Aircall vs Dialpad pricing: $15 seat vs $90 floor

Dialpad Connect Standard costs $15 per user per month billed annually and will sell you a single seat. Aircall Essentials costs $30 per license billed annually and will not sell fewer than three, a floor Aircall now prints on its own plan card as "3 licenses for $90/month". So the smallest possible bill is $15 at Dialpad and $90 at Aircall, six times as much, before either product has done anything. That gap closes fast once you price the plan that can actually run a sales or support desk, and for three people it comes down to $75 against $90. Which of those is the better $75 or $90 depends on four rows: hold queues, CRM integrations, the HIPAA agreement, and whether the vendor publishes a monthly rate at all.

Both rate cards below were read at source on September 9, 2026. Dialpad publishes its plan data as structured values inside its pricing page, with a separate USD column, and Aircall publishes a 92 row feature matrix the same way. Every seat minimum and per tier placement quoted here comes from the vendor's own table rather than from a third party summary of it.

Aircall vs Dialpad pricing, side by side

Read the seat minimum column first. It changes the entry price more than the headline does.

Aircall publishes no month to month rate for any plan. A few comparison pages quote "$40 to over $70" as Aircall's monthly pricing; that range is not on Aircall's own card and we do not repeat it. If you need to leave without a twelve month term, Aircall's rate card does not tell you what that costs, and Dialpad's does.

Is Aircall cheaper than Dialpad?

No, at any headcount and on any pair of plans. Aircall's cheapest license is $30 and Dialpad's is $15, so at the entry tier Dialpad is half the price per seat and, because of the three license floor, one sixth of the price for a solo buyer. Comparing the two middle tiers, Dialpad Pro at $25 against Aircall Essentials at $30, the gap narrows to $5 a seat: $75 against $90 for three people, $250 against $300 for ten. Aircall Professional at $50 is double Dialpad Pro.

All figures billed annually from both vendors' published rates. The Dialpad columns rise to $27 and $35 per seat if you refuse the annual term. The Aircall columns have no monthly equivalent to rise to, because none is published.

What does Aircall's $30 plan include that Dialpad's $15 plan does not?

The honest answer is: most of what a support desk needs, and this is why the cheaper vendor is not automatically the better buy. Aircall Essentials, on its own matrix, includes call queuing, ring groups, IVR, call routing, call recording, warm transfers, click to dial, a shared call inbox, extensions, voicemail transcription, APIs and webhooks, and native integrations with HubSpot, Zendesk, Pipedrive, Intercom, Slack and Zoho. All on the entry plan.

Dialpad Standard at $15 includes a multi level auto attendant and call recording on every tier, which is genuinely unusual at that price, but its own matrix draws three lines that matter for a desk. Hold queues are not on Standard at all. Departments and ring groups cap at three. And HubSpot is not on Standard; CRM integrations arrive on Pro at $25. So a $15 Dialpad seat can greet a caller with a menu and record the call, but it cannot park that caller in a queue, and it cannot log the call to your CRM. For a sales or support team, that is the whole job.

Put the plans that can actually do the work next to each other and the comparison becomes Dialpad Pro at $25 against Aircall Essentials at $30, both with a three seat floor. That is a $15 a month difference for three people. We ran the same exercise across the whole category in our rundown of which plan carries an auto attendant, and Dialpad is one of very few vendors that puts a multi level menu on the cheapest tier.

Which is better for a sales team, Aircall or Dialpad?

It depends on whether your reps dial out all day or answer in. For outbound, Aircall's PowerDialer and voicemail drop sit on Professional at $50, not on Essentials, so the plan that dials lists for you costs $150 for three people and $500 for ten. Dialpad's outbound tooling is thinner, but the CRM logging a sales team relies on is on Pro at $25 with Salesforce, HubSpot and the rest, and Dialpad publishes no per minute AI charge on top of the seat.

Aircall's Salesforce integration is Professional only. HubSpot, Pipedrive and Zoho are on Essentials. So a HubSpot shop can buy Aircall at $30 and a Salesforce shop pays $50, a distinction Aircall's rate card is clear about and most comparisons miss. Dialpad puts all of its CRM integrations on one tier, Pro at $25, which for a Salesforce team is half the Aircall price.

One more line worth reading if you are small. Aircall Essentials caps you at three teams. A shop with sales, support and billing each needing their own ring group is at the ceiling on day one and moves to Professional at $50 to add a fourth. Dialpad Standard caps departments at three as well, but Pro lifts that to 25.

Which is better for a support team?

Aircall, if you can afford the $90 floor and the team is inbound heavy. Call queuing with queue callback, coaching, whispering and live monitoring are what a support manager buys a phone system for, and Aircall has queuing on Essentials with the supervisor features on Professional. Dialpad has no hold queue at all until Pro, and its own matrix does not split recording into on demand and automatic, so we do not claim either.

The row that surprised us is texting. Support teams increasingly close a call with a text, whether that is a link, a confirmation, or a request for a review while the call is fresh. That last one is a review request workflow rather than a phone feature, but it runs on your business number's SMS rate, and Aircall's matrix lists domestic SMS and MMS on all three tiers with "contact us for rates" in every column. No included count, no per message price, no cap. Dialpad does not publish a per tier SMS allowance either. So neither vendor will let you build a texting budget from its rate card, which is worse than a low cap because you cannot price it at all. RingCentral, Nextiva and Grasshopper all publish theirs.

Does Aircall or Dialpad sign a HIPAA BAA?

Dialpad publishes HIPAA and BAA compliance on all three tiers of its plan matrix, including Standard at $15, which makes it one of the cheapest documented routes to a signed business associate agreement anywhere in this category. Aircall's 92 row matrix does not mention HIPAA or a BAA at all, so we do not assert either way; ask Aircall directly and get the answer in writing before buying for a medical, dental or behavioral health practice.

Keep the two obligations separate. A signed BAA covers protected health information; it has nothing to do with whether you may record a call, which is governed by state wiretap law, and eleven US states require every party on the line to consent. We compared what each vendor actually publishes in our guide to which phone providers sign a HIPAA BAA.

What are the seat minimums at Aircall and Dialpad?

Aircall: three licenses on Essentials, three on Professional, twenty five on Custom, printed on the plan cards and confirmed on the matrix row "Minimum users". Dialpad: one on Standard, three on Pro, one hundred on Enterprise. The practical consequence is that a two person business cannot buy Aircall at all without paying for a third empty seat, and cannot buy Dialpad Pro without doing the same. The only plan on this page that sells a single seat is Dialpad Standard, which is also the plan without hold queues or CRM integration.

Aircall's matrix also lists "Standard Onboarding (11 users minimum)" on Essentials and Professional, so the guided setup is priced for teams of eleven or more even though the plan sells at three. Smaller teams set themselves up. We tracked seat floors across the flat rate end of the market in Dialpad vs Grasshopper, where the shapes differ rather than the minimums.

Aircall's AI minutes: the advertised rate is the 10,000 minute rate

Both vendors now sell AI on top of the seat price, and Aircall's is the one to read carefully. Its plan cards advertise AI Voice Agents "from $0.19 per minute". Its own bundles are 500 minutes for $175, which divides out to $0.35 a minute, and 2,500 minutes for $725, which is $0.29. The $0.19 figure appears only at 10,000 minutes and above. So the first bundle a small business would buy costs 84 percent more per minute than the advertised rate, and you need twenty times the entry volume to reach it. Every account gets 50 free AI agent minutes a month and 100 at sign up.

Dialpad prices its AI differently: its plan matrix places AI features by tier and publishes no per minute rate or minute bundle at all, so there is no advertised floor to divide. Neither vendor's AI line changes the seat comparison, but if a machine answering the phone is part of why you are shopping, divide Aircall's smallest bundle before you believe the "from" price. We priced the same pattern across the category in our breakdown of what an IVR system costs.

Do Aircall or Dialpad require an annual contract?

Dialpad does not, and publishes what the freedom costs: Standard is $15 annually against $27 monthly, an 80 percent premium, and Pro is $25 against $35, a 40 percent premium. Aircall's card says "billed annually" on both published plans and gives no monthly figure at all. Whether Aircall sells month to month is a question for its sales team, not something you can read off the rate card. If you have just left a legacy contract, that is worth weighing before signing another twelve months with either.

Neither published rate is what the invoice will say. Both vendors add regulatory and E911 line items on top of the plan rate, as does every US provider including us. The largest is the federal universal service pass-through: the FCC set the fourth quarter 2026 contribution factor at 42.0 percent in Public Notice DA 26-946, released September 14, 2026. That percentage applies only to the interstate and international portion of your service rather than the whole bill, and interconnected VoIP providers may use the FCC 64.9 percent interim safe harbor, so a realistic pass-through lands near 27 percent of the service charge. E911 fees are statutory and typically run about $0.20 to $3.00 per line per month. Ask both for a quote with fees included.

Where Phoner fits

Phoner is worth pricing here if what pushes you off Aircall is a $90 floor for a team that is two people, and what pushes you off Dialpad is discovering that the $15 seat cannot hold a caller in a queue or log a call to your CRM. Phoner Team at $29 per user includes a visual IVR phone menu you can inspect before you pay, ring groups written as readable rules, business texting with no monthly message cap on the plan, voicemail to text, and call recording with consent announcements, with toll-free and vanity numbers at a flat $5 each. Business at $59 adds multi level menus, CRM integrations and the API. Starter is $15. Every tier is month to month with no seat minimum, so the smallest possible bill is one seat and the rate you compare is the rate you can leave.

We are equally clear about what we do not do. Phoner has no ACD hold queue, no power dialer, no voicemail drop and no live call monitoring, so a support desk that parks callers in a queue and a sales floor that dials lists should buy Aircall or Dialpad Pro, and we would rather say so than sell you the wrong thing. We also do not sign a HIPAA business associate agreement; Dialpad at $15 does. If you want the full range of what a US business phone system costs before choosing, our business phone system cost breakdown prices thirteen providers side by side, and the Aircall alternatives page and Dialpad alternatives page carry each vendor's full plan matrix.