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Cisco Unified Contact Center Express vs Five9 comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Unified Contact Cente...
Ranking in Contact Center Infrastructure
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
IVR Systems (3rd)
Five9
Ranking in Contact Center Infrastructure
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Contact Center Platforms (3rd), Workforce Engagement Management (3rd), Sales Force Automation (6th), Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Contact Center Infrastructure category, the mindshare of Cisco Unified Contact Center Express is 8.9%, down from 16.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Five9 is 12.1%, up from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Contact Center Infrastructure Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Five912.1%
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express8.9%
Other79.0%
Contact Center Infrastructure
 

Featured Reviews

GR
Operation Director at Dammam University
Interactive voice response and automatic call distribution help to improve our customer service
Our primary use case is for customer service, in higher education and healthcare This solution provides uni-channel service support and is fully integrated with our DB. The new Cisco Finesse is really amazing. The most valuable features of this solution are the IVR (Interactive voice response)…
reviewer2788932 - PeerSpot reviewer
CX Intelligence Analytics at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Advanced call routing has enabled complex CRM-driven workflows but reporting still needs improvement
The complex call routing capabilities were valuable. I was able to set up fairly complex call routing, capturing data via internal IVR for potential customers' geography and then conducting lookups to determine which skill to route calls to. I also set up complex rollover, so if the first person could not answer, callers would wait a specified number of seconds hoping they would become available, and if they did not, the call would roll over to the next person. I was able to set up fairly complex integrations between our CRM and leverage that data for complex call routing, and it worked well. The integration and call routing both performed well.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"This solution provides uni-channel Service support and is fully integrated with our DB."
"This solution provides uni-channel service support and is fully integrated with our DB."
"Five9 has made our contact center more flexible by taking it to the cloud. The user experience for agents is great because everything is on one dashboard, from the dialer to the workflows for transferring calls and creating tickets."
"I really appreciate Five9 because I do not have to do much creatively, as everything is automated."
"The admin platform is easy to use and navigate. That has been incredibly useful for us because it has given us the ability to self-provision in a lot of situations. The ability to create and track data elements has also been a valuable addition."
"The technical support for Five9 has been exemplary."
"I like the capability of call and screen recording. It has helped us to hold our agents accountable to the expectations for the role. It creates a clearer picture than giving feedback that is just based on calls that we may have listened to, but we do not have anything to show the agents themselves."
"The reporting is the most valuable feature in Five9."
"Five9 has a lot of AI tools, which I find valuable. It offers transcription services and a power dialer for outbound dialing. I like that Five9 is built for outbound and suitable for that purpose."
"Five9 is extremely easy to manage and maintain."
 

Cons

"This solution could be improved with better support for higher education and healthcare."
"This solution could be improved with better support for higher education and healthcare."
"It would be ideal if they could combine the tools into one suite."
"Five9 has an active-passive high-availability model. I would prefer active-active."
"There have also been some challenges in being able to keep the format of an original email. The solution acts as a proxy, but it's not bringing over the full format that the email came in with... Five9's email channel isn't as good as some other vendors' email channels that I've seen. But there is an upgrade coming..."
"There are several audio issues that need attention. Whenever I disconnect a headset after connecting to the VDI, the station connection in Five9 disconnects automatically, requiring a VMware restart."
"What would make Five9 better is a partnership with an SMS AI solution, which would make Five9 pretty powerful."
"The pricing could be improved. It is set in US dollars, so it doesn't account for the exchange rate with other regions."
"Maybe they could do better on how we access all the data if we want the data to work outside of Five9. Sometimes, that's not the easiest process. It's not bad, but if there's an area for improvement, that could be one."
"During training and demos, resiliency tests failed, which was not ideal. This is a concern for stability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Five9 is expensive, but most companies would find that using it is worth the cost."
"Five9 is a little expensive because of our company's size. That said, it scales pretty well. The daily usage costs and monthly fees seem about right. It's not out of line with what we'd expect from other companies. However, they seem to have a one-size-fits-all implementation fee. Most of their clients have hundreds if not thousands of seats in the call centers, so $5,000 or $10,000 is not a huge cost. It would be nice if they had a sliding scale for smaller companies."
"I prefer Five9's licensing model."
"Five9 is reasonable."
"The cost is not at the lower end of the market, but it's worth it."
"The pricing seems reasonable. I had anticipated that whatever solution we went with would be more expensive. I was actually pleasantly surprised that the features that we had in Evolve IP, one-to-one, did not cost significantly more in Five9."
"Their license structure, out of the box, is better than that of other providers and their pricing is much less than other vendors we've looked at."
"The product is not the most expensive, but it's not cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Insurance Company
24%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Five9?
I like the capability of call and screen recording. It has helped us to hold our agents accountable to the expectations for the role. It creates a clearer picture than giving feedback that is just ...
What needs improvement with Five9?
The reporting suite needed improvement. I saw recently that Five9 released a new platform for reporting, as the reporting was not great previously.
What is your primary use case for Five9?
I was using Five9 in the senior living space.
 

Also Known As

CCX
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aegean Motorway, BC Hydro, City of Biel, Houston Methodist, Linz AG, Logicalis, London Hydro, Pirelli, SickKids Foundation, Sony Corporation, Sony Marketing (Japan) Inc.
Agilysys, BISSELL, From You Flowers, SumUp, Kyndryl, PING, Alaska Airlines, Omaha Steaks International, NextRep, AdventHealth
Find out what your peers are saying about Five9, Cisco, Mitel and others in Contact Center Infrastructure. Updated: March 2026.
886,174 professionals have used our research since 2012.