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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 (8th), Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Contact Center Infrastructure category, the mindshare of Cisco Unified Contact Center Express is 9.6%, down from 16.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Five9 is 12.0%, up from 10.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Contact Center Infrastructure Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Five912.0%
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express9.6%
Other78.4%
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)…
NS
Sr Specialist - Analytics Metrics and Reporting at Mercer
Real-time monitoring and reporting help with better operations
The Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) feature helps to monitor the agents. We can see if an agent is getting stuck. For example, if an agent has not been logged out properly, we can log out that particular agent from a particular session because it hampers productivity. It helps us to be more productive. Our call center agents use the Agent Assist feature. Our call center leaders are also using it to monitor agents' quality metrics. We are also using Qlik Sense along with Five9. Five9 is for monitoring, and Qlik Sense is for service-level reports. Five9 provides us with real-time information, whereas solutions like Verint take a lot more time. Qlik Sense can have intermittent logging issues where it might not work properly, whereas Five9 works properly. Among these three, Five9 is the best. Five9 also gives more bifurcation options. Five9 is good and intuitive. It helps to know how things are. I love it and use it every day. There are always new reports to generate. There are a lot of opportunities within Five9. Additionally, the real-time agent monitoring and ability to skill agents based on calls in the queue are invaluable and much easier than previous solutions like the AWS application. Previously, using the AWS application involved cumbersome steps to manage users and agents, making Five9 a welcome change. Overall, Five9 has made my job easier compared to before, and I do not struggle with it. Five9 has helped improve our call center’s speed to answer. Our leaders are using Five9 to monitor everything. It is not a time-consuming application.

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."
"When it comes to drop calls, we don't have a problem. They are performing to our satisfaction."
"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."
"It helped reduce costs in our organization. We've saved on staffing and we've saved on software by 10% to 15%."
"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."
"Overall, Five9 has made my job easier compared to before, and I do not struggle with it."
"The reporting is the most valuable feature in Five9."
"The tool enables easier management."
"I'm interested in all the features we're using and the reporting that's needed to get them up and running."
 

Cons

"This solution could be improved with better support for higher education and healthcare."
"The technical support is inconsistent and has room for improvement."
"The SMS feature could use some improvement as far as the opt-out process goes."
"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."
"There are some minor issues with some of their filtering that I'd like them to handle on their back end. The only limitation I can think of is that I'm always looking backward and can't look forward. I can't see how many calls are scheduled for tomorrow based on our system."
"During training and demos, resiliency tests failed, which was not ideal. This is a concern for stability."
"The pricing could be improved. It is set in US dollars, so it doesn't account for the exchange rate with other regions."
"Five9 Omnichannel’s UI could be improved."
"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."
"I prefer Five9's licensing model."
"The product's pricing is flexible and reasonable."
"The product is not the most expensive, but it's not cheap."
"Five9 is reasonable."
"Five9 is expensive, but most companies would find that using it is worth the cost."
"The cost is not at the lower end of the market, but it's worth it."
"Five9's pricing wasn't quite as flexible as I'd hoped, but it ended up being reasonably priced overall."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Insurance Company
25%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software 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.
884,122 professionals have used our research since 2012.