Aircall vs Dialpad for small sales teams (2026)

How we judged this

We are a two-person operations consultancy in Toronto. We build and repair HubSpot portals for small teams, and the phone system is usually the messiest integration in the stack. So this comparison weighs one thing above everything else: does each call land in HubSpot as a clean, reportable record. The record matters more than the demo or the feature grid.

Pricing below was checked in June 2026 against both vendors' pricing pages and four independent pricing teardowns (CloudTalk, Nextiva, GetVoIP, eesel). All prices are USD and assume annual billing unless we say otherwise. Both companies edit their pricing pages without notice, so confirm on a live quote before you sign anything.

Verified pricing, June 2026

Aircall

• Essentials: $30 per license per month annual, $40 month-to-month. Three-license minimum, so real entry cost is $90 per month. Includes IVR, call recording (storage capped at one year), the HubSpot integration, and about 100 other integrations.
• Professional: $50 per license per month annual, $70 month-to-month. Adds the power dialer, Salesforce, mandatory call tagging, queue callback, and longer analytics history.
• Custom: quoted, 25-license minimum. Not relevant at this size.
• AI Assist add-on: $9 per license per month. This is where transcription, call summaries, and sentiment live. They are not in the base plans.
• Analytics+ add-on: $15 per license per month for longer data history and deeper filters.
• Extra phone numbers run $6 per month each. SMS overage fees apply past the monthly allowance (sources cite 4,000 to 5,500 outbound messages).

Note the shape of this: a sales team that lives in the dialer wants Professional for the power dialer, and wants AI Assist for summaries. That stack is $59 per seat, not the $30 on the pricing page headline.

Dialpad

• Connect Standard: $15 per user per month annual, $27 month-to-month. Single seat allowed. Unlimited US and Canada calling, SMS, and AI transcription included. No CRM integrations. For this article's purpose, Standard is the wrong plan: your calls never reach HubSpot.
• Connect Pro: $25 per user per month annual, $35 month-to-month. Three-seat minimum. Adds the CRM integrations (HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, Zendesk), multiple phone numbers, global SMS, and 24/7 support.
• Connect Enterprise: quoted, 100-seat minimum.
• Dialpad Sell is a separate sales-specific product: Essentials around $39 per user per month annual ($49 monthly), Advanced $95, Premium $150. The live coaching, playbooks, and scorecards you see in Dialpad's ads live here, not in the $25 plan. Most teams under 15 seats do not need it.
• Add-ons: extra local numbers about $5 per month, toll-free about $15, video meetings over 10 people $15 per user per month.

The headline difference: Dialpad includes AI transcription and call summaries on every plan. Aircall charges $9 per seat for the same category of features.

Head to head

Factor	Aircall	Dialpad
Cheapest plan with HubSpot	Essentials, $30/seat (3-seat min)	Connect Pro, $25/seat (3-seat min)
Realistic sales stack	Professional + AI Assist, $59/seat	Connect Pro, $25/seat
AI transcription and summaries	$9/seat add-on	Included on all plans
HubSpot logging depth	Deepest available: calls and SMS on contacts, deals, tickets, with recording links and outcomes	Good on paper, fragile in practice: dropped call records reported
Call quality reputation	Multiple incidents in 2025; quality is the top complaint on review portals	Mixed; one-way audio when switching WiFi to LTE is the recurring complaint
Number porting	About 15 days average, sometimes longer	Often 1 to 3 business days for simple US/CA numbers
Single-seat option	None (3-license minimum)	Standard only, without CRM sync
Month-to-month penalty	$30 becomes $40, $50 becomes $70	$15 becomes $27, $25 becomes $35

Aircall, honestly

Where it wins

Aircall is built like a call-centre tool: queues, IVR, ring groups, shared lines, warm transfer. Mandatory call tagging on Professional is the best feature for a sales manager, because it forces the discipline that makes reports true.

The HubSpot integration is the deepest of any phone tool we have set up. Calls and SMS log as engagements on contacts, deals, and tickets, with duration, the caller's number, a link to the recording, rep comments, and the call outcome. Independent comparisons land in the same place: if accurate CRM data is the priority, Aircall is the safer pick.

Where it falls short daily

• The AI math. Transcription and summaries cost $9 extra per license while Dialpad includes them everywhere. On 8 seats that is $864 a year for table-stakes features.
• Two HubSpot apps. The calling widget and the data sync are separate marketplace apps, and reviewers call the split clunky. One documented edge case: a conference call started as an internal call between two Aircall users does not log at all.
• Call quality is inconsistent. Review portals tracked at least four incidents affecting call performance in 2025, and quality and connection issues are the most criticized part of the product. For a phone company, that is the complaint that matters most.
• Porting is slow. Around 15 days on average to bring your number in, longer for some number types and countries. Recent Trustpilot reviews are rough on the porting and SMS registration teams specifically.
• Minimums and the monthly penalty. Three licenses minimum on every plan. Month-to-month Professional jumps from $50 to $70 per seat, a 40 percent markup for flexibility.

Dialpad, honestly

Where it wins

Price, and what is included at that price. Connect Pro at $25 gets you the HubSpot integration, unlimited US and Canada calling, live transcription, AI call summaries, and 24/7 support. The apps are modern and quick. Porting in is genuinely fast: straightforward US and Canadian local numbers often complete in 1 to 3 business days, which beats most of the industry and beats Aircall by roughly two weeks.

Standard at $15 is also the only real single-seat plan in this comparison, if you can live without CRM sync.

Where it falls short daily

• The integration is the weak leg. Reviewers report dropped call records, contact sync problems between Dialpad and HubSpot, and Zapier patch jobs to fill the gaps. For the buyer of this article, that is the worst possible place to be fragile. A missing call record means rep activity reports undercount, and a coaching conversation that starts from wrong data goes badly.
• One-way audio. The recurring complaint pattern: switching between WiFi and mobile data, waking a laptop from sleep, transfers, and parallel ring can all produce dead air or a dropped call. If your reps work from cafes and cars, take this seriously and test it.
• Product-line confusion. Connect, Sell, Support, and Ai Contact Center are different products with different price lists. The coaching features in the marketing usually belong to Sell at $39 to $150 per seat, not the $25 plan you bought. Read the plan grid twice.
• Support and billing friction. Trustpilot and BBB complaints cluster around billing, cancellations, and unresponsive support. The uptime SLA is an Enterprise feature, which is a strange thing to gate.

Per-seat math at 3, 8, and 15 seats

Monthly totals on annual billing, USD, with the yearly cost in brackets. Configurations are the realistic ones for a HubSpot sales team, not the brochure ones.

Configuration	3 seats	8 seats	15 seats
Dialpad Connect Pro ($25)	$75 ($900/yr)	$200 ($2,400/yr)	$375 ($4,500/yr)
Dialpad Sell Essentials ($39)	$117 ($1,404/yr)	$312 ($3,744/yr)	$585 ($7,020/yr)
Aircall Essentials + AI Assist ($39)	$117 ($1,404/yr)	$312 ($3,744/yr)	$585 ($7,020/yr)
Aircall Professional + AI Assist ($59)	$177 ($2,124/yr)	$472 ($5,664/yr)	$885 ($10,620/yr)

The gap compounds with headcount. At 15 seats, the full Aircall sales stack costs $6,120 more per year than Dialpad Pro. That difference funds a lot of fixing elsewhere in your stack. Both vendors bill in USD, so Canadian teams pay the exchange rate on top of every number above.

One more honest cut: at 3 seats, Aircall Essentials plus AI Assist costs the same $117 as Dialpad Sell. If your three reps are on the phone all day and you want the cleaner HubSpot records, the premium for Aircall at that size is small. The price argument for Dialpad is strongest against Aircall Professional, not Essentials.

The HubSpot logging test that decides the choice

Whichever way you lean, run the trial inside your real HubSpot portal, not a demo sandbox. We have built 600+ workflows across client portals, and the ones that fail most are fed by call data that never arrived. Five tests, in order:

1. Call a contact with two open deals. Where did the call log? Can the rep choose the deal, or does it associate to nothing? Deal-level call counts are the basis of every pipeline review.
2. Check the call outcome values. Map Connected, Left voicemail, and No answer to what you report on, then build one custom report grouped by rep and outcome. If the outcomes arrive as free text or not at all, stop the trial.
3. Miss a call on purpose. Build a workflow: missed inbound call creates a task for the owner within a minute. This is the single highest-value call automation for a small team, and it only works if the missed call logs reliably.
4. Open the recording link as a manager who does not hold a phone seat. Permission surprises show up here, usually two weeks after you signed.
5. Log a call from the mobile app on cell data. This is where Dialpad's sync drops most often according to reviewers, and where any phone tool is weakest.

Call records feed lead scoring, attribution, and rep activity reporting in the systems we build, so we are picky about this on purpose. If you want the winner wired in properly, that is standard RevOps work for us, and the same logic applies to the rest of your stack as covered in RevOps for small teams.

Migration and lock-in notes

• You own your number, but plan the gap. Porting into Dialpad is usually days; porting into Aircall averages about 15 days. Porting out of either works, but keep the old account active and paid until the new carrier confirms, or you risk a dead line mid-quarter.
• Annual contracts are where the good prices live. Month-to-month costs 33 to 80 percent more depending on plan. Sign annual only after the trial passes the five tests above.
• Export recordings before you cancel. Aircall Essentials stores recordings for one year only, and access dies with the subscription on both tools. Download anything compliance or training needs.
• The real lock-in is not the phone tool. Call engagements written into HubSpot stay in HubSpot after you leave either vendor. That is exactly why logging quality matters more than the per-seat price: the phone vendor is replaceable, your two years of activity history is not.
• Three-seat minimums on both sides (all Aircall plans, Dialpad Pro). A two-person team pays for a phantom seat either way.

Skip both of them if

• Your reps make under about 20 calls a day and you already pay for Sales Hub. HubSpot's built-in calling includes 500 minutes per account per month on Starter, 3,000 on Professional, and 12,000 on Enterprise. Inbound calls log automatically only on a HubSpot-provided number, and there is no IVR or queueing. But there is also no integration to break, because there is nothing to sync. For a lot of three-person teams this is the right answer, and it costs zero new dollars.
• Your "sales calls" are booked demos. If conversations happen on Zoom or Meet from a calendar link, you need a meeting recorder, not a business phone system. Different problem, different tools.
• The actual job is cold outbound at volume. Then the dialer attached to your sequencing stack matters more than a phone system, and you are shopping in a different category. That is GTM engineering territory, not VoIP.
• You cannot fill three seats. Dialpad Standard at $15 is the only single-seat plan here, and it cannot sync to HubSpot. At that size, log calls manually and spend nothing.

If you want a second opinion on the choice, or you want outcomes mapped, missed-call workflows built, and reports that match reality, we do that at a flat $150/hr CAD with scope quoted in writing first. Tell us your call volume and we will tell you if you even need one of these tools.

FAQ

Does Dialpad's cheapest plan work with HubSpot?

No. Connect Standard at $15 per user excludes CRM integrations entirely. You need Connect Pro at $25 per user per month on annual billing, which carries a three-seat minimum, so the real entry cost for a HubSpot-connected Dialpad setup is $75 per month.

Do I need Aircall's AI add-on for HubSpot logging?

Basic logging is included: calls land on contacts, deals, and tickets with duration, recording links, notes, and outcomes. The $9 per license AI Assist add-on is what puts transcripts, AI summaries, and sentiment into those records. Most sales teams end up adding it, so budget $39 to $59 per seat, not $30.

How long does number porting take in 2026?

Dialpad typically completes simple US and Canadian local number ports in 1 to 3 business days. Aircall averages about 15 days and can run longer for certain number types and countries. Either way, keep your old provider active until the port is confirmed, and never schedule a port for the last week of a quarter.

Can we just use HubSpot's built-in calling instead?

Often, yes. Sales Hub includes calling minutes per account per month: 500 on Starter, 3,000 on Professional, 12,000 on Enterprise. Inbound calls log automatically only on a HubSpot-provided number, and you give up IVR, queues, and ring groups. If reps make under about 20 calls a day, it is usually the right call, and the logging is native so nothing can fall out of sync.