Ranking auto dialers on feature counts decides very little. Two products with identical feature lists can still produce completely different days for a rep, because four things decide the outcome: the dialling mode, where the call record lands afterwards, whether caller ID can be separated per client, and which tier the dialer is actually on.
Below is a ranked list with a "best for" label on each entry, a comparison table with published prices and third-party review aggregates, and then the part a listicle usually skips: what the compliance rules really say, and what answering machine detection actually returns.
Pricing note. Every price below was read off that vendor's own live pricing page on 15 September 2026. No price here comes from a third-party listing. Where a vendor publishes more than one billing basis, each figure says which one it is: prices marked billed annually are only available on an annual commitment. Where a vendor publishes a single basis, the figure is a monthly rate, and the entry states the unit it is charged per. Two vendors on this list publish no price at all, and one renders no figure on its own page. Those three are flagged rather than filled in with a guess or with someone else's number.
Ranking note. The ranking is ours and it is editorial. It is ordered by how well each tool fits the job stated in its label, not by a score. Inflowave makes the list and sits where we think it honestly sits. Where a competitor is better for your shape of team, the entry says so.
The best auto dialer software, ranked
1. PhoneBurner - best dedicated power dialer
The purest power dialer here and genuinely good at the job. Published pricing is $140 per user per month billed annually on Standard, $165 per user per month billed annually on Professional and $183 per user per month billed annually on Premium. Billed monthly those same three tiers become $165, $195 and $215 per user per month. There is no cheaper entry tier; $140 on an annual commitment is the floor.
What you are buying is a calling product that syncs to a CRM. The CRM stays the system of record and the dialer stays a separate subscription, which is fine at five seats and expensive at fifteen. If your whole business is a phone room, nothing on this page is going to argue you out of it.
2. Close - best CRM-native dialer for a single-company sales team
Close is a CRM with the dialer inside rather than a phone system with a CRM connector. Four per-user tiers, quoted here as price per user per month: Solo at $19 billed monthly or $9 billed annually, Essentials at $49 or $35, Growth at $109 or $99, Scale at $149 or $139. The second figure in each pair is the per-user monthly rate on an annual commitment, not a yearly total. The built-in power dialer starts at Growth; the predictive dialer is Scale only. Calling is billed as usage passed through at cost, which Close states at roughly $0.02 per minute, with lines from about $1 per line per month.
Close deserves credit. Usage-based calling passed through near cost is the fairest pricing model on this page, and publishing a per-minute number at all puts it ahead of most of the category. The catch for an agency is that dialling starts at the $99 to $109 seat, and per-seat pricing does not care that three of your seats only call for one client.
3. Convoso - best predictive dialer for a high-volume call centre
Convoso does not publish pricing. Its pricing page states that solutions are customised per customer based on seats, features and integrations, that annual plans are primary with a discount currently advertised at 20 percent, and that there is no free trial (live demos instead). If you want a number, you have to ask for it.
This is a contact-centre platform built for dozens to hundreds of agents against large lists. It will out-dial anything else here. It also brings the compliance surface described further down, plus a sales cycle and a contract.
4. CallTools - best-reviewed predictive option for a smaller room
Also quote-only: the pricing page is a form asking for company, team size, call volume and industry before it will produce an estimate. It is tied for the highest third-party rating in the table below, level with PhoneBurner at 4.8 out of 5, and it reaches that rating on the smaller review base of the two (156 against PhoneBurner's 176). A rating on 156 reviews moves further on a handful of outliers than one on a larger base, which is worth knowing before you lean on it.
5. Inflowave - best for an agency dialling for several clients from one CRM
A one-call-at-a-time power dialer built inside the CRM, priced as part of the platform rather than as a separate per-seat calling subscription, with phone numbers and caller ID held per client workspace. Calls, recordings, transcripts, outcomes and the follow-up all write to the same lead record the DMs, emails and deal stage already live on, so there is no reconciliation step between a phone system's export and a CRM activity feed.
Plans are $27 (Influencer), $149 (Business), $297 (Pro) and $497 (Max) per month at the account level, not per seat. The caps matter more than the headline for this use case: client workspaces and connected social accounts are 1 on Influencer, 1 on Business, 10 on Pro and 50 on Max; team seats are 1, 1, 5 and uncapped on Max; contacts are 2,000, 1,000, 10,000 and uncapped on Max. If you run more than ten client accounts, Max is the tier to model, not Pro. There is no free tier, but every paid plan, Influencer included, carries a seven-day free trial.
It is not predictive and not parallel. One line per rep. If four hundred dials a day per agent against a purchased list is the model, Convoso or CallTools will beat us and you should buy one of those.
6. GoHighLevel - best if your agency already runs on it
Priced at the agency level rather than per seat: Starter $97, Unlimited $297 and Agency Pro $497, each per month billed monthly, or $970, $2,970 and $4,970 per year billed annually. All three tiers carry a 14-day free trial. Sub-accounts are unlimited from the $297 tier; what is billed per sub-account is a set of add-ons, for example $50 or $97 per month per sub-account for the AI Employee add-on, $30 per month per sub-account for Online Listings and $49 per month per sub-account for the branded client portal. On Unlimited and Agency Pro, GoHighLevel states those add-on costs can be rebilled to clients with a markup, so they are not automatically unrecovered agency cost. Branding the desktop web app with your own logo is presented on their page as a platform capability rather than a tier feature; the white-label mobile app is the separate item, a flat $497 per month billed monthly at the agency level, not per sub-account. What the $497 agency tier itself adds is SaaS Mode, automated sub-account creation and rebilling with markup.
Agency-level rather than per-seat pricing is the thing GoHighLevel got right for this market. Running a separate dialer subscription alongside it reintroduces the split-system problem the platform was meant to remove: two activity logs, two exports, and a reconciliation step between them.
7. Aircall - best if you need a full phone system as well as a dialer
Read the feature split before the price: Power Dialer and Voicemail Drop are on Professional, not Essentials, and both plans carry a three-licence minimum, with a Custom tier from 25 licences. That much is on Aircall's own page.
The price is not. As of 15 September 2026, Aircall's pricing page renders its per-licence figures client-side and displays a placeholder instead of a number, so there is no vendor-published figure to quote here, on either billing basis. We have deliberately not filled the gap with a third-party number: aggregator listings carry figures Aircall itself does not publish, and we do not quote a price a vendor has not stated. Get the quote in writing, ask for it per licence, and price the three-licence floor rather than one seat.
8. RingCentral, Dialpad, JustCall - phone systems first
RingCentral, Dialpad and JustCall all compete for auto dialer searches and all publish pricing. They are unified communications platforms where outbound dialling is one mode among many. If you need desk phones, extensions and inbound routing for thirty people, that breadth is worth paying for, and a sales-only dialer is not a substitute. Prices are not quoted here because their tier structures change what is included, so a figure copied into an article can be stale by the time you read it; read the live page.
Auto dialer software compared: price, dialling mode and CRM write-back
Ratings and review counts are Capterra listings read 15 September 2026, used because G2 blocks automated reading and mixing two aggregators produces numbers that cannot be compared. Review counts move daily. A 4.8 on 156 reviews is not the same claim as a 4.7 on 164; small bases swing on a handful of outliers.
| Product | Best for | Dialling mode | Entry price for the dialer (15 Sep 2026) | Capterra rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PhoneBurner | Dedicated phone room | Power | $140 per user/mo billed annually ($165 billed monthly) | 4.8 / 5 | 176 |
| Close | CRM-native sales team | Power (Growth), Predictive (Scale) | $99 per user/mo billed annually ($109 billed monthly) | 4.7 / 5 | 164 |
| Convoso | High-volume call centre | Predictive, multi-line | Not published, quote only | 4.5 / 5 | 395 |
| CallTools | Smaller predictive room | Predictive | Not published, quote only | 4.8 / 5 | 156 |
| Inflowave | Agency dialling for multiple clients | Power | Included in plan; $297/mo billed monthly covers 10 client workspaces | Not listed | - |
| GoHighLevel | Agencies already on the platform | Varies by setup | $97/mo agency-level, billed monthly | 4.2 / 5 | 89 |
| Aircall | Teams needing a full phone system | Power (Professional tier) | No figure published on vendor page; 3-licence minimum | 4.2 / 5 | 466 |
Inflowave has no Capterra listing, so the cell is empty rather than filled with a number from somewhere else. Treat the absence as what it is: less third-party evidence than PhoneBurner or Close, and a reason to run the trial yourself.
Dialling modes, and why "auto dialer" hides the decision
"Auto dialer" is a family name, not a product type. Underneath it are four behaviours with different consequences.
A preview dialer shows the rep the record and waits for them to start the call. Highest quality per conversation, lowest volume.
A power dialer places one call at a time from a queue and moves to the next the moment the current one ends. No silent pause on answer, because there is always exactly one rep waiting for exactly one call.
A progressive dialer does the same but starts the next call automatically when an agent becomes free, ratio fixed at one to one.
A predictive dialer places several calls per available agent and predicts who will be free. Connect rate goes up, and so does the chance that a human answers before an agent is available.
Auto dialer compliance: the layer that decides more than the feature list
Under the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule, an outbound call is legally abandoned if a person answers and the telemarketer does not connect the call to a sales representative within two seconds of the person's completed greeting. The safe harbour requires technology that ensures abandonment of no more than three percent of all calls answered by a person, measured over a single campaign if it runs under 30 days or over each successive 30-day period, and requires the phone to ring for at least fifteen seconds or four rings before an unanswered call is disconnected. The text is in 16 CFR 310.4, with an FTC plain-language compliance guide alongside it.
Now read that as a buying criterion, carefully, because this point is easy to overstate in both directions.
A three percent ceiling only bites if you dial more lines than you have agents. A single-line power dialer never places a call it has no agent for, so it does not generate abandoned calls in the TSR sense. That is a structural property, not a quality claim.
What it is not is evidence that predictive dialing is non-compliant. The TSR explicitly contemplates predictive dialing and provides a safe harbour for it; the safe harbour is what sets the terms, requiring the rate to be held under three percent and the records kept to demonstrate it. The honest framing is about where the work sits: with a predictive dialer, staying compliant is an ongoing operational discipline you have to staff, monitor and evidence. With one line per rep, that particular obligation does not arise. Which trade is right depends on whether you have someone whose job is watching the abandonment rate. In a twelve-person agency, usually you do not. In a two-hundred-seat call centre, you do, and the extra connect rate pays for them.
None of the above is legal advice, and abandonment is only one rule among several.
Separately, TCPA rules on automated dialling live in 47 CFR 64.1200, and the Supreme Court narrowed what counts as an automatic telephone dialling system in Facebook v. Duguid, holding the device must have the capacity to store or produce numbers using a random or sequential number generator (full opinion). A dialer calling a list you uploaded is not generating numbers randomly, which matters, but it does not exempt you from Do Not Call rules, consent requirements for prerecorded messages, or state law. Scrubbing against the Do Not Call Registry is your obligation, not your vendor's.
Answering machine detection is a probability, not a fact
Answering machine detection turns up on feature lists without a stated output contract beside it.
Underneath our own dialer is carrier-level detection. Twilio, whose implementation we use, documents the possible results explicitly: human, machine_start, fax or unknown in the fast mode, and machine_end_beep, machine_end_silence, machine_end_other, human, fax or unknown when you ask it to wait for the end of the greeting. Twilio's own documentation states the engine "will not always return the right answer" and that a short voicemail greeting can be misread.
So the evaluation question is not "does it have AMD". It is: when detection is wrong, does a rep get dropped into a voicemail greeting, and does the system store what it guessed so you can audit it later. Any vendor who cannot answer the second half is storing a decision it cannot show you. Ask to see a call record with the detection result on it during the trial.
Auto dialer software FAQ
Is an automatic dialer illegal?
No, but it is regulated. The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule caps abandoned calls at three percent of calls answered by a person and requires connection to a representative within two seconds of the greeting, with a safe harbour that predictive dialers are expected to operate inside. TCPA rules sit in 47 CFR 64.1200, and the Supreme Court in Facebook v. Duguid limited the statutory definition of an autodialer to devices that store or produce numbers using a random or sequential number generator. Do Not Call scrubbing and consent for prerecorded messages remain your responsibility.
How much do auto dialers cost?
Published prices vary by an order of magnitude, and several vendors publish nothing. Checked 15 September 2026: PhoneBurner starts at $140 per user per month billed annually, or $165 per user per month billed monthly. Close lists $99 per user per month billed annually on Growth, the first tier with a built-in power dialer, or $109 per user per month billed monthly, plus usage-based calling at roughly $0.02 per minute. GoHighLevel is $97 to $497 per month billed monthly at the agency level rather than per seat, or $970 to $4,970 per year billed annually. Aircall's own page displayed no figure on the date checked. Convoso and CallTools do not publish pricing at all and quote after a consultation.
What is the cheapest auto dialer?
Among the tools compared here and on prices published by the vendor, Close's Growth tier at $99 per user per month billed annually is the cheapest that names a built-in power dialer, with calling billed separately as usage. Aircall's Professional tier may be cheaper per licence, but Aircall published no figure on the date checked, on either billing basis, and enforces a three-licence minimum, so it cannot be ranked on a verified number. Cheaper entry tiers exist across the category but generally provide click-to-dial rather than queued dialling. Platform-priced tools can work out lower per head, because the cost attaches to the account rather than to every seat.
Is there a free autodialer?
Free options exist, mostly as mobile apps or limited trials. Check three things before relying on one: CRM write-back, per-client caller ID separation, and an audit trail of what detection decided. For one person calling a short list, their absence may be acceptable. For a team where reporting has to be defensible, the cost reappears as manual data entry. On trials specifically: GoHighLevel publishes a 14-day free trial, and Convoso states it offers no free trial. Inflowave has no free tier, but every paid plan, Influencer included, carries a seven-day free trial.
What is the best auto dialer?
There is no single answer, because the mode decides the tool. For high-volume call centres with agents to keep busy and someone accountable for the abandonment rate, a predictive platform such as Convoso or CallTools wins outright. For a dedicated phone room, PhoneBurner is the refined specialist. For a sales team that already lives in a CRM, Close keeps the record in one place. For an agency dialling for several clients that need separate numbers and separate reporting, that is the case Inflowave is built for. Pick the mode your headcount and compliance posture support first, then compare vendors inside it.
How do I set up an auto dialer?
The common sequence: connect or buy a phone number and verify it for outbound calling, import or filter the contact list, scrub it against the Do Not Call registry and your own suppression list, record the voicemail message you intend to drop, write the script and the objection handling, set the outcome options your reps will pick from, and map those outcomes to CRM tags or pipeline stages. Then run a small test batch and listen to the recordings before scaling the list.
What are the common problems with auto dialers?
Four recur. Answering machine detection is probabilistic, so reps occasionally get dropped into a greeting. Predictive modes create abandoned calls and the silent pause that goes with them unless the rate is actively managed. Calls logged in a separate phone system drift out of sync with the CRM, producing two different activity counts. And caller ID reused across clients or burned by high-volume dialling gets flagged by carriers, which quietly destroys answer rates before anyone notices.
If you are building the outbound motion as well as choosing the tool, the companion reading is our guides to outbound sales and cold calling.
