Which call center software do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which call center software to buy, a shortlist comes back. We asked 44 different phrasings of that question across 3 engines, 132 answers in total, and counted every product named. This is the result. Nobody paid to be on it, and no vendor list was written in advance — the 75 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Run 3–4 August 2026 Questions 44 Answers 132 Vendors named 75 Top-10 repeatability 10/10

Free to read, raw data included.

Is one of these call center and contact center platforms yours?

The board is re-measured every month. For $9.99 a month you get one email when your own row moves — your rank and answer count, who took the mentions you were absent from, and which of the 44 questions started or stopped naming you. Leave your address and I reply by hand with what your row reads today. What is in it, and the $29.99 one-off report →

Nothing is charged and nothing starts — I reply by email. Your address is used to answer you and to set up billing; it does not go on a list.

Two conditions on every number below

These 44 questions are one family of phrasings — call center software — and every number below is conditional on them. A differently worded family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint — is a different measurement and can come back naming a different set of products. All 44 questions are printed in full below, so you can see exactly what was asked before you read what came back. We have measured how big that can get, on two of our own boards: SuiteCRM is named in 83 of the 132 answers on /c/crmctx/ and in none of the 132 on /c/crm/ — same products, same day, same extraction, asked differently.
The engine columns below are not one instrument. Perplexity (sonar) searches the web while it answers and returned the sources used beside every one of those 44 answers — that column is what gets retrieved. ChatGPT (gpt-5.5) and Gemini (gemini-flash-latest) were called through their APIs with no tools and the near-empty system prompt quoted in the method below, so they answer out of the models’ own weights — not one of those 88 answers came back with a source. Those columns are what the models already remember. Both are worth counting and they are not the same measurement: a product can be named often by what the models remember and rarely by what they retrieve, or the reverse, and the totals in the Answers column add the two together.

The leaderboard

“Answers” is how many of the 132 answers named that product. Share is the same number as a percentage. The three right-hand columns split it by engine. Every row has its own link — the # beside a vendor name gives you something like connexion.me/c/callcenter/#five9. Click a vendor's name to see which of the 44 questions named them, and click one of those to read the answer it was counted from, word for word.

#VendorAnswers ShareChatGPTGeminiPerplexity
1Five9#7556.8%372018
2Genesys Cloud CX#6851.5%302513
3Talkdesk#6650.0%31269
4NICE CXone#5239.4%251314
5Aircall#4836.4%22179
6RingCentral Contact Center#4634.8%22915
7Amazon Connect#3828.8%13196
8Dialpad#3022.7%12711
9CloudTalk#2619.7%2519
10Nextiva#2216.7%6214
11Zendesk#2115.9%1047
12Zendesk Talk#2115.9%11100
13Freshdesk Contact Center#
Named together with Freshcaller in 6 of the 20 answers that name either. Gemini’s answer to question 30 writes the two as one product renamed: “**Freshdesk Contact Center (formerly Freshcaller)**”. Counted as separate rows — how names are counted.
2015.2%1082
148x8 Contact Center#139.8%913
15Twilio Flex#139.8%742
16Genesys#86.1%008
17Freshcaller#
Named together with Freshdesk Contact Center in 6 of the 20 answers that name either. Gemini’s answer to question 30 writes the two as one product renamed: “**Freshdesk Contact Center (formerly Freshcaller)**”. Counted as separate rows — how names are counted.
64.5%240
18Zoom Contact Center#64.5%213
19JustCall#53.8%023
20NICE#53.8%005
21Convoso#43.0%121
22Genesys Cloud#43.0%103
23Salesforce Service Cloud Voice#43.0%130
24Avaya Experience Platform#32.3%210
25TCN#32.3%111
26Voiso#32.3%003
27Bright Pattern#21.5%002
28Calilio#21.5%002
29CallTools#21.5%011
30Cisco#21.5%200
31Cisco Webex Contact Center#21.5%110
32Freshworks Customer Service Suite#21.5%110
33Gladly#21.5%101
34LiveAgent#21.5%101
35Ringover#21.5%002
36Salesforce Service Cloud#21.5%110
378×8#10.8%001
38Acefone#10.8%001
39AcmaTel#10.8%001
40AgentTech#10.8%001
41Avaya#10.8%100
42Avaya Aura Contact Center#10.8%100
43Bitrix24#10.8%001
44Carbyne#10.8%001
45Cisco PCCE#10.8%010
46Cisco UCCE#10.8%100
47Financial Services Experience Cloud for Insurance#10.8%010
48Follow Up Boss (Built-in Phone System)#10.8%010
49Freshworks#10.8%100
50GoTo Contact Center#10.8%001
51HubSpot calling#10.8%100
52HubSpot Service Hub#10.8%010
53Infobip#10.8%001
54KrispCall#10.8%001
55Kustomer#10.8%100
56MightyCall#10.8%001
57NetCarrier#10.8%001
58PhoneBurner#10.8%010
59RapidDeploy#10.8%001
60Ringly#10.8%001
61Salesforce#10.8%010
62Salesforce Agentforce for Service#10.8%001
63Salesforce Service/Agentforce#10.8%001
64Sprinklr#10.8%001
65Twilio Voice/Flex#10.8%001
66UCCE#10.8%100
67UJET#10.8%100
68VICIdial#10.8%010
69Voicent#10.8%001
70Webex Contact Center#10.8%100
71Xima Software#10.8%001
72Zoho Desk#10.8%010
73Zoho Desk + Zoho Voice#10.8%100
74Zoho Voice#10.8%010
75Zoho Voice / Zoho Desk#10.8%100

What is free, and what is for sale

Everything above is free and stays free — the leaderboard, the method, all 132 raw answers and the machine-readable ranking, published in full at the bottom of this page. No vendor paid to be listed, no vendor can pay to move, and nothing here goes behind a login later.

What is for sale is one vendor's row, watched: $9.99 a month to be told when your rank moves, who took your mentions, and which phrasings started or stopped naming you — the board is re-run monthly and you get what changed. A one-off $29.99 deep report on a single row is the other option. What is in each →

Method

Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.

The engines

ChatGPT (gpt-5.5), Gemini (gemini-flash-latest), Perplexity (sonar). Each was called through its public API with a near-empty system prompt — “answer the user's question directly and concisely” — and nothing else. The engines were not asked to produce a list, rank anything, or name vendors. Steering them toward a list would have manufactured the thing being measured.

The questions

44 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.

These 44 questions are one phrasing family, not every way this market gets asked about. The family is call center software — that is the wording they were written from, and it is counted back against them here: 26 of them contain “call”; 36 of them contain “center”; 28 of them contain “software”, and 41 of the 44 contain at least one. A different family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint, different words — is a different measurement, and it can come back naming a different set of vendors. This board is this family, measured. It is not the whole market.
  1. What is the best call center software for a 50-person customer support team?
  2. Best contact center software for small business
  3. We're a 30 person inbound support team transitioning off basic cell phones. What call center platform should we buy?
  4. Recommend contact center software for an e-commerce company handling high call volume.
  5. affordable CCaaS software for SMB
  6. What call center software do mid-market companies actually use?
  7. Best cloud contact center platform for remote support agents
  8. We need call center software with IVR, call recording, and skill-based routing for 20 reps. Recommendations?
  9. Which contact center software has the best CRM integration for healthcare practices?
  10. Top cloud call center software for small financial service firms
  11. Best call center platform for outbound sales teams making high-volume cold calls
  12. We are scaling our customer service team from 10 to 50 agents. What CCaaS provider should we evaluate?
  13. What is the most reliable contact center software for healthcare organizations requiring HIPAA compliance?
  14. Best call center software with omnichannel support for email, chat, and phone
  15. easy to set up call center software for small business
  16. We run a 15-person collections agency and need auto-dialer and call recording capabilities. What software should we buy?
  17. Which CCaaS platform is best for virtual call centers with distributed remote workers?
  18. Best enterprise contact center software for multi-location businesses
  19. We are replacing our legacy on-premise PBX with a cloud contact center. What software do you recommend?
  20. What contact center software is best for B2B SaaS customer support?
  21. best call center software for real estate agencies managing inbound leads
  22. We have high seasonal spikes in customer service calls during holidays. Which elastic CCaaS platform handles scale best?
  23. Best call center platform for insurance agencies with intelligent call routing
  24. What call center software offers the best real-time supervisor monitoring and call whispering?
  25. affordable cloud contact center software for non-profits
  26. We need a contact center solution with workforce management and quality assurance tools included. What should we look at?
  27. Which CCaaS solution is best for international customer support with global phone numbers?
  28. Best call center software for logistics and dispatch teams
  29. What is the top-rated contact center platform for blended inbound and outbound support?
  30. We are a growing retail brand struggling with long hold times. What call center software can help manage queues better?
  31. best call center software with AI IVR and self-service voice bots
  32. Which cloud call center platform has the lowest latency and highest voice quality?
  33. We need software to run a 24/7 technical support hotline. What CCaaS tool should we buy?
  34. Best contact center platform for hotel reservation desks and hospitality
  35. What call center software works best for high-security environments like banking?
  36. top contact center software for small business customer service
  37. We need to set up a call center in under a week for emergency response. What cloud solution is fastest to deploy?
  38. Which CCaaS platform provides the best real-time agent speech analytics and sentiment analysis?
  39. Best call center software for automotive dealerships handling service department calls
  40. What is the best cloud phone system designed specifically for customer service call centers?
  41. best contact center software with native CRM ticketing capabilities
  42. We have 100 customer service reps working from home and need central call monitoring software. What should we buy?
  43. Which call center software offers flexible per-minute or pay-as-you-go pricing for low volume call centers?
  44. What call center platform is best for managing multi-language support queues?

How the vendor list was built

Each of the 132 answers was read back and every named product extracted. The vendor list is discovered: a product appears here if and only if an engine named it. Counted are call center and contact center (CCaaS) platforms, inbound/outbound call routing systems, and broader suites whose contact center module was named. Excluded, even when named: general business VoIP and PBX phone systems, help desk and ticketing systems, sales CRMs, standalone conversation intelligence tools, standalone workforce management software, developer CPaaS APIs, call tracking tools for marketing, and companies named only as an example user.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. This run collapsed 28 spellings onto 12 of the rows below: “Talkdesk”, “Talkdesk (Automotive Edition)” and “Talkdesk (Healthcare Experience Cloud)” are one row — the one the table prints as Talkdesk. An edition name is folded into its product when it is that product’s name followed by a further word, and the plain name is at least three times as common. This run folded 17 such names, among them “Talkdesk Healthcare Experience Cloud” counts as Talkdesk and “RingCentral RingCX” counts as RingCentral Contact Center. A name that merely begins with the same letters is a different product and keeps its own row. No pair was merged by hand in this category: every fold above is the rule applied mechanically, with no human judgement about who is who.

Beyond those folds a product is counted as the engines spelled it, and two rows in the table are never merged into one. When a product has been renamed or acquired and the engines still answer with both names, both names keep their own row: this page carries no hand-maintained list of who is now who, because that list would be a human claim about a mechanical count and nothing here could check it. What it has instead is the answers. Where an answer itself writes two of the rows below as one product renamed — the construction “X (formerly Y)” — the line beside those rows quotes that sentence and gives the overlap and the total, so the union is on the page. Nothing else produces that line. Two rows being named in the same answers does not, however often: the engines answer in shortlists, so the leaders of a category are named together whatever they are called. One pair of rows below carries that line in this run: Freshdesk Contact Center and Freshcaller. What each one quotes is what an engine wrote, not a judgement of ours about who owns what.

A product is counted once per answer, however many times that answer mentions it.

Is this stable, or is it noise?

The entire run was repeated a second time, same 44 questions, same engines, independent calls. The top ten came back 10/10 identical. What moved: by position, Genesys Cloud CX was 2 in run A and 3 in run B; Talkdesk was 3 in run A and 2 in run B; Aircall was 5 in run A and 6 in run B; RingCentral Contact Center was 6 in run A and 5 in run B; Amazon Connect was 7 in run A and 8 in run B; Dialpad was 8 in run A and 7 in run B. Run B named 75 vendors over 132 answers against run A's 75. The tail moves; the head does not.

A leaderboard whose top ten reshuffles between runs would not be worth publishing, so this check was run before the page was, and the page ships only because it passed.

What this is not

This measures what three answer engines said between 3 and 4 August 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which call center software to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

All 132 answers, verbatim, one JSON object per line: run A · run B. The per-answer extracted product names: run A · run B. Machine-readable ranking: ranking.json.

What Perplexity was reading. It is the only one of these engines that returns a source list, and the markers in its answers above — [1], [2] — point into it. Every URL it cited, with the title, date and the excerpt it actually retrieved, one JSON object per answer: run A · run B. Join on index to the answers file, and read [n] as citations[n-1]. Perplexity returned a source list on 44 of its 44 answers. ChatGPT and Gemini returned no sources at all — no citation, grounding or search-result field of any kind appears anywhere in their API responses, on any of the 44 answers each gave. That is a fact about the engines, not a gap in this page.

The sources behind the answers

Run A's 44 Perplexity answers cited 859 URLs across 250 distinct domains. Below are the 62 that were cited in three or more separate answers. Citations counts every URL from that domain, so a domain cited three times in one answer counts three times; Answers is how many of the 44 answers cited it at all.

DomainCitationsAnswers
reddit.com4531
nextiva.com3930
getvoip.com3530
zendesk.com2924
cloudtalk.io2920
g2.com2718
ximasoftware.com1816
wifitalents.com1716
ringcentral.com1715
thecxlead.com1616
zoom.com1611
dialpad.com1414
nice.com1414
gitnux.org1312
amplifai.com1211
bland.ai1211
gartner.com1111
macronetservices.com1111
aircall.io119
justcall.io119
retellai.com117
getapp.com109
zipdo.co99
voiso.com98
youtube.com98
brightpattern.com88
salesforce.com88
vonage.com88
capterra.com86
cxfoundation.com77
talkdesk.com77
techradar.com77
calilio.com66
capacity.com66
f6s.com66
genesys.com66
infobip.com66
softwaresuggest.com66
sprinklr.com66
alpharun.com55
balto.ai55
gigabpo.com55
guideflow.com55
learn.g2.com55
twixor.ai55
worldmetrics.org55
avoxi.com44
dialaxy.com44
harmonix.ai44
ipctech.com44
sourceforge.net43
commsadvisor.com33
convoso.com33
crescendo.ai33
fitsmallbusiness.com33
flyfone.com33
globalresponse.com33
hiringbranch.com33
listicler.com33
medium.com33
slashdot.org33
us.fitgap.com33

A domain missing from this table was cited in fewer than three answers, or was never cited at all — the run A file linked above is the complete list either way, and it is the only way to tell those two apart. Cited is not endorsed: a page the engine retrieved is not a page that recommended anyone, and this counts what was read, not what it said.

The answer a vendor panel shows you is read straight out of the run A file linked above — the page fetches the one line it needs and displays it unaltered, so what you read there and what you get by downloading the file are the same bytes.

What one line of each file holds, and the terms you may re-use them under — the raw answers may be re-used in any medium, commercially and inside open-source software, with attribution.