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Five9 vs PolyAI (2026)

Comparing Five9 and PolyAI? Both are Contact Center & CCaaS, Enterprise and Voice & Phone AI tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at pricing and an estimated monthly bill, channels, compliance claims, and integrations, plus when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.

At a glance

Conversations/mo

% handled by AI

Agent seats

Price it at my volume

Estimates assume 5,000 conversations a month, 60% handled by AI and 10 agent seats, at each vendor's published list price (the cost calculator's model); treat them as a floor, not a quote. Compliance rows are what vendors publicly claim, and “Not verified” means we have not confirmed that fact yet, not that the tool lacks it.

Choose Five9 or PolyAI?

About Five9

Five9 is a cloud contact center platform, the kind that runs the whole operation: inbound and outbound voice, chat, email, SMS, and social messaging, plus routing, quality management, and workforce tools. Its Genius AI suite threads through everything, with voice and digital AI Agents that resolve customer conversations on their own, AI Agent Assist that transcribes calls and coaches live reps, and AI Summaries, Insights, and Knowledge doing the after-call cleanup. In 2025 Five9 pushed hard into what it calls Agentic CX, adding an Agentic Engine plus AI Trust and Governance controls.

The company has been at this since 2001, when it started in San Ramon, California, betting that contact centers belonged in the cloud back when they lived in server closets. It went public on NASDAQ in April 2014 at 7 dollars a share under the ticker FIVN. In 2021 Zoom agreed to buy Five9 for roughly 14.7 billion dollars in stock, then shareholders balked and the deal was terminated that September. Longtime CEO Mike Burkland retired, handing the job to Amit Mathradas in February 2026. Today Five9 claims more than 3,000 customers, including Alaska Airlines, PUMA, Omaha Steaks, Wyndham, and Exact Sciences.

Five9 publishes exactly two prices. Digital costs 119 dollars per concurrent seat per month for digital channels only, and Core costs 159 dollars with voice included. The Plus, Pro, and Enterprise bundles are quote only, and everything carries a 50 seat minimum plus usage based charges. Bundled AI covers 3,000 minutes per seat before metered fees kick in, and the serious stuff, AI Agents and virtual agents, is sold as add-ons through sales. Budget accordingly.

Choose Five9 if you run a genuine contact center with 50 or more seats and want voice, digital channels, and AI under one roof from a vendor that will still exist next year. Skip it if you are a small team wanting a simple helpdesk: Zendesk or Intercom will fit better, cost less, and skip the sales calls.

Read the full Five9 listing →  ·  See Five9 alternatives →

About PolyAI

PolyAI answers the phone. While most of this directory started with chat and added voice later, PolyAI has been voice-first since three Cambridge machine-learning PhDs, Nikola Mrkšić, Pei-Hao Su, and Tsung-Hsien Wen, founded it in London in 2017 out of the university's Machine Intelligence Lab. Its agents are known for sounding genuinely human and for surviving the things that break lesser systems: interruptions, accents, background noise, and callers who change their mind mid-sentence. Restaurants, hotels, banks, and utilities use it to answer every call instantly, day and night, with customers like PG&E, UniCredit, Golden Nugget, and Fogo de Chao on the roster.

The platform matured into what the company calls an agentic dialog platform: Dialog Studio (formerly Agent Studio) for building and managing agents without code, a developer kit for deeper work, and its own dialog models: the audio-native Dialog-RSN-1 for calls and Raven, trained on more than a billion enterprise conversations, for webchat and multilingual text. Inside Dialog Studio sits Wren, an agent that builds agents from a description, reviews production calls on a schedule, and drafts and tests fixes that wait for a person to approve them. Compliance boxes (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI) are ticked, which matters because taking payments and health information over the phone is exactly where voice AI earns its keep.

Investors have noticed the wedge. In December 2025 PolyAI raised an $86 million Series D at a valuation around $750 million, with NVIDIA's venture arm participating, bringing total funding past $200 million. Commercially it bills on usage, priced per minute of conversation, with rates scoped to your call volume rather than published on the site.

Choose PolyAI when the phone is your problem. If most of your support pain is hold music, missed calls, and staffing the night shift, a voice-native specialist will beat a chat-first platform's bolted-on telephony, and PolyAI is one of the most proven voice specialists in the market.

Read the full PolyAI listing →  ·  See PolyAI alternatives →

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