vs Dialpad - progressive dialing, top Sell tier

VICIfast vs Dialpad: which should you pick?

Pick Dialpad if you want a phone system and contact centre from one vendor, prices published in the open, and progressive dialing is enough for your floor. Pick managed VICIdial on VICIfast if you need predictive pacing on every plan rather than a $150-a-seat Sell Premium licence plus per-minute charges and prepaid dialing credits.

Dialpad describes itself as an AI-native communications platform and sells four things that matter here: Connect (the business phone system), Support (contact centre), Sell (sales outreach), and a separately metered AI Agent product priced by conversation credits. The narrow question this page answers is what you are actually buying if you need an outbound dialer.

Quick summary

Prices and inclusions checked September 2026 from Dialpad's own pricing page, rates page and help centre. Vendors change pricing - verify before you buy.

Where Dialpad wins

• Cheap phones, one console. Connect Standard at $15 per user per month on annual billing is an inexpensive business phone system, and running Support or Sell alongside it keeps everything in one admin console with one invoice.
• They publish their prices, in several currencies. In a category where "contact sales" is the norm, being able to budget before you speak to anyone is worth something, and Dialpad's tier list is complete apart from Connect Enterprise.
• The dialer is more than single-line. Dialpad calls it progressive, but their own docs list "N:1 lines per agent" and a campaign control to "use Lines per agent limit to control campaign pacing for available agents". That is not predictive pacing, and no Dialpad document claims it is - but it is not one-call-per-agent either, and it is fair to say so.
• A real self-serve trial. 14 days, from the website, without a sales call.
• The AI features are first-party. Transcription, recaps, scorecards and coaching are Dialpad's own product rather than an integration you assemble. If you want those without a project, that is a real reason to pick them.

Where VICIfast wins

• Predictive pacing, on every plan. Dialpad's help documentation opens with "Dialer is a progressive outbound dialer built into Dialpad." Progressive places roughly one call per available agent; predictive places more, anticipating when agents free up. On a floor where idle time is the cost you are trying to kill, that difference is the product.
• The dialer is not the top tier. On VICIdial, predictive is the base product. On Dialpad, "to use the Dialpad Dialer, you must be on a Dialpad Sell Premium plan" - $150 per user per month annual, $170 monthly.
• Cost stops tracking headcount. Going from 20 agents to 45 on the same VICIfast box costs nothing extra.
• Your carrier, your rate. Bring Telnyx, Bandwidth, Skyetel or whoever you negotiated with, and we add nothing to those minutes. Or use VICIfast Voice, our own US termination, from $0.0085/min.
• Per-trunk TCPA scrubbing. Bring your own Blacklist Alliance key and set the litigator-scrub mode per outbound carrier. See /features/tcpa-compliance.
• Root on your own box. Custom AGI, your own cron jobs, direct MariaDB access, and every SSH session recorded as a replayable asciinema cast.

How much does Dialpad cost?

Per user per month, checked September 2026. Note that the pricing page renders its numbers in the browser rather than putting them in the page, so read them there yourself rather than trusting any comparison article, this one included.

Connect Enterprise is not published, and the AI Agent product is credit-based with no public rate. Connect publishes seat minimums of 1, 3 and 100 for Standard, Pro and Enterprise; no seat minimum is published for Support or Sell.

Three costs sit on top of the seat price, and all three are Dialpad's own published wording:

• Minutes. "Dialpad Support and Dialpad Sell seats are charged at $0.01/min for inbound calls, $0.02/min for outbound calls, and $0.008/message for inbound & outbound SMS within the United States and Canada."
• Dialing credits. Running the Dialer requires outbound calling credits with auto-recharge. No credit rate is published, so this is a line item you will have to ask about.
• A contact centre. The Dialer also requires at least one Contact Center configured, which is a Support or Sell construct, not a Connect one.

At the Sell Premium annual rate, before minutes and credits:

Both columns carry per-minute costs. Dialpad's is $0.02 outbound at their published rate; ours is whatever you negotiated with your carrier, which at volume is usually lower. See VICIfast pricing for the full grid.

Can you bring your own carrier to Dialpad?

Not that Dialpad documents. There is no bring-your-own-carrier or SIP-trunking product on their site or in their help centre, and the pages you would expect to find one on return 404. What they do publish is number porting in, Microsoft Teams Direct Routing - which is Dialpad supplying carriage to Teams, the opposite direction - and BYOD, which is about handsets, not carriers.

We are not going to claim they prohibit it, because we cannot verify that. The accurate statement is that no BYOC path is documented, so if carrier control matters, ask them and get the answer in writing.

VICIfast supports bring-your-own-carrier in both directions on every plan, with no markup on your carrier's minutes. If you would rather not source carriage, VICIfast Voice is our own optional US termination and DIDs, from $0.0085/min.

When is Dialpad the better choice?

• You want one vendor for phones and contact centre. Connect plus Support or Sell in one console is a coherent product, and cheaper at the phone-system end than running two vendors.
• The AI features are the point. If real-time transcription, recaps and coaching are what you are buying, Dialpad ships them first-party and you would be building or integrating them anywhere else.
• Outbound is preview or progressive anyway. SDRs hand-picking 40 calls a day do not need predictive pacing, and paying for it would be waste.
• You have no technical staff. Nobody has to own a server, patch Asterisk, or answer a pager. That is a real cost we are asking you to take on, and for some teams it is not worth it.
• You want to buy without talking to anyone. Published prices plus a 14-day self-serve trial means you can evaluate on your own schedule.

How do you move from Dialpad to VICIdial?

Port your DIDs to your new SIP carrier first, and do not cancel Dialpad until porting completes - that is usually the long pole at two to seven days. Contacts come from your CRM rather than from Dialpad. Dispositions map by hand, queues become VICIdial in-groups, and recordings need a bulk export before the account closes.

Budget an hour or two of agent training. VICIdial's agent screen is denser than Dialpad's and less polished, with far more of the controls on screen at once - that is a genuine downgrade in feel and an upgrade in what an agent can do without leaving the page. Most migrations run one to two weeks end to end, paced by porting. Background is at migrate Dialpad to VICIdial. Contact us to scope it -. Scoping it costs nothing; a done-for-you migration is a paid add-on, included on the top dedicated plans.

Next steps

• VICIfast pricing - the published plan grid, billed per server rather than per seat.
• Managed VICIdial hosting - what runs on the box and who keeps it patched.
• All migration guides - the runbooks for moving off other platforms.

Start a 7-day trial → - card validated, no charge until day 7.