Moving from Aircall to managed VICIdial

Aircall is a cloud phone system. VICIdial is an outbound dialer. Teams move when outbound volume becomes the job rather than a side of it - Aircall's own dialer walks a list one call per agent at a time, and past roughly 100 calls per agent per day that pacing is most of the working day.

Not sure the move is right yet? The VICIfast vs Aircall comparison covers the category difference and makes the case for keeping Aircall on inbound rather than replacing it.

Two things that will cost you if you get them wrong

Port your numbers before you cancel. Aircall documents that porting out "does not automatically cancel your Aircall subscription," and lists "port any numbers you want to keep" as the first essential action before cancelling - adding that you should "begin early, as number porting can take several weeks." Aircall separately states the general rule that numbers "must remain active with your current carrier until the porting is complete" and that "cancelling early may result in losing the numbers permanently." Sequence the move accordingly: port first, verify, then cancel.

Your data has a 30-day fuse after termination. Aircall's data-protection addendum gives you thirty days after the agreement ends to export your data, "at its expense, in accordance with the capabilities of the Service," after which it is deleted. Their support documentation says the same in two other places. Read that middle clause carefully - your export right is bounded by whatever export the product actually offers, and for recordings that is one file at a time.

What actually comes with you

Your numbers. Porting out is a documented, customer-initiated process, and Aircall states it charges no fee for it (your new carrier might). You start it with the gaining carrier, who handles the request. Aircall does not issue letters of authorization on the way out and does not use account numbers; if the new provider needs proof, Aircall support can supply proof of ownership. Once the port completes, delete the numbers in the Aircall dashboard so you stop being billed for them.

Two documented limits: whole ranges must move together - "it is not possible to port only a single number from a range" - and Aircall notes some numbers may be restricted by operator agreements, number range, or service type. Timeframes beyond "several weeks" are not published, so treat porting as the critical path and start it first.

Your call history, in bounded slices. Call History exports to CSV and is available to admins and supervisors. The table itself shows the past six months on every plan. Export range depends on plan: six months on Essentials, twelve on Professional and Custom - but the date picker caps each selection at six months, so a full year means two consecutive exports. Recording URLs are not among the exported fields.

Your contacts - but only by asking. This one surprises people. Aircall states plainly that "bulk contact deletion and export are not available as self-serve actions," and that to get a full export you must contact support, who "will provide you with a CSV file containing all your contacts." Raise that ticket early; it is not something you can do at 11pm the night before cutover.

What is genuinely hard to get out

Call recordings. There is no bulk download. Aircall documents downloading an MP3 from the Conversation Center one conversation at a time, and no bulk or multi-select path appears anywhere in their documentation.

Retention depends on plan and on how you ask. Aircall's pricing page lists recording access as "up to 1 year (by request, 6 months available in Dashboard)" on Essentials, and unlimited on the same terms for Professional and Custom. Their support documentation is more concrete: the last six months are available in the dashboard or via a data export, and for anything older you contact support, who "can provide links when available but cannot download recordings for you." Deleted recordings are not recoverable.

The API does not rescue you at scale. Aircall caps the public API at 120 requests per minute per company, pages at a maximum of 50 records, and - the real constraint - will not return more than 10,000 records per query even with pagination, so you chunk by date range. Recording links returned by the API expire in one hour (three for the short-URL variant), which means you cannot enumerate first and fetch later.

If recordings matter to you for compliance or QA, decide early how many you genuinely need. Pulling years of audio one file at a time is a project, and the thirty-day post-termination window is not enough time to discover that.

Everything you configured. IVR, routing rules, tags, integrations and analytics setup do not export into anything another platform reads. Aircall's analytics export is Professional-only and truncates at 1,000 rows unless you explicitly choose all results.

What you rebuild on VICIdial

Effectively the whole dialing side, and it is a different product rather than a port of the old one:

• Campaigns, dial method and pacing, retry and recycle rules
• Lists and custom lead fields
• Dispositions, replacing Aircall's tags
• In-groups and call menus, if you are taking inbound too
• DIDs and inbound routing for the numbers you ported
• Trunks, pointed at your own carrier
• Agents, user groups, calling windows and holidays

These are dashboard screens on our side rather than config files, which shortens the work but does not remove the decisions. Leads load through a CSV importer that maps your columns onto VICIdial's lead fields, needs at minimum a phone number and a last name, and offers dedupe scoping, DNC skip-or-flag, timezone assignment from area code or postal code, an error report and a ten-minute undo.

Worth setting expectations with your team: VICIdial's agent screen is denser and less polished than Aircall's. That is a genuine downgrade in feel and an upgrade in what an agent can do without leaving the page. Budget an hour or two of training.

Our automated migration reads a standard VICIdial database over SSH - it cannot read an Aircall account, and nothing automates that direction.

The order to do it in

1. Raise the contacts export ticket with Aircall support. It is the longest-lead self-serve-blocked item.
2. Start the port with your new carrier. Several weeks, not days. Do not cancel anything yet.
3. Export call history in six-month slices, and pull whatever recordings you actually need.
4. Provision the VICIfast server and connect your carrier.
5. Rebuild campaigns, dispositions, in-groups and users; import a pilot list.
6. Run both in parallel. Aircall keeps carrying live traffic while you tune pacing on non-critical leads.
7. Complete the port, confirm calls land on the new box, then delete the ported numbers in Aircall.
8. Cancel - minding the notice terms below.

Before you cancel, check your notice terms

Aircall's terms auto-renew for another term of the same length unless either party gives written notice of non-renewal at least thirty days before the end of the current term. Their support documentation adds an important carve-out: that thirty-day requirement "no longer applies to accounts with between 1 and 10 seats," which can self-cancel from the dashboard. Larger accounts must email their customer success contact, and Aircall states that a late cancellation on those accounts means the contract "will automatically renew and generate a new invoice." Aircall's published position on refunds is that there are none.

Check which side of that line you are on before you plan the cutover date.

What to test before cutover

• Outbound on each trunk, inbound on each ported DID
• Dispositions writing back, including the ones your reporting relies on
• Calling windows and per-state rules, with timezone assignment spot-checked
• DNC scrubbing against a deliberately seeded suppressed number
• Recording capture and playback on the new box
• Agent login, transfer and closer paths
• Pacing on a pilot campaign before you point it at good leads

Cost

Aircall publishes $30 per licence per month for Essentials and $50 for Professional, both billed annually with a three-licence minimum; Custom is quote-only at 25 licences. The Power Dialer sits on Professional.

A 20-seat floor on Professional at list is about $1,000 a month. VICIfast's Growth plan is $219 a month for a box sized at 25 agents, billed per server rather than per seat - roughly $10,000 a year of difference, before your carrier's invoice, which you now pay directly. The comparison is not like-for-like: Aircall's price includes integrations and a polished inbound experience you are giving up. See pricing and the full comparison.

Next steps

• VICIfast vs Aircall - which category you actually need, and when to keep Aircall for inbound.
• VICIfast pricing - the plan grid this migration lands on, billed per server.
• Start a 7-day trial - card validated, nothing charged until day 7. Stand a box up while the port runs.

Want help scoping it? Talk to us - scoping costs nothing. A done-for-you migration is a paid onboarding add-on, included free on the top plans.