A Five9 alternative for founders and small teams

Five9 is a cloud contact centre. Its published prices start at $119 a seat a month, with a minimum of 50 seats. Deacon is an AI customer support agent for founders who answer support themselves, and it starts with a team of one. It answers your customers in seconds from your own docs, on your website, and shows you what they’re stuck on and what they want next. There’s a free plan, and it needs no card.

Five9’s prices read on five9.com/products/pricing on 23 September 2026

Deacon or Five9, which fits your team

Choose Deacon if

  • You answer customers yourself, or with a handful of teammates
  • Your customers reach you through your website, not by phone
  • You want to sign up today, with no quote and no seat minimum
  • You want answers in seconds from your docs, and an honest “I don’t know” when they don’t cover it
  • You want to see what customers ask for, on every plan

Choose Five9 if

  • You run a contact centre with 50 seats or more
  • Customers phone you, and you need IVR, call routing and recording
  • Your team makes outbound calls and needs a dialler
  • You want voice AI agents that verify callers and act in your systems
  • You need quality and workforce management for your agents

Try Deacon for free

Install Deacon

Deacon and Five9, feature by feature

Built for

Deacon
Founders and small teams who answer support themselves
Five9
Contact centres whose agents take calls and digital conversations

Seat minimum

Deacon
None. One person can start on the free plan
Five9
50 seats at its published prices, with other terms through its sales team

Getting started

Deacon
Sign up on the free plan, with every feature, no card and no end date
Five9
Get a quote. Two bundles show a price and three are Contact Sales

How it’s priced

Deacon
A plan price with its seats included. Nothing is billed past the plan’s answers, and no plan upgrades itself
Five9
Per concurrent user. $119 a seat a month for Digital and $159 for Core, with usage charges on top in some cases

AI that answers customers

Deacon
An AI agent on your website, on every plan, the free one included
Five9
Voice AI Agents and intelligent virtual agents for web, voice and SMS, each by quote

AI in the bundles

Deacon
Every feature is on every plan
Five9
None on Digital. Core adds summaries, live transcription and AI Insights, with 3,000 AI minutes a seat plus usage

Answers

Deacon
In seconds, at any hour and in the visitor’s language, from your website, files, pasted text and the answers you write
Five9
Its AI agents work through multi-step requests and take action across your business systems

When it can’t answer

Deacon
Says it doesn’t know, asks for the visitor’s email, and emails you when they leave it
Five9
Passes the conversation, with its context, to a live agent

Talking to a person

Deacon
Reply from the dashboard, and your words appear in the visitor’s open chat under your name
Five9
Agents on an agent desktop, with call recording, routing and a dialler

What customers ask about

Deacon
Topics group questions, count who asked and label most of them, on every plan
Five9
AI Insights from Core up, and analytics in the Pro and Enterprise bundles

Tools for staff

Deacon
None needed. You reply from Deacon’s dashboard
Five9
Quality and workforce management on Pro and Enterprise, and AI Agent Assist on Plus and Enterprise

Website analytics

Deacon
Included, from the same script, with visitors, sources, goals, funnels and JavaScript errors
Five9
Not listed in its bundles

Channels

Deacon
A chat widget on your website
Five9
Voice, chat, email, SMS and social messaging, with inbound and outbound calling. Digital leaves out voice

Five9’s bundles, prices and seat minimum are from its pricing page, and what its AI agents do is from its AI agents page, both read on 23 September 2026.

Why Deacon fits a founder better

Start with one person, not 50 seats

Five9’s pricing page sets a minimum of 50 seats under its published prices, which are $119 a seat a month for Digital and $159 for Core. Fifty Digital seats come to $5,950 a month before any usage charges, and that’s a contact centre’s budget. Deacon starts with you. The free plan needs no card and has no end date, each paid plan includes its seats in one price, and every feature is on every plan.

Answers on your website, not in a phone queue

Five9 is built around agents taking calls and chats, and its AI agents lead with voice. If your customers find you through your website, that’s a lot of machinery for the questions they ask. Deacon answers them where they are, in seconds, from your own docs and in the language they write in. There’s no phone line, queue or rota to run.

Know what customers need, from the free plan up

Five9’s AI Insights start with the Core bundle, and its analytics come with the Pro and Enterprise bundles, priced by quote. Deacon keeps every conversation, groups the questions into topics, counts how many people asked, and labels most of them as a feature ask, a bug report, a how-to and so on. It’s on every plan, and the same script shows your visitors, where they came from and which goals they reach.

Nobody on shift, and fewer questions for you

Deacon answers at any hour with nobody watching the chat. When your docs don’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know instead of guessing, asks for the visitor’s email and emails you once they leave it. The question waits for you with an Answer this button, and every answer you write becomes part of what Deacon knows. So it gets better as you go, and needs you less over time.

When Five9 is the better choice

If a team of 50 or more takes your customers’ calls, Five9 is made for it. Every voice seat carries IVR, call routing, recording and a dialler, for inbound and outbound work. Chat, email, SMS and social messaging sit alongside, and bundles from Core up connect to Salesforce, ServiceNow, Dynamics, Zendesk or Oracle. Pro and Enterprise add quality and workforce management, from Five9 or from Verint or Calabrio. Its voice AI agents handle multi-step requests and act across your business systems. Deacon answers on your website and hands the rest to you.

Five9’s pricing has some give in it, too. Its pricing page prices seats per concurrent user, so you pay for the agents working at the same time rather than everyone on the payroll, and it offers named-agent pricing and pay per use through its sales team. Core, at $159 a seat a month, includes 3,000 AI minutes per seat.

If your customers phone a team of 50 or more, choose Five9. If you’re a founder answering them on your website, Deacon is built for you.

Questions about Deacon and Five9

Five9’s pricing page shows five bundles. Digital, for digital channels only, is $119 a seat a month, and Core, with voice and AI essentials, is $159. Plus, Pro and Enterprise are priced by quote. Prices are per concurrent user, usage-based pricing may apply, and there’s a minimum of 50 seats. Bundles with AI include 3,000 AI minutes a seat, plus usage, and the AI agents that answer customers are quoted separately. Deacon has a free plan with every feature, no card and no end date, and each paid plan is one price with its seats included. Deacon’s figures are on the pricing page.

Not at its published prices, which carry a minimum of 50 seats. The same footnote says Five9 also sells through custom quotes, named-agent pricing and pay per use, so a smaller team has to ask its sales team for a price. If you’re a founder answering customers yourself, Deacon is made for your size, and you can start on the free plan today.

No. Deacon answers on your site by itself, day and night. When a visitor leaves their email or asks for a person, you get an email, and you reply from Deacon’s dashboard. There are no queues or rotas, and nobody has to sit watching the chat.

Deacon won’t help with that part. It has no phone line, IVR, call routing or dialler, and no email, SMS or WhatsApp channel. It answers in a chat on your website. If phone support is central to your business, you need a platform that answers calls, and Five9 is built for that.

Find it in the dashboard and type your reply. Deacon stops answering in that conversation, and if the visitor is still in the chat, your words appear there under your first name and your company’s. If they’ve gone, your reply goes to them by email, as long as they left an address in that conversation. One button hands the conversation back to Deacon.

No. Deacon answers questions from your content and passes the rest to you. It takes no actions in other systems, and it always declines questions about a visitor’s own account, invoice or data. Five9’s AI agents verify identity, check your systems and take action on the customer’s behalf.

Deacon writes each answer from the passages it finds in your content for that question, not from what the model absorbed elsewhere. If they don’t cover the question, it tells the visitor it doesn’t know and asks for their email. An answer that comes from a page on your site usually links to it, so customers can see where it came from.

Yes. Sign up free, add your docs, and put the questions your customers ask to Deacon in the Playground. Playground chats never count against your answers. The free plan needs no card, doesn’t expire, and nothing on it is deleted for inactivity.

Try Deacon for free

Add your docs and try Deacon on real customer questions in the Playground before it goes on your site. There’s no seat minimum and no quote to wait for, and the free plan needs no card.

See what Deacon does, compare it with NiCE, or read the plans and prices.

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