RingCentral vs Dialpad (2026): breadth versus built-in AI

Shortlists that include RingCentral usually include Dialpad too, and it is easy to see why: both drop your desk phones, hand every employee a softphone on their laptop and mobile, and promise to transcribe and summarize the calls afterward. Look closer, though, and these two are chasing different buyers. RingCentral is the sprawling, integration-heavy platform built for organizations that want every feature under one roof and do not blink at add-on line items. Dialpad is the AI-first challenger that treats live transcription and automatic call notes as table stakes, not a premium tier, and keeps its plan sheet short on purpose.

Everything below is drawn from published per-tier pricing as of mid-2026. We flag where a number is an annual-commitment rate versus month-to-month, because the gap between the two is one of the biggest decision points on this page. Pricing moves around, so treat each dollar figure as a starting point and confirm the live rate on each provider's own site before you sign anything.

Here is the honest frame before we dig in. These two products are not really trying to win the same argument. RingCentral's pitch is comprehensiveness: one platform that does calling, messaging, high-capacity video, deep analytics, and a huge library of integrations, so a growing organization never has to leave. Dialpad's pitch is intelligence: put usable AI in front of every rep on day one and keep the rest of the product lean enough that a small team can run it without a specialist. Neither is wrong, and the trap is comparing them purely on price, since a $15 seat and a $20 seat are close enough that the real decision hangs on which philosophy fits how your team works. The sections below are organized so you can find your own tie-breaker fast, whether that is AI, integrations, video, support, or the shape of the contract.

How we compared

We priced every published plan tier for both products at the annual and the month-to-month rate, signed into the apps to walk the setup and daily-driver experience, placed and transcribed test calls to judge the AI, and read each provider's add-on and fee list so the sticker price and the real price could be told apart. Where a provider hides pricing behind a sales call, we say so rather than guess. We also cross-checked ratings against G2 and Trustpilot rather than repeating a vendor's own claim about itself, and we treat the entry-tier price as the beginning of a cost conversation, not the end of one, because in this category the seat you actually buy is rarely the seat on the billboard. Our full scoring approach lives on how we test.

At a glance

The fast version, on the dozen points that swing most purchases. Prices are the per-user, per-month annual-commitment rate as of mid-2026.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Both run three tiers and both headline the annual rate, but the shape of the two ladders is different. RingCentral's RingEX ladder is Core at $20, Advanced at $25, and Ultra at $35 per user per month. Dialpad Connect runs Standard at $15, Pro at $25, and an Enterprise tier that is quote-only and commonly carries a minimum of around 100 seats. So at the door Dialpad undercuts RingCentral by $5 a seat, the two meet in the middle at $25, and RingCentral publishes a real top price ($35) while Dialpad makes you call sales for its ceiling.

The number that actually stings on Dialpad is the monthly one. Its annual Standard rate is $15, but pay month to month and that seat jumps to $27, an 80 percent premium for the flexibility, and Pro climbs from $25 to $35 the same way. RingCentral's month-to-month penalty is gentler at roughly a third above the annual rate. If you are the kind of buyer who wants to avoid a 12-month lock while you trial a system on live seats, Dialpad punishes that far harder than RingCentral does. Commit annually and the story flips: Dialpad Standard at $15 is the cheapest genuine entry point of the two.

Then there are the extras, and this is where a clean sticker price can quietly inflate. RingCentral leans on paid boosters, an AI Receptionist starting around $39, a Business SMS Booster at $25, a Call Queues Booster at $35, and pricier AI conversation add-ons, so a Core seat that looked like $20 can drift well north once you switch on the things you actually wanted. Dialpad's add-ons are smaller-ticket but they add up too: extra local numbers run about $5 each per month, international or toll-free numbers about $15, a conference-room line about $15, and large-meeting capacity around $15 per user. On top of everything, both providers pass through taxes and regulatory fees that typically add 15 to 25 percent, and neither confirms a specific number-porting fee on its public pricing page, so budget for one and ask.

It helps to run a real example rather than stare at the ladder. Take a 25-seat sales team that wants CRM logging and automatic AI call summaries, which is a common ask. On Dialpad, that means Pro at $25 a seat annually, because Pro is where the Salesforce and HubSpot connectors live, so you land at roughly $625 a month before taxes, with the AI already included at no extra charge. On RingCentral, CRM also lives at the Advanced tier ($25), so the base is the same $625, but the moment you want generative AI drafting or a serious conversation-intelligence layer you start adding boosters, and a single AI conversation add-on at $60 a seat, even applied to only your ten busiest reps, adds $600 a month on its own. That is the pattern to watch: the two platforms tie on the tier that unlocks CRM, then RingCentral's real cost fans out with every AI or queue booster you enable, while Dialpad's AI is already sunk into the seat price.

The flip side of that example is the team that does not need AI at all and just wants dependable calling, an auto-attendant, and a mobile app for a handful of people. That buyer is arguably overpaying on Dialpad, whose whole value proposition is the AI they are ignoring, and might do just as well on RingCentral Core, or on a cheaper rival entirely. Match the platform to the workflow, not to the headline. And whichever way you lean, price the specific tier that unlocks your one non-negotiable feature, not the entry tier, because the entry price is rarely the price you actually pay.

One more budgeting note that trips buyers up: Dialpad's Enterprise tier is not just "Pro with extras," it is a different purchasing motion. The roughly 100-seat minimum commonly attached to it means a 60-person company that wants Enterprise-only features like SSO is stuck negotiating up to a floor it has not reached, or living without them. RingCentral does not impose that kind of seat floor to reach its equivalent capabilities, which can make it the more natural fit for a mid-sized company that wants enterprise controls before it has enterprise headcount.

Setup and onboarding

Getting to a working phone system is where Dialpad's short plan sheet pays off. Because AI, calling, messaging, and meetings all live in one Standard plan with almost nothing gated, there are fewer decisions to make on day one: you claim numbers, invite users, set a couple of ring groups, and the transcription is already running on your first call. Teams we have set up were placing intelligent, auto-summarized calls the same afternoon, and the admin console is modern enough that a non-technical office manager can run it without a partner.

RingCentral is more of a project, in proportion to how much it can do. The initial configuration surfaces more choices, more feature toggles, more places to route and record and analyze, and the payoff is a system that bends to complex call flows and multi-site structures once it is dialed in. Larger organizations often see that as a feature, not a chore, and RingCentral's implementation help and partner network exist precisely to shepherd bigger rollouts. But a five-person shop that just wants dial tone and call notes will feel the difference in time-to-value. One important asymmetry worth naming: Dialpad locks single sign-on to its Enterprise tier, so if your IT team requires SSO from the start, that is a jump to a quote-only plan.

Number porting shapes the real timeline more than either provider's marketing admits. Both support bringing your existing numbers across, but porting is governed by your losing carrier, not your new one, and it commonly takes one to a few weeks regardless of which platform you chose. The practical move on both is the same: stand up the new system on temporary numbers, get everyone trained and comfortable, then schedule the port for a low-traffic window so a hiccup does not drop live customer calls. Dialpad's leaner setup means your team is fluent sooner, which makes that parallel-run window less stressful; RingCentral's richer configuration means you will want that window anyway to test your call flows before cutover.

Location structure is another quiet setup divide. Dialpad's Standard tier supports a single office location and up to three ring groups, Pro lifts that to ten locations and 25 ring groups, and only Enterprise goes unlimited. A multi-branch business can outgrow Standard on structure alone, before it ever cares about AI or CRM, so map your sites and departments to those limits during evaluation rather than after you have migrated. RingCentral's multi-site handling is a mature strength and rarely the thing that forces a tier jump, which is part of why larger, distributed organizations gravitate to it despite the longer initial configuration.

For the smallest teams, the honest guidance is to lean on each provider's trial to do your onboarding for you. Spin up three or four real seats, port nothing yet, place a week of genuine calls, and see which console your least technical teammate can actually operate without asking for help. That single test predicts satisfaction better than any feature grid, and it costs nothing but a week.

Voice and video quality

On core call quality neither disappoints. Both run on mature carrier-grade networks, both deliver clean HD voice on a decent connection, and both give you the softphone-plus-mobile combo that lets people take the office number anywhere. Dialpad's apps are notably crisp and quick, and because its whole pitch is riding on top of the call in real time, its media handling has to be tight, in our testing it was.

Video is where RingCentral pulls ahead on raw specification. Its meetings scale to 100 participants on Core and up to 200 on Ultra, which matters if you run all-hands calls, training sessions, or large client webinars inside your phone platform instead of bolting on a separate video tool. Dialpad includes built-in meetings, but its default capacity is smaller and larger sessions push you toward a paid add-on. If video is an afterthought for your team, this is a wash; if you host big meetings, RingCentral gives you more headroom without a second vendor.

Worth separating, though, is the difference between a phone platform's built-in video and a purpose-built meetings tool. Plenty of teams already run Zoom or Microsoft Teams for scheduled video and only want their phone system for calls, texts, and voicemail. If that is you, the built-in video ceilings barely register, and Dialpad's smaller cap costs you nothing because you are meeting elsewhere. The video comparison matters most for teams that genuinely want to collapse phone and video into one bill and one app, and that is the exact scenario where RingCentral's 200-participant Ultra ceiling earns its keep and Dialpad's add-on math starts to look less appealing.

Screen sharing, chat, and file sharing round out the meeting story on both, so day-to-day internal collaboration is covered either way. The gap only opens on scale and on whether you want video and phone under one roof, so weigh it by how you meet rather than by the raw number.

On the underlying call experience, pay attention to how each platform behaves on imperfect networks, because that is where softphones live or die. Both fall back gracefully and both let a rep flip a live call from desktop to mobile mid-conversation when they need to leave the desk, which is the kind of small thing that decides whether people actually adopt the app or keep reaching for their cell. Dialpad's mobile app felt especially quick to us, and because its transcription runs continuously, the call notes follow you across that hand-off. RingCentral's apps are heavier but more configurable, mirroring the desktop-versus-project contrast that runs through this whole comparison.

One reliability nuance specific to voice: call recording. RingCentral includes on-demand recording on Core and switches on automatic, always-on recording at Advanced, which matters for compliance-driven teams that must capture every call. Confirm how each platform handles recording retention, storage limits, and export before you commit if recordings are a regulatory requirement rather than a convenience, because that detail rarely appears on a pricing page but very much appears on an auditor's checklist.

AI features

This is the section that defines the whole matchup. Dialpad built its reputation on voice AI, and it delivers it where it counts most, on the entry tier. From Standard at $15, you get real-time transcription as the call happens plus automatic AI call and voicemail summaries, so reps and managers can skim what was said instead of replaying audio. That is not an add-on and it is not a top-tier perk; it is the default experience, and it is the single most compelling reason to pick Dialpad over almost anyone.

RingCentral is not AI-shy, but it meters the good stuff. Core includes a basic AI layer, transcription, real-time notes, closed captions, while the more advanced and generative capabilities, like AI drafting for messages, unlock at Advanced ($25) and up, and its most powerful conversation-intelligence pieces arrive as separate paid add-ons that can run $60 and beyond. So you can absolutely get AI from RingCentral, you just climb tiers and buy boosters to reach parity with what Dialpad hands you at the door. For a sales or support team whose entire workflow depends on searchable call notes and instant summaries, that difference is the difference.

It is worth being precise about what "AI" actually does for a phone team, because the word gets stretched. The genuinely useful pieces are a live transcript you can read while the call happens, an automatic post-call summary with action items so nobody scribbles notes, and a searchable archive so a manager can find every call that mentioned a competitor or a refund. Dialpad delivers all three from Standard, and because the transcription runs by default, the searchable history builds itself from day one instead of starting empty the day you upgrade. That compounding value, months of searchable, summarized calls, is easy to underrate at purchase and hard to replace later.

RingCentral's answer is capable but arrives in pieces you assemble and pay for. The basic Core layer covers transcription and captions, which is real, but the drafting, coaching, and deeper conversation-intelligence features that sales leaders actually demo are up-tier and add-on. If you are comparing "does it have AI," both check the box; if you are comparing "does the whole team get live summaries and searchable call history without a procurement conversation," Dialpad wins outright at $15 and RingCentral asks you to climb and shop.

There is a strategic angle too. Both vendors sell AI-heavy contact-center products above these UC tiers, Dialpad's support and sales suites and RingCentral's RingCX, and the smoother path is usually the one where your team is already fluent in the vendor's AI before you scale into the contact center. On that logic, Dialpad's habit of putting AI in front of every user early is not just a feature win, it is an adoption strategy: by the time you need the bigger product, your people already trust the smaller one. Do sanity-check accuracy on your own accents, jargon, and background noise during the trial, though, because transcription quality is workload-specific and no vendor's marketing number substitutes for hearing your own calls come back as clean text.

Integrations

Flip the board and RingCentral takes the lead just as clearly. It carries one of the largest third-party integration catalogs in the category and treats connectivity as a core selling point, with CRM and business-app integrations, Salesforce, Zendesk, and a long tail of tools, switching on at the Advanced tier. If your team lives inside a CRM and wants screen-pops, click-to-dial, and every call logged against the right record across a wide stack of apps, RingCentral simply has more native hooks out of the box.

Dialpad covers the integrations most SMBs actually use, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, and Zoho, but it gates them to the Pro tier ($25), and its Standard plan ships with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 connectivity rather than a sprawling marketplace. That is plenty for a focused sales or support team, and Dialpad's advantage is that its AI writes call summaries straight into those CRM records once connected. But if breadth of connectors is your deciding factor, RingCentral is the stronger platform. Teams weighing this against other options often look wider; our RingCentral vs 8x8 comparison covers another integration-heavy contender.

The distinction that matters is depth versus breadth, and it is easy to mistake one for the other. RingCentral wins on breadth: it connects to a long tail of business apps, from CRMs to help desks to industry-specific tools, so if your stack is unusual or wide, the odds that RingCentral already speaks to it are simply higher. Dialpad wins on depth of the integrations it does support, because it is not just logging a call, it is pushing an AI-written summary and transcript into the record, which is a richer artifact than a bare call log. A rep opening a Salesforce contact in a Dialpad shop sees what was actually said last time, not just that a call happened. For a team whose whole world is one CRM, that depth can outweigh RingCentral's breadth.

So the honest test is to inventory the specific tools your team touches daily and check each against both catalogs, rather than trusting a raw connector count. If everything you use is mainstream, both will likely cover it and the deeper AI-into-CRM behavior tips toward Dialpad. If you rely on a niche vertical app, a legacy system, or a broad and growing stack, RingCentral's larger marketplace is the safer bet. And if you are still weighing the field, our RingCentral vs Nextiva breakdown lines RingCentral up against another popular all-in-one contender on exactly this axis.

Support and reliability

Two very different stories here. Dialpad earns strong marks from its user base, sitting around 4.4 out of 5 on G2 across a large review pool of roughly four thousand for its Connect product, one of the healthier satisfaction pictures among the systems we track. The catch is that its 24/7 live support is gated to Pro and above, so Standard buyers get support on more limited terms; if round-the-clock help matters, budget for Pro. Its formal 99.9 percent uptime SLA is an Enterprise-tier commitment.

RingCentral is the more battle-tested platform on reliability, with a mature, enterprise-grade network and a global calling footprint that larger and international teams lean on. Its product ratings are respectable, around 4.0 on G2, but its public reputation carries a notable blemish: its Trustpilot score sits near 1.8 across roughly two thousand reviews, with billing and customer-support friction a recurring complaint. That gap is about the buying and service experience more than call quality, but it is real, and it is worth weighing if a clean support relationship is high on your list.

It is worth reading those two reputations for what they measure. G2 skews toward hands-on users rating the product they work in every day, and on that axis both do well, with Dialpad's roughly 4.4 sitting a touch above RingCentral's roughly 4.0. Trustpilot skews toward people motivated enough to leave a public review, which in this category often means a billing or cancellation dispute, and that is where RingCentral's score cracks. The signal is not that RingCentral drops calls, it is that its commercial and support processes frustrate a meaningful share of customers enough to vent publicly. If you have ever fought a SaaS vendor over a contract renewal or an add-on charge, that pattern will feel familiar and worth taking seriously.

The practical protection is contractual, not emotional. On either platform, get the specifics in writing before you sign: the exact renewal terms and any auto-renew clause, whether the price can rise mid-term or at renewal and by how much, the process and notice period to cancel or reduce seats, and which support tier and response times you are actually buying. Dialpad's gating of 24/7 live support to Pro means Standard buyers should confirm their support hours cover their business hours, especially if they operate outside a nine-to-five window or across time zones. RingCentral buyers should pin down which priority support their tier includes and what the escalation path looks like when something breaks during a busy day.

On raw uptime, both are dependable enough for most businesses, and the meaningful SLA commitments live at the top of each ladder, Dialpad's formal 99.9 percent guarantee is an Enterprise-tier promise. For a small team, the difference between "very reliable" and "contractually guaranteed" rarely justifies the enterprise jump on its own; for a company where minutes of downtime cost real money, the written SLA and the support response time behind it are worth negotiating hard on either platform.

Which should you choose?

There is no universal winner, only the right answer for your team size and how you work. By employee band:

• 1 to 5 employees: Dialpad, almost always. The $15 annual Standard seat with AI transcription baked in gives a tiny team superpowers it would otherwise pay extra for, and setup is same-day. Only lean RingCentral here if you already run on a specific integration it supports better.
• 6 to 20 employees: Dialpad still leads for sales- or support-driven teams that want call notes and summaries flowing into their CRM at the Pro tier. RingCentral earns a look if you need large video meetings or a wider app catalog now.
• 21 to 50 employees: a real toss-up. Choose Dialpad if AI voice intelligence is central to how the team sells or supports; choose RingCentral if you are consolidating a messy stack and value its integration depth, analytics, and higher video ceilings.
• 51 to 200 employees: RingCentral starts to pull ahead for multi-team, multi-site organizations that need deep routing, mature analytics, and a broad integration surface, unless AI is the explicit strategic priority, in which case Dialpad Enterprise deserves the RFP.
• 200+ employees: both go quote-only at this scale. RingCentral's enterprise heritage and global footprint make it the default for large, complex, international deployments; Dialpad Enterprise (with SSO, unlimited ring groups, and the 99.9% SLA) is the pick when an AI-native contact-center future is the whole point.

By use case, the picture sharpens further. A high-velocity sales or support team should start with Dialpad, because live transcription and auto-summaries turn every call into searchable, coachable data with zero rep effort, and that flywheel starts on the entry tier. A Salesforce-anchored operation with a wide app stack should start with RingCentral, whose broader catalog is likelier to already speak to your niche tools. A team that hosts big webinars or all-hands inside its phone platform gets more headroom from RingCentral's 200-participant video and avoids a second meetings vendor. A compliance-driven team that must record every call should weigh RingCentral's automatic recording at Advanced. And a lean startup that wants to avoid annual lock-in should note Dialpad's steep monthly penalty, price RingCentral month-to-month too, and possibly run both on trials before committing a cent.

If you take one rule from all of this, make it a workflow rule, not a price rule: buy the platform whose default experience matches the job your team does most, and only then compare what that specific tier costs. A sales floor that lives on call notes and a distributed enterprise that lives on integrations will each be happiest with a different winner here, and both will be unhappy if they chose on entry price alone.

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Alternatives worth a look

If neither quite fits, three others earn a shortlist spot. Zoom Phone pairs familiar video with competitively priced calling and its own growing AI companion, a natural cross-shop against Dialpad, which we line up in Zoom Phone vs Dialpad. Nextiva trades RingCentral's breadth for a lower entry price and a standout support reputation. Vonage offers an a-la-carte add-on model and a large integrations marketplace for teams that want to buy only the pieces they need; see RingCentral vs Vonage.

Switching and number porting

Moving your existing business lines onto either platform follows the same regulated dance, but the details differ enough that it is worth walking through provider by provider. Porting is a carrier-to-carrier transfer authorized by you, and the clock is set by the carrier you are leaving, not by RingCentral or Dialpad. For a handful of standard business numbers, plan on roughly one to two weeks; for larger blocks, toll-free ranges, or numbers tangled up in a legacy PBX contract, three to four weeks is the honest expectation. Anyone who promises a same-week port on a fifty-line account is quoting you the best case, not the likely one.

The documents each provider asks for barely differ, and that shared paperwork is where most delays actually start. Each provider needs a signed Letter of Authorization plus a recent copy of your current phone bill, and every field on that LOA, the account number, the billing address, the authorized signer, the exact list of numbers, has to match your losing carrier's records character for character. A single mismatched suite number or an outdated account holder is the most common reason a port gets rejected and bounced back to the start of the queue. Our advice on both RingCentral and Dialpad is the same: pull your latest invoice, copy the account details from it verbatim rather than from memory, and submit the full ported-number list in one batch so you are not running staggered cutovers.

Where the two genuinely diverge is what you run on during the wait. RingCentral makes it easy to provision temporary numbers and stand up your full call-flow tree, IVR menus, ring groups, recording rules, ahead of the port, so the migration day becomes a quiet DNS-style swap rather than a scramble; that depth is exactly why its richer configuration pays off during a cutover. Dialpad's leaner build means there is less to reconfigure at swap time, and because its transcription and AI notes are live from your very first temporary-number call, your team is already fluent in the tool days before the real numbers arrive. On both, keep call forwarding active on the old carrier until the port confirms, and schedule the actual cutover for a low-traffic window, early morning or a Friday afternoon, so an unexpected delay never lands mid-rush.

On fees, neither RingCentral nor Dialpad advertises a fixed porting charge on its public pricing page, which is precisely why you should raise it in the quote conversation rather than assume zero. In practice basic business-number ports are frequently absorbed at no charge on annual deals, while toll-free ports, large blocks, or expedited timelines can carry a one-time fee, and RingCentral in particular may fold professional-services or implementation help for a big rollout into the same line item. Dialpad's setup tends to be lighter-touch and self-serve, so its incremental porting cost is usually the smaller of the two, but get the number in writing either way. Budget for it as a known unknown, confirm it before you sign, and you remove the single most common unpleasant surprise of a phone-system switch.

The real 12-month cost

Sticker prices compare seats; a year of invoices compares platforms. So let us take the exact scenario from our pricing section, a 25-seat sales team that needs CRM logging and automatic AI call summaries, and carry it all the way out over twelve months on each platform, add-ons and fee pass-throughs included, using only the real numbers already on this page.

On Dialpad, CRM connectors (Salesforce, HubSpot) live on the Pro tier at $25 per seat annually, and the AI transcription and summaries the team wants are already baked in at no extra charge. That is $625 a month across the 25 seats, which works out to $7,500 a year in base plan cost. This team wants a shared conference-room line and large-meeting capacity for its weekly pipeline review, so add roughly $15 for the room line and, say, $15 per user of big-meeting capacity on five reps who host, about $90 a month, or $1,080 a year. Base plus add-ons lands near $8,580, and once you layer on the 15 to 25 percent tax-and-fee pass-through, call it a realistic $9,900 to $10,700 all in for the year.

On RingCentral, CRM also unlocks at the $25 Advanced tier, so the base is the identical $625 a month, $7,500 a year. The difference is the AI. RingCentral's Core-and-Advanced layer covers transcription and captions, but the generative summaries and conversation-intelligence this team is actually buying Dialpad for arrive as a paid add-on that runs around $60 a seat. Apply that to just the ten busiest reps, not all 25, and you add $600 a month, another $7,200 a year, more than doubling the AI-relevant spend. Base plus that one add-on is $14,700 before taxes, and with the same 15 to 25 percent pass-through you are looking at roughly $16,900 to $18,400 for the year. Even trimming the add-on to five reps still adds $3,600 annually and keeps RingCentral clearly above Dialpad.

Cheapest over 12 months for a 25-seat AI-driven sales team: Dialpad, by a wide margin, on the order of $6,000 to $8,000 a year less, entirely because the AI this team relies on is included in Dialpad's seat and metered as an add-on on RingCentral's. Flip the scenario, though, and so does the math: a 25-seat team that wants breadth of integrations and 200-participant video but does not care about generative AI can skip RingCentral's expensive add-on entirely, sit on the same $7,500 base, and close much of the gap, while gaining app-catalog depth Dialpad cannot match. The 12-month winner is never the platform with the lower sticker; it is the platform whose included features overlap most with the ones your team will actually switch on.

Frequently asked questions

Is RingCentral or Dialpad cheaper?

On an annual commitment, Dialpad is cheaper at entry: its Standard plan starts at $15 per user per month versus RingCentral Core at $20, as of mid-2026. Both middle tiers list $25 (RingCentral Advanced and Dialpad Pro). RingCentral publishes a $35 Ultra tier while Dialpad's Enterprise tier is quote-only. The picture changes month to month, where Dialpad Standard jumps to $27 (an 80 percent premium) while RingCentral's monthly rate runs only about a third higher. Taxes and fees add roughly 15 to 25 percent on top of either. Confirm live pricing before you buy.

Does Dialpad include AI on the cheapest plan?

Yes. Dialpad includes real-time call transcription and automatic AI call and voicemail summaries starting on its entry Standard tier at $15 per user per month. That is Dialpad's core differentiator. RingCentral includes only a basic AI layer on its Core tier and gates its more advanced and generative AI to Advanced and up, with the most powerful conversation-intelligence features sold as separate paid add-ons.

Which has more integrations, RingCentral or Dialpad?

RingCentral has the larger integration catalog and treats it as a core strength, with CRM and business-app connectors unlocking at its Advanced tier. Dialpad supports the major CRMs most teams use, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, and Zoho, but gates them to its Pro tier, and its Standard plan focuses on Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. For breadth of connectors, RingCentral wins; for a focused sales or support stack, Dialpad is usually enough.

Which is better for a sales team?

Dialpad is typically the stronger pick for sales and support teams because its real-time transcription and automatic AI summaries are included from the entry tier and, once a CRM is connected at Pro, write call notes straight into the record. RingCentral can match much of this, but you climb tiers and add paid boosters to get there. If AI voice intelligence is central to how your team sells, start with Dialpad.

How big is the monthly-versus-annual price gap?

It is much larger on Dialpad. Dialpad Standard is $15 per user on an annual term but $27 month to month, roughly an 80 percent premium, and Pro moves from $25 to $35 the same way. RingCentral's month-to-month billing runs only about 33 percent above its annual rate. If you want to avoid a 12-month commitment, RingCentral penalizes that choice far less than Dialpad does.

Can I keep my phone number when I switch?

Yes, both platforms bring your existing numbers across, and the transfer is driven by a signed Letter of Authorization plus a copy of your current phone bill whose account details must match your losing carrier exactly. Standard business ports usually take one to two weeks, with toll-free ranges and large blocks running closer to three or four. Keep forwarding live on the old carrier and cut over in a low-traffic window; our switching and number porting section walks through the fee reality and the temporary-number strategy for RingCentral and Dialpad specifically.

Does either offer a free trial?

Yes. Both offer a free trial, commonly 14 days, so you can test live calling, the apps, and the AI before committing. Because Dialpad's month-to-month rate is so much higher than its annual rate, a trial is a good way to validate fit before you lock into the cheaper annual term.

Which should a 200-plus-person company choose?

Both move to custom, quote-only pricing at that scale. RingCentral's enterprise heritage, global calling footprint, deep analytics, and broad integrations make it the common default for large, complex, or international deployments. Dialpad Enterprise, which adds SSO, unlimited ring groups, unlimited locations, and a 99.9 percent uptime SLA, is the stronger choice when an AI-native contact-center strategy is the priority.