NICE is a cloud-based contact center company that’s been in the game since the late 90s. Its main offering, CXone, is well-priced and uses AI to help personalize caller interactions and make agents more productive, making it a choice worth considering for businesses looking for a contact center as a service (CCaaS) solution.
However, NICE is not without its drawbacks, so businesses looking for a hosted contact center solution will want to weigh their options and understand the best alternatives to NICE CXone.
With that in mind, we’ve examined NICE CXone’s strengths and weaknesses and compared it with several of its top competitors to discover alternatives and show which ones stand out.
Strengths of NICE CXone
To identify great alternatives to NICE CXone, we should first see what it does well to give us a baseline for comparison. Then, we can see what other options do differently and whether their offerings are better or worse.
The following are four of NICE CXone’s top selling points.
Customization and flexibility
NICE CXone offers extensive customization, allowing businesses to tailor the product to their specifications.
Users can design their own call scripts, customize their dashboards, create custom reports, and design queue routing that meets their needs.
Omnichannel capabilities
As one of the industry’s oldest contact center companies, they’ve had a headstart regarding integrations in a multichannel environment.
NICE CXone supports over 30 digital channels, including phone, email, live chat, social media, and mobile apps. This provides several customer support and communications options, so contact centers can connect with customers via their channels of choice.
Advanced features
Given the recent rise in popularity of AI-powered tools and solutions, it’s unsurprising that NICE CXone includes AI-driven features, such as virtual assistants, interaction summaries, and AI-enabled copilots.
The platform also includes virtual attendants — to provide performance insights — and features designed to boost productivity, such as predictive dialers and workforce management tools.
Competitive pricing
While not a cheap contact center solution, NICE CXone offers competitive pricing, and reviewers state that it provides good value for the price. This can make it a cost-effective solution for businesses mindful of their budgets.
Expect to pay $71–209 per user monthly to use NICE CXone. Typically, voice-enabled contact center agents start at $94 monthly. Below is a snapshot from the NICE pricing page:
Why Customers Look for NICE CXone Alternatives
While NICE CXone has several strong selling points, it’s not perfect. There are many reasons customers and businesses might look elsewhere for their contact center needs, and the following are five reasons.
No native UCaaS
NICE CXone is a powerful CCaaS solution, but it doesn’t provide unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and requires integration with a third-party UCaaS provider. So, organizations looking for an integrated UCaaS–CCaaS solution will need to look elsewhere.
This is why Jordan mentioned in his review that transferring calls is a novel feature:
Complex configuration
A great contact center solution needs to be easy to set up and manage. This is one area where NICE CXone can fall short, as some users have reported that it requires complex configurations, which can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
“[NICE] charges heavy fees for such support (not included with your recurring service fees) and as such there are a lot of features we’re simply not leveraging. We’ve even abandoned the use of some features because the way they present in the client software is too cumbersome for end users to handle reliably.”
Paul Jebe
Service issues and customer support
Downtime can be a major problem for contact centers, and NICE CXone often struggles with service issues and downtime. Some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of the customer support they’ve received, with unresolved issues.
Additionally, NICE’s support and assistance aren’t included in their plans. Users have reported high fees for customer support, which can be a challenge for businesses with limited budgets and technical expertise.
Restrictive licensing
As users have pointed out, NICE CXone’s licensing can be somewhat restrictive, limiting how the platform can be used within an organization. Companies with specific or niche contact center needs should make sure those use cases are allowed within the license.
Learning curves for reporting and add-ons
The NICE CXone platform has a steep learning curve. The challenges with reporting and using add-on software are particularly noteworthy, with many customers pointing these out as major obstacles.
Related: Top 6 Broadvoice Alternatives for Growing Contact Centers
Top 6 Alternatives to NICE CXone
If NICE CXone contact center isn’t right for you, don’t worry — several other CCaaS options exist. We’ve compiled a list of the top six alternatives to NICE for your consideration.
1. Nextiva
Nextiva is a complete CCaaS and UCaaS platform offering a wide range of communications features, including full-featured inbound and outbound contact center software.
Among Nextiva’s key features are:
- AI-powered features: These features include voice and chatbots, intelligent virtual agents (IVAs), automatic transcripts, and post-call summaries.
- Omnichannel communications: This allows agents to communicate with customers via voice, email, chat, SMS, or social media on a single platform.
- Call recording: This feature is essential for compliance and training.
- Auto dialer and automated outbound campaigns: These built-in features make reaching out to customers faster and easier.
- Analytics: These provide tracking, reporting, real-time summaries, and actionable insights.
- Native workforce optimization capabilities: These capabilities include multi-skill and multichannel staffing forecasts, quality monitoring, and coaching tools.
- CRM integrations: Multiple integrations with popular solutions such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoho.
- Mobile app: This helps users work from anywhere.
Nextiva is renowned for its robust call management and call flow customization, as well as its integrations with CRM, help desk, and productivity apps and solutions. Additionally, its 24/7 customer support is widely regarded as best-in-class and is available at no extra cost.
Why Nextiva is a great CXone alternative: It offers a wide range of communication tools and channels, AI-powered features, and top-class customer support. The platform’s array of features, ease of deployment, competitive pricing, and customer support make it stand out from the competition.
2. CloudTalk
CloudTalk is a VoIP business calling solution used by customer service and sales teams. Its call center software is stable and reliable, with a user-friendly interface. It offers several features designed to make contact centers more efficient:
- Smart dialer and power dialer: These streamline calling processes by eliminating the need for manual dialing.
- AI-powered conversational intelligence: Enhances customer interactions by providing real-time insights and recommendations to agents.
- Click to call: This allows agents to call numbers directly from their devices.
- CRM integrations: These integrations include apps such as Pipedrive, Zendesk, and Salesforce.
CloudTalk includes comprehensive analytics to provide organizations with insights into their calls, customers, and agent performance. Additionally, it provides responsive customer support.
Why CloudTalk is a good CXone alternative: It offers stable, reliable communications, extensive, seamless integration capabilities, and excellent customer support.
3. Five9
Five9 is a CCaaS provider frequently recognized as a leader in the field. Its solution uses advanced AI capabilities to provide the following:
- Interaction analytics: These transform customer data from all channels into structured, actionable information.
- Sentiment analysis: This provides insights into how customers are feeling on each call.
- Journey mapping: This shows agents a customer’s entire history and journey across all channels.
- IVA and Agent Assist: These chatbot solutions provide agents with real-time support, boosting efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Other Five9 features of note include omnichannel routing, real-time reporting, social media integration, predictive dialing, workforce engagement management, and CRM integrations.
Why Five9 is a good CXone alternative: It offers sophisticated IVR with speech recognition and a predictive dialer powered by machine learning to improve contact center efficiency. Additionally, its detailed real-time reporting and analytics are useful for contact center supervisors, helping them to ensure compliance and training are up to date across their teams.
Related: The 7 Best Five9 Alternatives That Are Easy to Use
4. JustCall
JustCall is an AI-driven communications company with a focus on phone and SMS/MMS communications. JustCall’s products include inbound and outbound contact center solutions offering AI-powered features to enhance customer interactions.
JustCall is known for its powerful messaging tools and suite of productivity tools:
- Call transcripts: JustCall converts calls and voice recordings into transcripts (available as part of the JustCall IQ suite).
- Agent management tools: These are useful for managing team organization, performance, and scheduling
- Performance analytics: These include call scoring to provide insights into how well contact center agents handle calls.
- Sentiment analysis: This provides insights into how customers feel during each call.
- Live call monitoring: This helps supervisors monitor their contact centers, allowing them to step in on a call if needed.
- CRM integrations: These include Pipedrive, ActiveCampaign, and HubSpot.
Why JustCall is a good CXone alternative: Its AI capabilities help improve customer interactions while saving agents’ and callers’ time. It includes calling and SMS/MMS credits in all its plans, providing multiple channels for customers.
5. Genesys
Genesys is a stalwart in the contact center space. Its omnichannel contact center solution offers a wide range of contact center features:
- Omnichannel routing: This ensures customers reach the right agent no matter which communications channel they prefer.
- Interaction analytics: These gather new data and insights from customer interactions.
- Real-time reporting: This keeps contact center supervisors up to date on ongoing calls.
- AI-powered features: These include speech and text analytics, Agent Assist, chatbots, and predictive engagement.
- CRM and unified communication and collaboration (UCC) integrations: These include Zendesk, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.
Genesys has several strengths, including its advanced AI capabilities, personalization, workforce engagement management, and mobile customer support. These have made it a popular choice among enterprises, although its pricing may make it unaffordable for smaller businesses.
Why Genesys is a good CXone alternative: It uses advanced AI and nuanced sentiment analysis to predict customer needs, provide deep insights through interaction analytics, and gain a better understanding of customers.
Related: 7 Genesys Alternatives to Make Scaling Your Contact Center Easier
6. Aircall
Aircall is a cloud-based phone system that’s known for its user-friendly interface, ease of setup, and ability to seamlessly integrate with other tools. It offers an array of cloud communication features:
- Call center analytics: It includes live and historical dashboards to optimize performance, staffing, and planning.
- Call recording: This is an important feature for training, performance monitoring, gathering feedback, and creating playbooks.
- Click to dial: This saves time on dialing.
- CRM integrations: These include Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, and HubSpot.
Aircall’s robust analytics display important metrics and KPIs, providing actionable insights to contact center supervisors. It also offers a virtual call center feature, allowing organizations to manage and maintain a single contact center even with a remotely distributed workforce.
Why Aircall is a good CXone alternative: Aircall’s simplicity and ease of use make it a great solution for teams that need a straightforward and efficient contact center system. Its strong integration capabilities allow organizations to use it alongside the apps, tools, and CRM platforms they regularly use.
The Verdict: Nextiva Wins
Looking at the options, it’s clear that one choice stands out from the rest.
Nextiva’s user-friendly interface, excellent customer support, competitive pricing, and robust yet easy-to-understand feature set make it a top alternative to NICE CXone. It’s not just a good option — it’s nicer than NICE.
Nextiva may not be as well-known as some other alternatives, but that’s actually a point in its favor and has contributed to its top-class customer service. Nextiva’s account managers maintain a personal relationship with their customers to provide personalized help based on each user’s needs.
While NICE CXone offers an extensive range of advanced features and AI capabilities, its complexity, occasional service issues, restrictive licensing, and lack of customer support can be detrimental. On the other hand, Nextiva is simple, reliable, and affordable, making it an attractive option.
While there are many great alternatives to NICE on the market, businesses seeking an effective and easy-to-use communications platform with great customer support need look no further than Nextiva.
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