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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 (7th), Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Contact Center Infrastructure category, the mindshare of Cisco Unified Contact Center Express is 8.3%, down from 12.1% 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."
"When it comes to drop calls, we don't have a problem. They are performing to our satisfaction."
"I'm interested in all the features we're using and the reporting that's needed to get them up and running."
"The product’s IVR script editor is very easy and simple to use."
"I like the fact that I can customize the cadencing. I can drill in and create custom contact point cadencing for all of our different categories of leads. We attack some people more aggressively, but others much more softly. I have much more confidence that things aren't slipping through the cracks. It continues to bring customers up for us until they've either moved through the cycle or we've removed them from the cycle. It gives us greater peace of mind. The ability to get in quickly and customize many of those pieces easily was appealing to us."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of making scripts within the contact center solution itself."
"I like the ease with which we can make changes if necessary. Currently, we are using it for phone and email distribution, but we're talking about adding chat and delving into the omnichannel features more."
"The admin tools are most valuable, such as using the UI to configure all the campaigns and all the settings that we use. Also, the monitoring panels it has are very good. Our supervisors and sales managers build dashboards in the solution so that we can understand how our operation is performing throughout the day. That is very useful."
"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."
 

Cons

"This solution could be improved with better support for higher education and healthcare."
"The reporting suite needed improvement."
"Sometimes, there are some call quality issue complaints from our users."
"Integration with third-party solutions can be difficult and has room for improvement."
"During training and demos, resiliency tests failed, which was not ideal. This is a concern for stability."
"Five9 should provide free training resources for end users, including agents, supervisors, and admins."
"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..."
"For Five9, I would like a feature where reports such as AHT or workforce-related reports can be generated automatically without starting from scratch"
"The pricing could be improved. It is set in US dollars, so it doesn't account for the exchange rate with other regions."
 

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."
"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."
"Five9 is expensive, but most companies would find that using it is worth the cost."
"The product's pricing is flexible and reasonable."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Insurance Company
24%
Construction Company
10%
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

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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: June 2026.
903,257 professionals have used our research since 2012.