vs Issabel - a PBX with no predictive dialer

VICIfast vs Issabel: which should you pick?

Pick Issabel if you need a free, self-hosted unified-communications platform - PBX, IVR, fax, video - and you have someone to run it. Pick managed VICIdial on VICIfast if the job is outbound: Issabel's own Contact Center documentation lists manual, preview and progressive dialing, and no predictive mode.

Issabel and VICIdial both come out of the Asterisk world and both are free to download, so they land in the same searches. They are not the same kind of software. Issabel describes itself as "a free and open source software that allows you to build communication tools for businesses" and says it "functions as an IP PBX". VICIdial is an outbound dialer. The other thing worth knowing early: the PBX is free, and the contact centre is not.

Quick summary

Checked September 2026 against Issabel's own sites, store, documentation and GitHub repositories. Prices and packaging change - verify with them before you buy.

Where Issabel wins

• The PBX is free, and it is a full phone system. Extensions, voicemail, IVR, conference rooms, fax, internal calling, email and video in one ISO, under GPL, with no licence to buy. If you need a phone system rather than a dialer, that is a serious offer and VICIdial is not competing with it.
• They publish contact-centre prices. Voice Agent licences at $29 and Omnichannel Agent licences at $39, on a recurring monthly model based on active agents. In a category full of quote forms, having a number on the page counts.
• You can run it yourself. The ISO is downloadable and self-hostable, and the store still sells on-premise agent licences for teams running Issabel 5 on their own infrastructure.
• Elastix heritage. Issabel was created in 2017 as the continuation of Elastix after that project's open-source line was discontinued. If your team knows the Elastix interface, they know this one.
• The project is still being worked on. The main repositories carried commits through August 2026, including security fixes, and the community forum was active in September 2026.

Where VICIfast wins

• Predictive pacing. This is the one that decides most evaluations, and the source is Issabel's own Contact Center documentation: "It includes manual, preview, and progressive dialing. Automated calling campaigns can be created using progressive dialing and predefined contact lists." Their own feature comparison table lists progressive and preview dialing and has no predictive row at all.
• The dialer is not a separate purchase. Issabel's Contact Center is a commercial module priced per agent; on VICIfast every dialing mode is in the base product on every plan.
• You are not the sysadmin. Patching, backups, firewall, TLS certificates and monitoring are ours. The server is provisioned in about 40 seconds and stays maintained. You keep root anyway.
• Compliance tooling. Per-trunk litigator scrubbing with your own Blacklist Alliance key, set per outbound carrier, plus drop-rate enforcement. See /features/tcpa-compliance.
• Current builds. Your box is provisioned from maintained images rather than an ISO cut in 2024.

Does Issabel have a predictive dialer?

Not in the product they sell today. The clearest statement is theirs: the Contact Center "includes manual, preview, and progressive dialing", and their own article on dialing methods says "Issabel's new Contact Center offers various dialing options, including manual, preview, and progressive dialing" - while defining predictive at length as the most advanced of the three and then arguing progressive is the more suitable choice.

There is a nuance worth getting right, because the internet gets it wrong in both directions. The legacy community Call Center module, inherited from the Elastix line, does contain a predictive option - there is an "Enable predictive dialer behavior" setting and a predictive dialer class in that repository. That repository's last commit was in January 2023. So if someone tells you Issabel can do predictive, they are probably thinking of a module that has not been touched in over three years, not of the commercial Contact Center that Issabel currently sells and supports.

Why it matters: progressive dialing places roughly one call per available agent. Predictive places more, pacing against a forecast of when agents free up, which is where the extra talk time per agent hour comes from. If your economics depend on agent utilisation, that gap is the whole business case. VICIdial's dial level, drop-SLA enforcement, recycle rules and answering-machine detection are per-campaign settings on every plan.

What does Issabel cost?

The PBX costs nothing. The contact centre does, and the details are worth reading before you plan a floor around it:

• Voice Agent licence $29 per agent, Omnichannel Agent licence $39 per agent, on a recurring monthly model based on active agents.
• Minimums differ by where it runs. On Issabel's cloud, a minimum of 5 agents in increments of one. On your own cloud or on-premise, a minimum of 10 agents in increments of 10 - so an eleventh agent buys you ten.
• Extra PBX users are $5 per user per month on top.
• Issabel is explicit that the Contact Center is not open source: "It is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform based on a monthly subscription model", and "it is a module that runs on Issabel PBX and cannot be installed separately."

VICIfast publishes the whole grid, and what you pay for is the managed server rather than the software: $49/month for Launch at a suggested 5 agents, $219/month for Growth at 25, $399/month for Pro at 50, in the US region. See VICIfast pricing.

What is the real cost of self-hosting either one?

If you are comparing "free Issabel" against "paid VICIfast", compare the whole cost. Choosing free software does not remove the server or the person. A self-hosted box means you own the OS patching, the Asterisk upgrades, the CVE response, the firewall, the TLS certificates, the daily backups and the pager when dialing stops. That is a part-time sysadmin role and it is the single most underestimated line in a self-hosting budget - we wrote it up in the hidden cost of self-hosted VICIdial.

Two practical notes from checking Issabel's own material in September 2026. The newest ISO is issabel5-USB-DVD-x86_64-20240430.iso, dated April 2024 and built on Rocky Linux 8. And both of the "download" links on their own sites returned 404 when we tried them - the files are on the project's SourceForge page instead, so budget a little time to find the right build.

None of that is an argument against self-hosting. It is an argument for pricing it honestly. If you have a sysadmin who already runs Asterisk boxes and enjoys it, self-hosting is a perfectly rational choice.

Where is the project heading?

Worth knowing because it affects on-premise plans. In an announcement dated 29 October 2025, Issabel's CEO wrote that "Issabel adopts a 100% cloud-focused model" and that "starting October 28, 2025, Issabel will discontinue offering on-premise servers and hardware, focusing entirely on developing and expanding cloud-based solutions and services", with existing agreements and maintenance contracts honoured.

Read that precisely: it discontinues hardware and appliances, not on-premise software. The free ISO is still self-hostable and the store still sells on-premise agent licences. But if your plan involved buying an appliance from them, that door is closed, and it tells you where the commercial attention is going.

When is Issabel the better choice?

• You need a PBX, not a dialer. Extensions, voicemail, IVR, conferences, fax, internal calling. That is what Issabel is for, and it is free.
• Outbound is manual, preview or progressive. If agents hand-pick calls or you are comfortable with one call per available agent, you do not need predictive pacing and the free platform is enough.
• Budget is zero and you have the skills. A GPL stack you install yourself, with no vendor and no invoice, is a real option that managed hosting cannot beat on price.
• You are already in the Elastix world and your team knows the interface.
• You want one box for everything. Telephony, fax, video and PBX in a single install is a coherent answer for a small business.

How do you move from Issabel to VICIdial?

Both run Asterisk, so trunk configuration and dial-plan logic translate with rewriting rather than starting over. If you were running VICIdial on top of Issabel, the schemas overlap directly and a dump restores cleanly. If you were running pure Issabel, your lead data most likely lives in a CRM rather than in the PBX, and it loads into vicidial_list as CSV.

Decide full replacement versus hybrid first: keeping Issabel for PBX duties and running VICIdial for outbound only, with different DIDs routing to each, is a common and sensible end state.

Full detail is in migrating from Elastix or Issabel to managed VICIdial, with background at VICIdial vs Issabel. 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

• Migrating from Elastix or Issabel - the runbook: inventory, full replace versus hybrid, export and cutover.
• VICIfast pricing - the published plan grid, billed per server.
• Managed VICIdial hosting - what runs on the box and who keeps it patched.

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