Aircall vs Dialpad (2026)
The decision is whether the speech layer comes with the phone or is sold on top of it. Dialpad runs transcription, live sentiment and call summaries on every call on every plan, its fifteen dollar entry seat included, and the GTM Tech Index grades it B on AI centrality for building speech into the transport path. Aircall sells the same class of capability as add ons at every tier, nine dollars a license for summaries on the entry plan and forty nine for live transcription and coaching even on its top one, over a phone system whose real center is a marketplace of connectors into the tools a team already runs. The security record separates them further. Dialpad publishes a long certification set, including a cloud registry entry dating to 2019 and a state government cloud authorization, while Aircall describes its program as aligned with the standards it names and correctly attributes those certificates to its hosting provider. Aircall's case is Europe and openness on paper, with headquarters in Paris and New York, offices in London, Madrid and Berlin, and a processing agreement anyone can read before a sales call. Both now run voice agents that answer calls on their own.
- You want to read the processing terms before the first sales call. Aircall publishes its processing agreement openly, defining controller and processor roles against the European regulation and scoping the processing in a named exhibit, where Dialpad keeps its substantive documents behind an access request.
- Your team lives in its customer record system. Aircall's marketplace is the reason to buy it, and on the largest customer record platform a separately sold telephony product adds call controls, real time transcription and supervisor barge in inside that platform's own agent console, beside a messaging module covering a major consumer platform in more than one hundred and eighty countries.
- Your operation spans European markets. Aircall has dual headquarters in Paris and New York with offices in London, Madrid, Berlin and Sydney, and it states plainly that its voice agent works in English, Spanish, French and German while its summaries work in English only, a limit most vendors leave a buyer to discover after purchase.
- You want speech features in the seat price. Dialpad includes transcription, live sentiment, call summaries and voicemail transcription on every plan from fifteen dollars a user a month, with a one user minimum, where Aircall charges nine dollars a license for summaries on its entry tier and forty nine for live transcription and coaching on every tier.
- Your security review needs certificates rather than alignment. Dialpad lists a service organization control report, the international information security standard in its 2022 revision, cloud security and cloud privacy standards, payment card and health frameworks, and two entries a buyer can verify outside its own site, a cloud registry listing from 2019 and a state government cloud authorization at level two.
- You will put an agent on live calls and want the governance written down. Dialpad keeps a dedicated AI section in its trust center, with overview, governance, and evaluation and red teaming entries beside a standing AI use policy, and its public subprocessor list names both its model provider and a data annotation company.
This comparison is published by GTM Tech Index, an independent research platform that compares go to market software vendors objectively. Aircall and Dialpad are each graded against the same capability taxonomy, from each vendor's own public materials, under the GTM Tech Index verification standard. No vendor pays for placement, and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Plain facts
| Aircall | Dialpad | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | Dialers & Voice | Dialers & Voice |
| Founded | 2014 | 2011 |
| Headquarters | Paris, France and New York, New York, United States | San Ramon, California, United States |
| Website | aircall.io | www.dialpad.com |
Side by Side
| Axis | A Aircall |
D Dialpad |
|---|---|---|
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AI Capability
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| AI Centrality | ||
| Autonomy and Oversight Model | ||
| AI Disclosure and Model Transparency | ||
| Operational and Outcome Evidence | ||
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Compliance and Risk
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| Outreach Compliance Posture | ||
| Data Privacy Posture | ||
| Data Licensing and Provenance | ||
| Platform Terms Exposure | ||
| AI Safety and Data Stewardship | ||
| Recipient Disclosure and Authenticity | ||
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Integration and Deployment
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| Ecosystem and Integration Depth | ||
| Deployment Model and Data Residency | ||
| Security Certifications and Trust Center | ||
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Commercial and Operational
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| Commercial Transparency | ||
| Exit and Data Portability | ||
| Deliverability and Sending Discipline | ||
| Segment and Market Coverage | ||
The short version of each
Aircall
Aircall is a cloud phone system founded in 2014 with headquarters in Paris and New York and offices in London, Madrid, Berlin and Sydney, built around a marketplace of connectors into customer record, helpdesk, productivity and messaging tools, with a power dialer, a voice agent and speech features sold as add ons. The GTM Tech Index grades it B on four axes: data privacy, where its processing agreement is published openly rather than on request; ecosystem depth, where a separately sold telephony product places call controls and live transcription inside the largest customer record platform's agent console; platform terms; and segment coverage, where license minimums state its floor and ceiling. It grades C on the other thirteen, including security, where its program is described as aligned with rather than certified to the standards it names, and commercial transparency, where published rates of thirty and fifty dollars a license sit behind a three license minimum and voice agent usage carries no published price.
Source: GTM Tech Index, 2026
Dialpad
Dialpad is a San Ramon based communications platform founded in 2011 that runs its own carrier infrastructure and builds speech recognition into every call, with a business phone system, a sales suite, a contact center suite and an autonomous agent product that handles voice and text interactions end to end. The GTM Tech Index grades it B on nine axes and C on eight. AI centrality takes B because transcription, live sentiment and summaries are included on every plan, the fifteen dollar entry tier among them. Security takes B for a certification set covering the international information security standard in its 2022 revision, cloud security and privacy standards, payment card and health frameworks, a cloud registry entry from 2019 and a state government cloud authorization. Stewardship takes B for a governance section with its own evaluation and red teaming entry, and model transparency takes B for a subprocessor list naming its model provider and a data annotation company. It grades C on residency, recipient disclosure and outcome evidence, publishing no transcription accuracy figure.
Source: GTM Tech Index, 2026
Common questions
Is Aircall better than Dialpad?
On published evidence Dialpad leads, with nine B grades in the GTM Tech Index to Aircall's four and no A on either side. Dialpad includes speech features on every plan, holds a long certification set and documents its AI governance. Aircall's strengths are its connector marketplace, an openly published processing agreement and a European footprint with offices in four European cities. Both grade C on residency, recipient disclosure and outcome evidence.
Is Dialpad cheaper than Aircall?
At the entry point, yes. Dialpad publishes fifteen and twenty five dollars a user a month on annual billing, or twenty seven and thirty five monthly, with a one user minimum, and a sales suite at thirty nine, ninety five and one hundred and fifty. Aircall publishes thirty and fifty dollars a license on annual billing, or forty and seventy monthly, with a three license minimum that puts its real floor at ninety dollars a month, plus priced add ons for summaries, coaching, analytics and extra numbers. Both quote their top tiers. Graded by GTM Tech Index against seventeen capability axes from each vendor's own published materials, verified September 27, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Does Aircall or Dialpad include AI transcription?
Dialpad does, on every call on every plan, with live sentiment and summaries alongside. Aircall sells live transcription and real time coaching as a forty nine dollar add on per license on every tier, including its top one, and post call summaries as a nine dollar add on on the entry tier. Neither publishes a transcription accuracy figure, which is why both grade C on outcome evidence in the GTM Tech Index.
Do Aircall and Dialpad protect outbound calls from spam labels?
Neither publishes the facts that decide it: the caller authentication attestation level it signs at, or how spam labels are remediated, which is why both grade C on deliverability. Dialpad runs its own carrier infrastructure, and third party connectivity providers market caller identity branding and spam label protection to its customers. Aircall's dialer works in power mode only, one number at a time, which by design avoids the abandoned calls that parallel dialing produces. Graded by GTM Tech Index against seventeen capability axes from each vendor's own published materials, verified September 27, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How does the GTM Tech Index grade Aircall and Dialpad?
Both are graded on the same seventeen capability and compliance axes from public sources, at a documented depth of seventeen each, and neither holds an A or a D. Aircall takes B on data privacy, ecosystem depth, platform terms and segment coverage, and C on thirteen. Dialpad takes B on nine axes, including AI centrality, security, stewardship, model transparency and commercial transparency, and C on eight. The index publishes no composite score and declares no winner.
Related comparisons
Other published head to head assessments involving these vendors or their closest peers. The full set for this category is on the Conversation Intelligence page.
The shared silence is the person on the other end of the call. Both sell voice agents that answer callers on their own, Dialpad's described as working end to end with no human in the loop and Aircall's as handling routine calls before a handoff, and neither publishes whether the caller is told they are speaking with software, whether that disclosure is configurable, or what the agent says when asked directly.
Both also record and transcribe calls with no automatic recording announcement described, where several jurisdictions require every party to consent. The second shared silence is where recordings live. Dialpad names its cloud provider and Aircall states it hosts primarily in a United States provider's data centers, and neither offers a European residency election for call audio, which is subject to recording law as well as data protection.
Neither describes the number porting process a departing customer faces, since numbers leave by carrier process rather than by export. The benign reading is that both leave announcements and residency to contracts and configuration. Ask both in writing what announcement plays in each jurisdiction, where European recordings are stored, and how long porting takes on termination.