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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 (4th), Sales Force Automation (7th), Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Contact Center Infrastructure category, the mindshare of Cisco Unified Contact Center Express is 8.3%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Five9 is 13.0%, up from 11.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Contact Center Infrastructure Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Five913.0%
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express8.3%
Other78.7%
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."
"The complex call routing capabilities were valuable, as 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, while also setting up complex rollover and integrations between our CRM to leverage that data for complex call routing, and it all worked well."
"I really appreciate Five9 because I do not have to do much creatively, as everything is automated."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of making scripts within the contact center solution itself."
"Before using the WFO and its analytics, our quality teams would listen to only 5 percent of contacts a week, per employee, which is a very small part of what an employee is doing... Now, this tool does an automatic evaluation of 100 percent of their calls. It has certainly helped the QA teams in their training, and that, in turn, helps our clients."
"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."
"The reporting is good, and we're testing AI summaries now. Also, the workflow automation feature, so far, has been good."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"This solution could be improved with better support for higher education and healthcare."
"The pricing could be improved. It is set in US dollars, so it doesn't account for the exchange rate with other regions."
"During training and demos, resiliency tests failed, which was not ideal. This is a concern for stability."
"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..."
"Downtime happens occasionally, about two days a month, likely because of heavy usage by many agents, but I have not faced that issue as a supervisor."
"The reporting could be a bit better."
"I would like to see more of the functions from the original Five9 adapter included in the Salesforce Plus adapter, as they do not automatically update when Five9 releases new features."
"The SMS feature could use some improvement as far as the opt-out process goes."
"Five9's stability needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"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."
"Five9 is expensive, but most companies would find that using it is worth the cost."
"I prefer Five9's licensing model."
"Five9's pricing wasn't quite as flexible as I'd hoped, but it ended up being reasonably priced overall."
"Five9 is reasonable."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Insurance Company
23%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

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

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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.
What advice do you have for others considering Five9?
I was a Workforce Management Director in that role at that time. I would note that I have no experience with CXone, only IEX. As a telephony platform, Five9 served my needs. My overall review ratin...
 

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: August 2026.
908,402 professionals have used our research since 2012.