Comparing Cresta and Five9? Both are Contact Center & CCaaS and Voice & Phone AI tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at how they price, what they integrate with, and when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
| Attribute | Cresta | Five9 |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Paid · Custom | Paid · $119/seat/mo |
| Founded | 2017 | 2001 |
| Categories | Agent Assist & Copilots Contact Center & CCaaS QA & Conversation Analytics Voice & Phone AI | Contact Center & CCaaS Enterprise Voice & Phone AI |
| Integrations | Salesforce Five9 Genesys Amazon Connect NICE Avaya | Salesforce ServiceNow Microsoft Dynamics 365 Zendesk Oracle Microsoft Teams Zoom RingCentral |
Cresta started from a simple observation: in every contact center, a handful of agents dramatically outperform the rest, and everything they do differently is sitting in the call recordings. Founded in 2017 by Zayd Enam, Tim Shi, and Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor behind Google X and Udacity, Cresta mines those conversations to learn what the best performers do, then coaches every agent in real time: suggested responses, knowledge, and guidance appearing on screen during live calls and chats.
That real-time layer is still the heart of the product, but the platform now spans the full loop. Conversation intelligence gives leaders visibility into every interaction, automated quality management replaces sampled QA scorecards, a training simulator lets agents rehearse against AI customers, and autonomous virtual agents take the high-volume calls that never needed a human. It plugs into the major contact-center stacks, including Five9, Genesys, Amazon Connect, NICE, and Avaya, so it layers onto what you run rather than replacing it.
Cresta sells to serious operations: United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Cox Communications, Marriott, and Brinks Home are named customers, and investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Greylock have backed it to the tune of roughly $276 million, most recently a $125 million Series D in late 2024 that valued the company around $1.6 billion. Pricing is enterprise and quote-based, with no public numbers.
Cresta is the pick when your strategy is making human agents better rather than replacing them, especially in revenue-bearing conversations like sales and retention where a slightly better sentence is worth real money. If you want humans out of the loop entirely, look at the autonomous-agent specialists; if you want your hundred agents performing like your best ten, Cresta was built for exactly that.
Read the full Cresta listing → · See Cresta alternatives →
Five9 is a cloud contact center platform, the kind that runs the whole operation: inbound and outbound voice, chat, email, SMS, and social messaging, plus routing, quality management, and workforce tools. Its Genius AI suite threads through everything, with voice and digital AI Agents that resolve customer conversations on their own, AI Agent Assist that transcribes calls and coaches live reps, and AI Summaries, Insights, and Knowledge doing the after-call cleanup. In 2025 Five9 pushed hard into what it calls Agentic CX, adding an Agentic Engine plus AI Trust and Governance controls.
The company has been at this since 2001, when it started in San Ramon, California, betting that contact centers belonged in the cloud back when they lived in server closets. It went public on NASDAQ in April 2014 at 7 dollars a share under the ticker FIVN. In 2021 Zoom agreed to buy Five9 for roughly 14.7 billion dollars in stock, then shareholders balked and the deal was terminated that September. Longtime CEO Mike Burkland retired, handing the job to Amit Mathradas in February 2026. Today Five9 claims more than 3,000 customers, including Alaska Airlines, PUMA, Omaha Steaks, Wyndham, and Exact Sciences.
Five9 publishes exactly two prices. Digital costs 119 dollars per concurrent seat per month for digital channels only, and Core costs 159 dollars with voice included. The Plus, Pro, and Enterprise bundles are quote only, and everything carries a 50 seat minimum plus usage based charges. Bundled AI covers 3,000 minutes per seat before metered fees kick in, and the serious stuff, AI Agents and virtual agents, is sold as add-ons through sales. Budget accordingly.
Choose Five9 if you run a genuine contact center with 50 or more seats and want voice, digital channels, and AI under one roof from a vendor that will still exist next year. Skip it if you are a small team wanting a simple helpdesk: Zendesk or Intercom will fit better, cost less, and skip the sales calls.
Submit your AI customer support software to get listed alongside these tools and show up in head-to-head comparisons.