Aircall vs Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedAircall compared with Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
Quo costs $15 to $35 a seat with no minimum and includes a number in every seat, with a much better shared inbox and texting experience. Aircall starts at $90 a month for three licences and gives you routing, queues, analytics, a dialer, and 250 integrations. Under five people with a conversational phone need, take Quo; five or more with routing and reporting requirements, take Aircall.
Quo (formerly OpenPhone) compared with Aircall
Aircall is the same shape of product one tier up in seriousness: better routing, a real Power Dialer, deeper Salesforce CTI, 250-plus integrations, and a three-license minimum at $30 a seat annually. Quo is cheaper, has no seat minimum, and has a far better shared-inbox and texting experience. Pick Aircall if you have a support or sales team of five or more who need queues and dialing; pick Quo if you are under five people and the phone is a conversation channel rather than a call centre.
Choose Aircall if
Sales and support teams of roughly five to fifty people who need a reliable phone system that integrates deeply with Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zendesk, handle inbound and outbound in roughly equal measure, and want routing, tagging, and analytics without running a contact centre platform.
Choose Quo (formerly OpenPhone) if
Small businesses, agencies, trades, and founder-led sales teams who need a shared work number with texting, light routing, and CRM logging, and who make dozens of calls a day rather than hundreds. Anyone who wants a business phone that costs less than a lunch per seat and can be live in an afternoon.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Aircall | Quo (formerly OpenPhone) |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Calling | Calling |
| Starting price | $30 per licence per month billed annually, three-licence minimum (free trial) | $15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly) (7 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Per-licence per-month subscription with a three-licence minimum on published plans and a twenty-five-licence minimum on Custom, one number included per plan, unlimited outbound within scope, and metered AI voice and messaging agents on top. | Per-user per-month subscription with a number included in every seat, unlimited US and Canada calling and messaging on all tiers, and usage-based charges only for international calling, extra numbers, automated SMS, and AI credits. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | Yes, self-serve trial through the Get free access signup | 7 days |
| Best for | Sales and support teams of roughly five to fifty people who need a reliable phone system that integrates deeply with Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zendesk, handle inbound and outbound in roughly equal measure, and want routing, tagging, and analytics without running a contact centre platform. | Small businesses, agencies, trades, and founder-led sales teams who need a shared work number with texting, light routing, and CRM logging, and who make dozens of calls a day rather than hundreds. Anyone who wants a business phone that costs less than a lunch per seat and can be live in an afternoon. |
| Setup time | Two to five days for a small team. Numbers provision quickly and integrations are OAuth connections, but IVR trees, routing rules, ring groups, and tag taxonomies deserve a proper design session rather than being improvised. | Under an hour for a solo user and about half a day for a small team. Choose a number, install the apps, set business hours and a ring group, and you are live. Number porting takes longer, typically one to two weeks, and runs in parallel while you use a temporary number. |
| Learning curve | Low for agents and moderate for administrators. The agent app is genuinely simple. Building good routing and a tagging taxonomy that survives contact with a sales team is the part that requires someone to own it. | Near zero. The interface is a messaging app with a keypad, and staff who have never used a business phone system understand it without training. The only genuinely unfamiliar concept is A2P 10DLC registration, which the product walks you through. |
| Platforms | Web app, macOS desktop, Windows desktop, iOS, Android, Salesforce CTI panel, Chrome extension | iOS, Android, macOS desktop app, Windows desktop app, Web app, Chrome extension |
| Compliance | GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, STIR/SHAKEN attestation on US outbound, HIPAA arrangements available on enterprise terms | SOC 2, GDPR, A2P 10DLC carrier registration handled in-product, STIR/SHAKEN attestation on outbound US calls |
| Founded | 2014 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Paris, France, and New York, United States | San Francisco, California, United States (remote-first) |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Aircall
Strengths
- The deepest integration catalogue in small-business phone at more than 250 native connectors, plus a genuine Salesforce CTI rather than a click-to-call shim.
- Routing, IVR, queuing, and mandatory call tagging give a small team real contact centre discipline without contact centre software.
- Advanced analytics with six months of retained history is more reporting depth than most competitors offer below enterprise pricing.
- Mature, well-funded, and stable: eFounders' first unicorn, roughly $226M raised, and more than a decade of continuous operation with offices across four continents.
Limitations
- The Power Dialer is single-line with no parallel mode, no predictive mode, and no answering machine detection, which makes Aircall uncompetitive for high-volume outbound.
- No local presence number pool, no automatic number rotation, and no spam remediation service, so caller ID reputation is your problem to manage externally.
- A three-licence minimum on every published plan excludes solo operators and pairs entirely.
- SSO sits behind a Custom tier with a twenty-five-licence minimum, which is an unusually high bar for a basic security control.
Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
Strengths
- The shared-number inbox with internal comments and assignment is the single best small-team phone experience on the market and is why the product spreads by word of mouth.
- A phone number is included in every seat, unlimited US and Canada calling is on the cheapest tier, and there is no seat minimum, so the entry cost is genuinely $15.
- API access on every plan including Starter, which most competitors reserve for their top tier or a custom contract.
- Setup is measured in minutes, not days: pick a number, install apps, invite the team. No PBX concepts, no dial plans, no reseller.
Limitations
- No dialer of any kind: no power dialing, no parallel lines, no answering machine detection, no local presence rotation. For a real outbound motion this is disqualifying.
- Unlimited calling stops at the US and Canadian border, and international is metered, which makes cost modelling awkward for anyone selling across regions.
- Call recording, CRM logging, and phone menus are all gated behind the Business tier, so the advertised $15 entry price is not the price most buyers actually pay.
- The Scale tier at $35 mostly buys support and call tags. The value curve flattens hard after Business.
Pricing compared
Aircall
Per-licence per-month subscription with a three-licence minimum on published plans and a twenty-five-licence minimum on Custom, one number included per plan, unlimited outbound within scope, and metered AI voice and messaging agents on top.
- Essentials$30
- Professional$50
- CustomCustom
Professional at $50 a licence buys the best integration surface in this category, a proper Salesforce CTI, credible routing, and six months of analytics, which is fair for a mixed sales-and-support team. It is poor value for pure outbound, because $50 buys a single-line dialer where Kixie's roughly $95 buys four lines with human voice detection and JustCall's $49 buys a power dialer with local presence and number rotation. The three-licence floor also means Aircall is never the cheapest option for a small team. Buy it for breadth and reliability, not for dials per hour.
Quo (formerly OpenPhone)
Per-user per-month subscription with a number included in every seat, unlimited US and Canada calling and messaging on all tiers, and usage-based charges only for international calling, extra numbers, automated SMS, and AI credits.
- Starter$15
- Business$23
- Scale$35
At $23 a seat for recording, transcripts, AI summaries, and CRM write-back, Business is the best price-to-capability ratio in small-business phone, and the fact that a number is included rather than billed separately quietly saves another few dollars a seat against Aircall or CloudTalk. The value case collapses only in two places: heavy international traffic, which is metered, and outbound dialing, which does not exist here at all. Judged as a phone system for a company under 30 people, it is underpriced. Judged as a sales dialer, it is not competing.
Editorial verdict on each
Aircall
Category LeaderAircall is the safest business phone system a growing team can buy and the wrong tool for a dialing floor. Professional at $50 a licence gives you a genuine Salesforce CTI, 250-plus integrations, smart routing, mandatory call tagging, six months of analytics, and AI transcription, which is the right package for a company where the phone serves both sales and support and needs to plug into everything else. What it does not give you is throughput: one line at a time, no answering machine detection, no local presence rotation, no spam remediation. Add a three-licence minimum, per-number billing, metered AI agents, and SSO stranded behind twenty-five licences, and the effective cost lands well above the sticker. Buy Aircall for reliability and integration depth in a five-to-fifty-person company. If your quarter depends on dials per hour, buy Kixie, CloudTalk, or PhoneBurner instead.
Read the full Aircall profileQuo (formerly OpenPhone)
Quo is the best small-business phone system you can buy for the money, and it is not an outbound sales tool. The shared-number inbox, the included number in every seat, the absence of a seat minimum, and API access on the cheapest plan add up to a product that a two-person company can adopt in an afternoon and never think about again. Business at $23 with recording, transcripts, AI summaries, and HubSpot or Salesforce write-back is the tier to buy. What you do not get is any dialer, any local presence rotation, any spam remediation, or unlimited calling beyond North America, and those absences are the whole difference between this category's phone systems and its dialers. If your reps work lists, buy Kixie or PhoneBurner. If customers call you and you call them back, buy Quo and stop shopping.
Read the full Quo (formerly OpenPhone) profileAircall profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Quo (formerly OpenPhone) last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.