When an organization is looking for a modern business communications provider, RingCentral and Dialpad are likely to emerge as strong candidates to consider. Both RingCentral and Dialpad provide voice, video conferencing, and messaging services intended for use in organizations. Both vendors also have offerings designed to meet the needs of call center and customer service center configurations. Both organizations offer to sign a business relationship agreement, which may be attractive to HIPAA-compliant healthcare customers.
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What is RingCentral?
RingCentral provides calling, conferencing and messaging solutions for businesses of all sizes. In addition, their contact center option connects businesses and customers with inbound or outbound calling configurations. RingCentral groups their plans into three categories.
RingCentral MVPwhich stands for message, video and phone, includes four different subscriptions:
- Requirements: for messaging and telephone services
- Default: for messaging, video, and phone services
- Premium: For Messages, Video, Phone and Open API Services
- Ultimate: For all the premium benefits, plus device health reports, alerts and unlimited storage
RingCentral Videofor conferences and team messages, offers two options:
- RingCentral Video Pro: for hosting up to 100 participants
- RingCentral Video Pro+: for hosting up to 200 participants and long-term recording storage
RingCentral Contact Center options span a range of configurations, including inbound, outbound, omnichannel, and employee engagement management. RingCentral publishes four plans, although all Contact Center plans require involvement from the RingCentral sales team. Plans include:
- Essentials: Provides voice services
- Default: Adds omnichannel engagement
- Premium: Adds quality management and screen recording capabilities
- Ultimate: Adds workforce and performance management features
What is keypad?
keypad provides calling, conferencing and messaging solutions for businesses of all sizes. In addition, the company has artificial intelligence powered contact center and sales dialer solutions. Dialpad groups their plans into four categories.
Business communicationfor Voice, Meetings, and Messaging, offers three plans:
- Standard: Offers calling and transcripts, video conferencing, and Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 integrations
- Pro: Adds numbers in more countries, caller groups, office locations and customer relationship management integrations
- Enterprise: Promises 100% uptime, offers unlimited locations and call groups, and adds more integrations
Meetingsfor conferencing, offers two options:
- Free: to host up to 10 participants for up to 45 minutes per meeting
- Business: Hosts up to 150 participants for up to 5 hours per meeting, along with automated digests plus live and post-meeting transcripts
Contact Centerfor AI-powered customer support, offers two options:
- Pro: Provides a contact center solution with live AI coaching, sentiment tracking, and CRM integration with a minimum of 3 licenses
- Enterprise: Adds advanced reporting, unlimited queues and a 100% uptime service level agreement with a minimum of 50 licenses
Sales selectorfor AI-enabled sales reach, offers two plans:
- Pro: Offers an outgoing dialer with AI coaching, CRM integrations and unlimited SMS and MMS with a minimum of 3 licenses
- Enterprise: Adds custom reporting, APIs and webhooks, and an Enterprise Service Level Agreement with a minimum of 100 licenses
RingCentral vs. Dialpad: Feature Comparison
A fundamental reason to consider RingCentral or Dialpad is to meet your organization’s voice communication needs. Both companies support calling on desk phones, as well as on computers and mobile devices.
desk phones
Dialpad’s site lists three Polycom and four Yealink desk phones, along with eight headsets intended to work well with the company’s services. In addition, support pages indicate that Dialpad will work with a few specific models of desk phones from Obihai, Poly (formerly Polycom), and Yealink.
RingCentral’s site lists 29 desk phones from various vendors, including Avaya, Cisco, Poly, Unify, and Yealink. In addition, support pages indicate that RingCentral also works with a long list of supported phones from ALE, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, Poly, Unify, and Yealink. The availability and features of these phones may vary.
Mobile apps
Both RingCentral and Dialpad offer mobile apps on Android and Apple platforms.
The primary Dialpad app handles calls, contacts and messages and Voice Intelligence allows the system to transcribe your conversations. A separate app, Dialpad Meetings, allows video conferencing on the go. Both apps are available for Android and iOS devices.
The primary RingCentral app handles messaging, video conferencing, and phone services in one app. A separate app, RingCentral for Intune, provides messaging, video conferencing, and phone capabilities in an app intended to be managed by a Microsoft Intune administrator. Both apps are available for Android and iOS devices. Additional apps – RingCentral Meeting Rooms and RingCentral Rooms – help set up and manage meeting room configurations and are available for Android and iPadOS devices.
Ratings for the two primary apps are in similar ranges, with the main apps receiving more than a 4-star rating out of 5 stars in each case. However, RingCentral has been rated significantly more often than Dialpad: On Apple and Android platforms, RingCentral has been rated more than 28,000 and 16,000 times, compared to Dialpad, which has been rated less than 500 and 1,000 times in stores, respectively. That data indicates that RingCentral likely has significantly more mobile adoption and usage than Dialpad.
App Integrations
Ideally, a communications service can also work well with other software systems you use. For example, it can be useful to make a quick call directly from a customer record or to auto-populate a calendar invite with a meeting link. The RingCentral App Gallery and Dialpad App Marketplace each serve as a central place to explore apps that integrate with the respective services. In addition, both vendors want to support developers who want to build apps that work with their platforms. Especially in larger organizations, this ability to build your own app can be useful for custom workflows and integrations.
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Of the two, RingCentral offers a wider range of app integrations. In the design of RingCentral, Google and Microsoft each earn their own menu item. Otherwise, the long list of categories includes connections to calendaring, collaboration, CRM, healthcare, marketing automation, and productivity tools. Some integration partners add important features, such as the ability to transcribe conversations or track and access advanced analytics. For developers, the RingCentral Developers site provides centralized access to the information needed to build your own app with the platform.
Dialpad also offers integrations with several notable systems. Dialpad works with Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 (including Microsoft Teams), Salesforce and Slack. Some of the categories of supported apps include identity management, CRM, customer service software, and workflow automation. The Dialpad Developers site provides an introduction, API reference, and discussions intended to assist application developers.
AI innovations
RingCentral offers automated live transcription, allowing people who join a conversation late to scan the previous conversation. In addition, the transcript can be downloaded and saved as a text file for later use. RingCentral Video Advanced Meeting Insights attempts to identify highlights of conversations. This includes the ability to generate meeting snippets and keywords for access in future searches, as well as the ability to generate a meeting summary that you can edit. Expect additional AI features as RingCentral rolls out new capabilities derived from their December 2020 acquisition of DeepAffect.
Dialpad is aggressively building artificial intelligence capabilities into the company’s services, thanks in part to its 2018 acquisition of TalkIQ. Dialpad’s speech-to-text system is available on some plans and can provide transcription of conversations for calls and meetings, and these transcripts are easier to search and access than recorded video. Dialpad’s system also attempts to automatically identify key meeting moments and further classify each moment as a positive or negative sentiment, problem solved, action item, recommendation, or even an interesting question. The system can also recognize addresses, competitor names, currencies, dates, email addresses and times.
Choose between RingCentral and Dialpad
Both RingCentral and keypad are highly capable, turnkey alternatives to legacy telephone and conferencing systems. Prices vary based on the number of users, as well as the plan, options, and billing cycle you select. In general, both systems are competitively priced. None of these suppliers should be considered a cheap or budget provider. Both strive for comprehensive, high-quality business communication services for a fair price.
Companies looking for a system that works with a large number of applications as well as devices may prefer RingCentral. The number of integrations offered makes it possible for you to link modern communication options to already used applications. And in a corporate environment with a diverse set of desk phone devices, RingCentral is more likely to work with your existing equipment.
However, as of 2022, Dialpad has an edge with their AI capabilities and ambitions. The Dialpad AI Transcription and Moment Identification System significantly improves call documentation, reference and follow-up workflows. The company is also adding several AI features to improve call and contact center performance. For example, in June 2022, the company launched Ai CSAT to automatically help score customer satisfaction with phone calls.
In summary, RingCentral has an edge in the number of integrations and devices supported, while Dialpad is at the forefront of applying AI to transcribe, analyze and act after meetings, as well as categorize contact center calls. The good news for potential customers is that both companies are strong competitors and both systems have the potential to be a wise choice for your business communications needs.
