An Aircall alternative for teams that place calls, not answer them
Aircall is built for teams that answer calls. If yours mostly places them, the seats are the expensive part and the queue is the part you never use.
Keep Aircall
Your team answers a queue, the calls have to land on a customer record by themselves, or a supervisor needs to listen in. None of that is a nice-to-have you can drop, and none of it is here.
Choose Airlophone
Your team needs international calling without a licence for every person. You pay only when somebody makes a call.
See Team callingRead the full comparison
01What it is
What Aircall actually is
Aircall is a cloud call centre. It sits on top of a CRM or a helpdesk, routes inbound calls into queues, hands them to whoever is free, records what happened and reports on how the queue performed. That is a real product and a hard one to build. If your team's job is picking up a support line, it is the right shape of tool and this page is not going to talk you out of it.
02The model
How Aircall is priced
Licensed per user per month with a floor on how many licences you can buy, so the smallest bill is set by the plan rather than by how many people call anybody. Several of the parts that read as core, analytics and the AI features among them, are sold on top of the licence.
Seat prices change. Check Aircall's own pricing page for its current figure. Airlophone publishes every rate at /rates.
03Where it stops
Where it stops, if the problem is international calling
The seat count sets the bill, not the call count.
On most teams that place international calls, two or three people place nearly all of them. Everyone else is on the account because they need to be reachable, and each of them costs the same as the person who called Manila every day.
The licence and the minutes are two different lines.
A seat buys the software. International calls are metered on top of it, so the monthly number you budgeted is the floor rather than the total, and the corridors your team actually calls decide the rest.
A number in another country is another product.
Local numbers are sold per number per month, on top of the seats. A team that wants to be reachable in three countries is paying three recurring charges before anybody has dialled.
There is a floor under how small you can be.
The minimum licence count means a two-person operation buys more than it uses from the first month. That is fine for a support desk hiring into it and wrong for a team whose calling is occasional.
04What we are not
What you would be giving up
Airlophone is calling, not a phone system. These are the specific things Aircall does that Airlophone does not, stated before the price rather than after it.
No call queues, no auto attendant, no routing rules.
An inbound call to a number you rent here rings the browser, or forwards to one phone you nominate. There is nothing to distribute it across a team, and no menu in front of it.
No CRM or helpdesk integration.
Nothing writes back to Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk or Intercom, and there is no screen pop. If the call has to appear on a customer record automatically, this is the wrong tool.
Not a CRM or helpdesk workflow.
You can save an outcome, add notes, assign a contact and set a follow-up. There are no automation rules, queues for review or CRM sync. If calls must create or update work in another system automatically, this is the wrong tool.
Local numbers in two countries, against their dozens.
Aircall sells numbers across a long list of countries, each its own recurring charge. Here you can rent one in the United States or Canada, present it as your caller ID and take calls back on it. You can also set up Verified Caller ID with an eligible number you already own. The dialer confirms whether it can be presented on the route before each call.
05What changes
What is different the week after you move
The eleven people who never call stop costing anything.
Everyone keeps an account and a number they can be reached on. The bill follows the calls rather than the headcount, so hiring somebody who dials twice a month does not add a licence.
You know the price before you dial, per country and per line type.
The whole card is published before you sign up and the keypad quotes the exact number you typed. A landline and a mobile in the same country are priced separately, which matters because they differ by more than 2x in 45 countries and the landline is the dearer one in 24.
A contractor cannot burn the wallet, and the limit bites when they press Call.
A monthly cap per person is enforced at the moment the call starts rather than reported at the end of the month, so overspend is a refusal rather than an invoice.
07What it costs
What the calling itself costs here
No licence, no seat, no minimum and no commitment. You fund one balance, the team spends from it, and a colleague who made no calls this month costs nothing. Rates for a support team calling customers back, from $0.03 a minute across 221 countries:
| Destination | Landline | Mobile |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | $0.09 | $0.12 |
| Germany | $0.07 | $1.15 |
| France | $0.09 | $0.59 |
| Australia | $0.09 | $0.29 |
| Canada | $0.03 | $0.03 |
Per minute in US dollars from a US caller ID, billed per minute with part of a minute counting as a full one. Read live from the published card, so this table cannot disagree with what you are charged. A landline and a mobile in the same country are priced apart because they cost different amounts to reach, and the band is resolved from the digits you dial rather than from a question you are asked.
A shared balance, a monthly cap per person enforced when they press Call, and an answer rate per member rather than a call count: see how the team account works, including the five things it deliberately does not do.
08Try it
Price a call your team actually makes
Type a real number from your own call log. The exact rate for that number appears before anything dials.
Calls to United States from $0.03 a minute for landline and toll-free. Basic rate.
Rates from a US caller ID. Your selected caller ID is priced before calling.
Sign up when you press Call.
09Questions
Common questions
What is the best Aircall alternative for a small team?
It depends on what you use Aircall for. If the queue, the routing and the CRM integration are the reason it is there, the alternatives are the other call centre products, and switching to something simpler will cost you those. If what you actually use is the outbound calling, the alternative is a pay-as-you-go calling account: one shared prepaid balance, no licence per person, and a cap per person enforced at the moment they press Call.
Is there a phone system without a per-seat fee?
Pay-as-you-go calling has no seat fee to dial: you fund one balance and the team spends from it, so somebody who made no calls this month costs nothing. Every team is Professional, so selected recording and transcripts are available without assigning seats. What you give up is the phone-system half. There are no queues, no auto attendant and no CRM integration, so it replaces the calling rather than the switchboard.
Why is Aircall more expensive than it first looks?
Three things stack, and none of them is hidden: the licence is charged per user per month with a minimum number of licences, several features are sold on top of the licence rather than inside it, and international minutes are metered separately again. We do not publish their figures here, because a price we copied would go stale faster than anybody would re-check it. Their own pricing page is the source worth reading.
Can I keep my Aircall number if I move?
Number portability depends on the vendor and on the country the number is in, and it is a question for them rather than for us. Airlophone rents US and Canadian numbers directly and does not currently accept a ported number from another provider, so plan on a new number if you move calling here.
Bring your team onto one balance
Invite members for free. Set spending limits and see every call in one place.