Aircall vs. RingCentral: How do they compare?

Sophie Gane10 Minutes • Last updated on

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TL;DR

Here’s a quick summary of how Aircall and RingCentral compare across their core capabilities:

Aspect

Aircall

RingCentral

Integrations

Extensive out-of-the-box integrations for sales, support, and CRM tools

Broad integrations spanning collaboration and productivity suites

AI capabilities

Built-in AI, with seamless third-party AI integrations

Proprietary AI for call analytics, transcription, and automation

Enterprise readiness

Strong SMB and mid-market focus, scalable to enterprise with API flexibility

Designed for organisations of all sizes, with advanced compliance features

Who this comparison is for

This guide is designed for call centres, contact centres, and support teams evaluating cloud-based communications. Whether you’re a small business, mid-market company, or enterprise, this breakdown will help you identify the best fit.

Aircall and RingCentral are both industry leaders in unified communications, offering comprehensive platforms for business calling, video conferencing, and messaging. While both solutions deliver essential VoIP features, their core strengths differ: Aircall excels in seamless integrations and reliable call quality, while RingCentral puts a strong emphasis on its proprietary AI and unified communications suite.

If your team relies on integrating with a range of business apps, especially for sales and support, Aircall stands out for its flexibility and depth. By contrast, RingCentral is great for those seeking an all-in-one collaboration platform. This comparison covers features, pricing, integrations, and ease of use to help you choose the right platform for your organisation.

Aircall vs. RingCentral: Side-by-side overview

Before we dive into the details, here is a quick summary of how these two platforms stack up against each other.

Feature

Aircall

RingCentral

Primary focus

Voice-centric for sales and support teams

Broad UCaaS (video, message, phone)

Ease of use

High (designed for immediate adoption)

Medium (steeper learning curve)

Setup time

Usually same-day

Can take weeks for complex setups

Integrations

200+ deep integrations (CRM/helpdesk focus)

300–500+ (many via third-party/Zapier)

AI capabilities

AI Assist, AI Voice Agent, Call Scoring

AI assistant, video highlights, meeting summaries

Pricing model

Transparent per-user pricing

Tiered packages (Essential to Ultra)

Best for

Sales and support teams using CRMs

General business communication and internal chat

What is Aircall?

Aircall is an AI-powered customer communications platform and call centre software designed specifically for modern sales and support teams. It prioritises ease of use, instant setup, and powerful integrations with the essential business tools you already use, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk.

Unlike traditional legacy systems, Aircall operates entirely in the cloud. This means you can set up a professional business phone system in minutes, not months. It empowers teams to have better conversations by surfacing context right when the phone rings.

Key features that make Aircall superior for business-critical teams include:

  • Power Dialer: Boosts agent productivity by automating dialing from a pre-selected list of numbers within the CRM. It eliminates manual entry errors and significantly increases the volume of daily outbound calls.

  • AI Assist suite: Aircall's conversation intelligence software includes capabilities like AI-powered call summaries, transcription, and key topic detection. For more advanced needs, the AI voice agent can handle inbound calls autonomously, qualifying leads or resolving simple support tickets.

  • Call coaching: Managers can use call whispering and live call monitoring to train agents in real time. This ensures quality control without interrupting the flow of the conversation.

  • Advanced analytics: A robust analytics dashboard allows leaders to track team performance, missed call rates, and other critical KPIs to make data-driven decisions.

Pros

  • Over 200 one-click integrations with CRMs, helpdesks, and essential business tools

  • Advanced features like power dialer and real-time coaching are intuitive to use

  • User-friendly interface that requires minimal training

  • Reliable call quality and global presence with numbers available in 100+ countries

Cons

  • Pricing may be higher than basic VoIP providers for advanced call centre features

  • Some advanced AI features are tier-dependent

What is RingCentral?

RingCentral is a cloud-based unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform combining business phone, messaging, video, and contact centre solutions. It is widely used by businesses of all sizes worldwide and is designed to replace separate communication tools with a single, integrated system.

RingCentral creates a "message, video, phone" ecosystem. It’s a strong contender for organisations that want to replace their Zoom, Slack, and phone system with one vendor. Their recent focus has shifted heavily toward AI assistants, offering features like automatic call transcriptions, sentiment analysis, and AI for video meeting summaries.

However, for teams specifically looking for a small business phone system or specialised sales software, RingCentral's broad approach can sometimes feel cluttered.

Pros

  • All-in-one communication platform (phone, messaging, video, contact centre)

  • Robust AI features integrated across video meetings and internal messaging

  • Large ecosystem of 500+ integrations and developer tooling

Cons

  • Higher pricing, especially when adding advanced AI and contact centre features

  • Complex setup and steep learning curve due to extensive functionality

  • Some advanced features may be restricted to higher-tier plans or need the "RingCX" add-on

Aircall vs. RingCentral: Detailed features comparison

When deciding between RingCentral or Aircall, the devil is in the details. Here’s how they compare across critical business categories.

Communication scope

Aircall is voice-centric. It focuses on being the best phone system for external communication. It handles SMS and integrates with WhatsApp, but it leaves internal chat to tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams; platforms your team likely already uses.

RingCentral aims to be everything to everyone. It combines fax, video conferencing, team chat, and phone into one app. This is great if you want to consolidate vendor spend, but it can lead to a bloated interface for agents who just need to call and log data.

AI capabilities

AI is the buzzword of 2026, but how is it actually applied?

Aircall applies AI deeply to sales and support workflows. Our AI Voice Agent can autonomously handle inbound traffic, while AI Assist provides concise call summaries that log directly to your CRM. This saves agents valuable time on after-call work (ACW).

RingCentral applies AI broadly. You get meeting summaries for video calls, AI drafting for team messages, and sentiment analysis.

Call centre features

For operations leads and support managers, this is the most critical comparison section.

  • Routing and IVR: Both offer smart routing and interactive voice response (IVR). Aircall's visual editor makes modifying these routes accessible to non-technical managers. RingCentral often requires IT intervention for complex changes.

  • Coaching: Aircall offers Call Whispering (speaking to the agent without the customer hearing) on most plans. RingCentral reserves some supervisor features for their dedicated contact centre (RingCX) plans, which are separate from their standard business license.

  • Analytics: Aircall provides real-time dashboards out-of-the-box. RingCentral has powerful analytics, but extracting the specific data sales managers need often requires navigating a more complex reporting suite.

Team collaboration tools

Aircall integrates with the collaboration tools you already have. For example, Aircall's shared inbox allows teams to comment on calls and assign follow-ups, and the Slack integration notifies channels of missed calls or specific events.

RingCentral includes a native team messaging app (similar to Slack). If you do not have an internal chat tool, this is a value-add.

Summary

It’s a win for Aircall regarding specialised performance. While RingCentral offers solid AI-driven unified communication, Aircall's extensive feature set is specifically designed to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of sales and support teams, making it the more powerful business tool for revenue-generating teams.

Aircall vs. RingCentral: Pricing comparison

Understanding the difference between RingCentral and Aircall pricing structures is vital for calculating total cost of ownership.

RingCentral pricing

RingCentral uses a tiered model (core, advanced, ultra).

  • Core: Basic phone and message features

  • Advanced: Adds automatic call recording and integrations (note: integrations are often gated here)

  • Ultra: Adds unlimited storage and device analytics

  • Hidden costs: To get true contact centre features (like advanced routing or supervisor tools), you often need to upgrade to "RingCX," which is a different price point entirely

Aircall pricing

Aircall offers a more transparent, per-user model typically divided into essentials, professional, and custom.

  • Essentials: Includes IVR, call recording, and basic integrations

  • Professional: Unlocks the power dialer, Salesforce integration, and advanced analytics

  • Custom: Tailored for enterprise needs with unlimited international calling options

  • Value: Aircall includes many "enterprise" features (like IVR and basic routing) in lower tiers compared to RingCentral

Summary

We believe it’s a tie, but with a strong lean toward Aircall for value. While RingCentral suggests a lower starting price, critical business features are often gated behind upgrades. Aircall provides a better return on investment for growing businesses that rely on their phone system to drive revenue.

Integrations comparison: Aircall vs. RingCentral

Integrations are where the Aircall vs. RingCentral comparison becomes most interesting.

RingCentral: Quantity

RingCentral boasts over 500 integrations. However, many of these are reliant on third-party connectors or open APIs that need developer resources to maintain. Their ecosystem is vast because they connect in a way with everything, from printer software to niche industry tools.

Aircall: Depth and quality

Aircall focuses on deep, native integrations with the 200+ essential business tools that matter most.

  • Salesforce: The Aircall Salesforce integration allows for lightning-fast click-to-dial, automatic logging, and screen pops that show customer data instantly.

  • HubSpot: The Aircall HubSpot integration is consistently rated as one of the best in the HubSpot marketplace, syncing tags, recordings, and deal status automatically.

Summary

RingCentral has the edge when it comes to quantity, but relies on third-party Zapier for many of its integrations. Aircall wins on the quality and depth of the integrations that run your business.

Ease of use comparison: Aircall vs. RingCentral

Adoption is the biggest hurdle for new software. If your team cannot use it, they will not use it.

Aircall

Aircall is designed for the modern user. The interface is clean, intuitive, and mimics the consumer apps your team uses daily. Onboarding a new agent takes minutes. You invite them via email, they download the app, and they are ready to take calls. The Aircall University resource provides excellent training materials to make sure success.

RingCentral

RingCentral is powerful but complex. Because it houses video, messaging, and phone in one app, the navigation can be overwhelming. Configuring the backend often requires a system administrator or IT professional, whereas Aircall can be managed by a sales or support team lead.

Summary

Aircall has the edge. Its design is laser-focused on the tasks sales and support teams perform daily, making it incredibly easy to learn and master without extensive training.

Security and global presence

For enterprise call centre software, security is non-negotiable.

Both platforms are strong here.

  • Compliance: Both are GDPR and SOC 2 compliant. Aircall also supports HIPAA compliance for healthcare clients.

  • Reliability: Both offer high uptime guarantees (typically 99.99%).

  • Global reach: Aircall makes it exceptionally easy to purchase local numbers in over 100 countries instantly. RingCentral also has global reach but can involve more paperwork for international number provisioning.

Aircall vs. other competitors

If you are looking at a broader Talkdesk vs. RingCentral vs. Aircall comparison, it helps to know where they sit in the market.

  • Talkdesk: A heavy-duty CCaaS solution. Great for massive enterprises with 500+ agents but often too expensive and complex for mid-market or SMBs.

  • Outreach: Excellent for sales engagement but lacks the robust inbound support capabilities of Aircall.

  • Zoom Phone: A simple add-on for Zoom users, but lacks the deep CRM integrations required for serious sales and support workflows.

Frequently asked questions

Is Aircall better than RingCentral for sales teams?

For most sales teams, yes. Aircall's power dialer, deep CRM integrations (especially with Salesforce and HubSpot), and sales-specific analytics make it a superior tool for high-velocity sales environments.

What’s the main difference between RingCentral and Aircall?

The main difference is focus. RingCentral is a unified communications (UCaaS) platform that combines video, chat, and phone. Aircall is a dedicated voice platform optimised for integrating with other business software (CCaaS/voice focus).

Is Aircall or RingCentral more secure?

Both platforms adhere to strict industry standards, including SOC 2 and GDPR compliance. Both are trusted by enterprise organisations globally to handle sensitive data.

Does Aircall integrate with my stack?

Likely, yes. Aircall has over 200 native integrations. You can check the specifics, such as the Aircall-HubSpot integration or others, on their marketplace.

How does Aircall’s AI compare to RingCentral’s for real-time call management?

Aircall's AI is built for actionable business insights, such as transcribing calls for CRM records and coaching agents. RingCentral's AI is broader, covering video meeting highlights and chat drafting. For call management specifically, Aircall's tools are more specialised for improving agent performance.

Which should you pick?

In the Aircall vs. RingCentral debate, the "best" option depends on your goals.

If you are looking for a general-purpose tool to replace your office desk phones, Zoom account, and Slack workspace with a single vendor, RingCentral is a strong contender. It is a capable "jack of all trades" for internal communication.

However, if your business depends on phone conversations to drive revenue and delight customers, Aircall is the superior choice.

Aircall wins for businesses that need:

  • Unparalleled integration capabilities with tools like Salesforce and HubSpot

  • Powerful features designed for performance, such as the power dialer and AI Assist

  • Ease of use that ensures your team actually adopts the tool

  • Flexibility to scale support and sales operations without IT headaches

Don't let your phone system be the bottleneck in your growth. See the difference for yourself.

Book a demo today and see first-hand why modern teams are switching to Aircall.


Published on January 6, 2026.

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