vs Aircall - power dialer, not predictive

VICIfast vs Aircall: which should you pick?

Aircall is a cloud phone system at $30 and $50 per licence per month billed annually; its Professional tier ships a Power Dialer, not a predictive one. Pick Aircall for polished inbound and low-volume outbound with Salesforce CTI. Pick VICIfast when agents dial 100+ times a day and pacing has to be predictive.

Aircall and managed VICIdial show up in the same evaluation but solve different problems. Aircall is a cloud business phone system - IVR, call recording, routing, integrations, and a Power Dialer on the higher tier. VICIdial is an outbound predictive dialer. The useful test is call volume: if agents make more than roughly 100 calls a day, you are shopping for a predictive dialer. If not, you probably want a phone system.

Quick summary

How much does Aircall cost?

Aircall's pricing page publishes two plans plus a Custom tier:

• Essentials - $30 per licence/month, billed annually, 3-licence minimum. Their description: "100+ integrations and API access, IVR, call recording, click-to-dial, SMS and MMS, softphone for desktop and mobile, and unlimited simultaneous outbound calls."
• Professional - $50 per licence/month, billed annually, 3-licence minimum. "All Essentials features plus all AI Assist features, Salesforce CTI, mandatory call tagging, advanced analytics, smart routing, queue callback, Power Dialer, and Voicemail Drop."
• Custom - "Talk to Sales", 25-licence minimum, with an SLA.

Those are the annual-commit prices. The detailed comparison table on the same page shows the month-to-month rates as $40/user for Essentials and $70/user for Professional.

Add-ons are priced too, and they add up: an AI add-on at $9 per licence/month and a fuller one at $49, advanced analytics at $15, WhatsApp at $10, a Salesforce Omni-Channel widget at $30 per licence, and AI Voice Agent minute packs at $175 for 500 minutes or $725 for 2,500 (metered at $0.49/min up to 2,500, $0.39 above). Every plan includes "50 free AI Voice Agent minutes per account, per month, with 100 additional minutes at sign-up".

VICIfast bills per server, not per licence: $99/month for Scale in the US on a box sized for 10 agents, $219 for Growth at 25, $399 for Pro at 50. Annual billing is ten months' price for twelve. See VICIfast pricing.

Is Aircall's dialer predictive?

No - and the distinction matters more than the name suggests. Aircall's own plan description lists a Power Dialer on the Professional tier, alongside Voicemail Drop and outbound call campaigns. A power dialer walks a list one number at a time per agent. A predictive dialer over-dials against a statistical model of agent availability, which is what produces the connect rates that outbound floors are built around - and what requires drop-rate governance to stay compliant.

If your agents hand-pick who they call, a power dialer is the right tool and the predictive machinery is overhead you do not want. If your agents are working a list at volume, the difference is most of the working day.

On VICIfast, predictive, progressive, preview and manual modes are VICIdial core behaviour, configured per campaign with dial level and drop-SLA controls, on every plan.

Where Aircall wins

• Inbound-first support. A customer-success team taking 30 calls a day is exactly the workflow Aircall's product is designed around. VICIdial's agent screen is not.
• CRM integration out of the box. 100+ integrations and API access on Essentials, Salesforce CTI on Professional. On VICIdial you wire that yourself with webhooks, polling or AGI.
• Nobody has to be technical. Aircall runs the platform and the numbers. VICIfast hands you root, which is only an advantage if someone on your team wants it.
• Genuinely low entry price and no seat floor to speak of. Three licences at $30 is $90 a month. For a small team that does not need predictive dialing, that is hard to beat and we will not pretend otherwise.
• AI features are packaged and priced openly - summaries, transcription, coaching and voice agents, all with published per-licence rates rather than a quote.
• You can sign up yourself. Their call to action is "Get free access", not a demo request.

Where VICIfast wins

• Outbound at real volume. 100+ calls per agent per day. Aircall's published plans list a Power Dialer, not predictive pacing.
• Predictive dial control. Drop SLA, recycle rates and dial level per campaign - the controls you need to run outbound at scale within FCC drop-rate limits.
• Bring your own SIP carrier. Keep Telnyx, Bandwidth or Skyetel direct, and we add nothing to those minutes. Aircall's pricing page does not address bring-your-own-carrier SIP trunking; ask them if it matters to you.
• Per-trunk TCPA scrubbing. Pre-dial litigator lookup with your own Blacklist Alliance key, set per outbound carrier. See /features/tcpa-compliance. This is not the layer Aircall operates at.
• Pricing decoupled from headcount. Per server, not per licence - the same box runs 20 agents or 45.
• Root and your own data. Leads, dispositions and recordings in a standard MariaDB schema you can dump any time, and SSH sessions recorded as replayable asciinema casts.

The pricing math

For a 20-agent outbound team, using Aircall's Professional tier because that is where the Power Dialer sits:

Aircall scales with headcount; VICIfast scales with hardware. Carrier minutes are a separate invoice from your carrier on VICIfast. And the comparison is not like-for-like on features - Aircall's price includes the integrations and the AI add-ons you buy on top, and buys you a product that does inbound support well.

Aircall prices checked on their own pricing page in September 2026. Vendors change pricing and packaging frequently - re-check aircall.io/pricing before you budget against these numbers.

When to pick Aircall

• Agents make under roughly 100 calls a day, and each one is chosen rather than dialed off a list.
• Inbound support is most of the volume, and the agent experience matters more than pacing.
• You want native Salesforce or HubSpot screen-pop without building it.
• Your team is three to twenty people and nobody wants to own a server.
• You want AI call summaries and coaching at a published per-licence price.

When to pick VICIfast

• Outbound volume is the job: lists, pacing, drop-rate caps, dispositions.
• Per-licence pricing has stopped making sense as the floor grows.
• You want your own SIP carrier and the ability to switch when rates change.
• Compliance scrubbing has to happen pre-dial, per trunk.
• You want root, your own schema, and no export gate if you leave.

Both tools, different teams

This is not an either/or in every shop. We see teams run both:

• Aircall for the customer support queue - inbound, low volume, CRM-tight.
• VICIdial on VICIfast for the outbound sales, collections or lead-gen floor - predictive, high volume, compliance-heavy.

If your operation has both shapes, run both tools. A dialer is the wrong place to do inbound customer support, and a phone system is the wrong place to do predictive outbound.

Migration from Aircall

If you are moving outbound off Aircall onto VICIfast:

• Export your outbound contact list from your CRM, not from Aircall - Aircall does not store your leads, your CRM does
• Load it into VICIdial as a campaign list
• Point your existing SIP carrier at the new VICIfast box, or port numbers you bought through Aircall
• Set up dispositions and closer groups to match your existing workflow

These moves are usually one to two days. The hard part is not the tooling - it is deciding your disposition and closer-group structure. The Aircall to VICIdial migration guide walks the DID porting timeline and the agent-training step in detail.

Next steps

• Migrating from Aircall to managed VICIdial - DID porting, the parallel week, and the predictive-dial pilot.
• VICIfast pricing - the published plan grid, billed per server rather than per user.
• Managed VICIdial hosting - what runs on the box and who keeps it running.

Start a 7-day trial → - card validated, no charge until day 7. You will know in the first hour whether predictive dialing is what your team needed.