred or goes to voicemail, since those three paths are where write-back most often stops.

Salesforce adds one further wrinkle that catches implementation teams. Permission set groups are not supported for Dialer permissions, so Dialer and Call Monitoring permission sets have to be assigned directly. A team that manages all its access through permission set groups, which is the modern Salesforce practice, will find that the one product they most want inside them will not go in.

What does a CRM dialer cost per rep once the add-ons are in?

Take five reps on Salesforce and price the realistic options rather than the headline seats. The answer lands between roughly $150 and $900 a month for the dialing layer alone, before a single minute of telephony, and the spread is almost entirely add-ons.

Apollo is the cheapest coherent setup: five Professional seats at $79 is $395, plus the $119 per team Advanced Dialer, so $514 a month with power dialing, parallel dialing and local presence included in that add-on. CloudTalk at the Expert tier is 49 EUR per user for the Salesforce connector, which is 245 EUR for five, and the Parallel Dialer is another 39 EUR each if you want it, taking it to 440 EUR. Ringover BUSINESS at 47 EUR is 235 EUR for five, on a 12-month commitment. Aircall Professional at 50 EUR is 250 EUR, and Salesforce Voice is a further 30 EUR per licence, so 400 EUR. PhoneBurner annual at $140 is $700 for five with native write-back on every tier and no CRM upcharge at all, plus ARMOR if you want number reputation protection.

The number that changes the comparison is the one that is not on any pricing page. Bridge Group's 2025 Sales Development report, based on 351 B2B companies, puts a median rep at 44 dials a day producing 4.1 quality conversations. Five reps is roughly 220 dials a day and about 20 conversations. Every option above is cheap relative to five loaded salaries, so the dialer decision is not really a cost decision. It is a decision about how many conversations those five people can physically have.

That is where the two categories separate. A seat-priced dialer buys screens: it makes a human faster at getting to the twenty conversations. A metered AI agent buys minutes: it holds the conversations itself and the number of them is bounded by your list rather than by your headcount. Neither is cheaper in general, and comparing them on a per-seat number is a category error. The full per-seat picture across fifteen platforms is on outbound calling software, the platform-level view is on outbound call center pricing, and the add-on lines specifically are on auto dialer pricing.

Which CRM dialer should an outbound team buy?

Start from your system of record, then from whether you need pacing, and only then from price. Those three questions eliminate most of the market before you book a demo.

If you are on Salesforce and you only need click-to-call with clean logging, the native Sales Dialer would have been the obvious answer and is no longer, because it is in retirement and Salesforce is pointing you at Salesforce Voice. Plan around that rather than around the product that exists today. If you are on Salesforce and you need pacing, PhoneBurner and Apollo are the two that publish both a price and a clear integration story, and CloudTalk Expert is the option if you want the call center feature set alongside.

If you are on HubSpot, the native tool is fine for low volume and becomes a constraint the moment volume is real, because the minute pool is shared and only Professional and Enterprise can top it up. PhoneBurner is native on every tier. If you are on Zoho, the built-in telephony works, and be aware that it is quoted in euro credits, which is an odd thing to carry on a US budget line.

If what you actually need is more conversations rather than faster dialing, none of the above is the answer, and it is worth being honest about that before you buy. A dialer compresses the dead time between attempts. It does not change what happens after somebody says hello, and at a 5 to 13 percent connect rate most of your list is never going to say hello at all. An AI voice agent removes the seat constraint instead of optimizing around it: it dials the list, discloses that it is an AI, qualifies against your criteria, handles the usual objections and books into the calendar, then writes every transcript and disposition back. We set the two approaches side by side on AI dialer, and the CRM-specific version of that question is on AI cold calling CRM.

One last thing to price in whichever way you go. Heavy outbound from a small pool of numbers is the fastest route to getting those numbers labeled, and number reputation is now a paid line item at Readymode, PhoneBurner and Kixie rather than a feature. The fallout and the fixes are in how to avoid spam likely on outbound calls, and the branded calling market that grew up around it is priced on branded caller ID.