TL;DR: We put Aircall and Swyx VoIP side by side. Here’s what we found.
We look after phone systems for a living, so when a customer asked us how our Swyx VoIP offering stacked up against Aircall, we decided to do the comparison properly — feature by feature, then line by line on price. We used Aircall’s own quoted pricing, at their best available discount, so the numbers below aren’t guesswork. This is what came back.
The short version: on the capability most businesses actually use, it’s close to a dead heat — and on price, it isn’t close at all. There’s one area where Aircall does more than we do, and we’ll be straight about that too. Here’s the detail.
Aircall prices per user, per month, on a 12-month commitment. The Professional licence lists at £55 per user per month and covers unlimited UK-to-UK calling, live monitoring dashboards, advanced analytics, IVR and smart routing, hunt groups, queue callbacks, and power dialling. AI is included at this tier — call summaries, topic recognition, sentiment analysis and talk-to-listen ratios. This is the tier we compare directly against.
Above it sits a separate add-on, AI Assist Pro, at £40 per user per month. This is a different kind of tool — real-time agent assist: live transcription during the call, live playbooks and prompts, competitor insights and objection handling surfaced as the rep talks, plus custom call summaries and automated scoring logged to your CRM. It’s a genuinely capable sales-enablement layer, and it takes the list price to £95 per user. We’ll come back to it, because it’s the one area where Aircall does something we don’t.
Aircall includes one phone number free of charge. Every additional direct dial number is £5 per number per month — so a 20-person team wanting a DDI each is another £100 a month at list. International calling is either billed per minute or bundled, and those bundles are charged per user, per month, from £8 (EMEA Light & North America) up to £30 (World+) — whether that user calls abroad or not. Volume discounts of 10–20% are available, but they’re tied to user count and a 12-month commitment.
Swyx is an award-winning cloud-based PBX we’ve been deploying and managing for over 20 years. It’s hosted in UK data centres and integrates with PC, Mac, mobile and tablet. Two tiers, both priced per user, per month:
That’s the whole price list. Unlimited UK mobile calling is in the base tier, not an upsell — which matters more than it sounds, because mobile is where most UK businesses spend their minutes.
The straight comparison: Swyx AI Pro at £18 is the equivalent of Aircall’s Professional licence at £55 — the same category of AI-enabled cloud phone system, at under a third of the price. What Swyx doesn’t do is replicate Aircall’s AI Assist Pro real-time agent-assist layer. If your team relies on live prompts and playbooks being fed to reps mid-call, that’s a specific capability Aircall offers and we don’t. For the large majority of businesses that want a capable phone system with call recording, transcription, scoring and analytics — but not a live sales-coaching overlay — the two are a fair match.
This was the part that surprised the customer who asked. Feature for feature, the two systems line up almost exactly — same calling, same routing, same recording, same call intelligence and analytics. There’s one exception, which we’ve flagged in the table and come back to below. Here’s the full breakdown.
| Capability | Aircall (Professional) | Swyx from Knowall IT |
|---|---|---|
| Licence cost per user / month | £55 (list) | £12 |
| Equivalent AI tier, per user / month | £55 (Professional, list) | £18 (Swyx AI Pro) |
| Real-time agent assist (live prompts & playbooks) | AI Assist Pro add-on (+£40) | Not offered |
| Unlimited UK landline calling | Yes | Yes |
| Unlimited UK mobile calling | Yes | Yes — included in the £12 tier |
| Cloud-hosted PBX | Yes | Yes — UK data centres |
| Softphone on desktop, mobile and tablet | Yes | Yes |
| Desk handsets | App-first deployment | Handsets, softphone, or both |
| IVR, smart routing, hunt groups, queue callbacks | Yes | Yes |
| Portal and reporting | Yes | Yes |
| Live wallboards and real-time agent status | Yes | Yes — AI Pro tier |
| Call transcription, scoring and summaries | Yes — full transcription/scoring in AI Assist Pro (+£40) | Yes — included in the £18 AI Pro tier |
| Call recording, search and bulk export | Yes | Yes — AI Pro tier |
| CDR records and scheduled reports | Yes | Yes — AI Pro tier |
| CRM and Outlook integration | Yes | Yes |
| Microsoft Teams integration | Yes | Yes |
| Fully managed by your IT provider | No — self-serve SaaS | Yes — managed by Knowall IT |
| UK-based support team | Global support model | London-based, ISO 27001 certified |
| Interface | Newer, app-style UI | Established UI — built for control, not for show |
Two rows are worth being straight about. The first is real-time agent assist — live prompts and playbooks fed to reps during a call. Aircall offers it as a £40 add-on; we don’t offer it at all. If that’s central to how your sales floor works, Aircall has something we can’t match. The second is the interface: the Swyx client looks less modern than Aircall’s. Everything else on the list is matched, the call quality is the same, and the monthly cost is not close. So the honest read is — if you need live in-call coaching or you’re buying on how the dialler looks, Aircall may be your answer. If you want a capable, well-supported phone system at a fraction of the cost, keep reading.
Numbers beat adjectives. Here’s a 20-user team on the equivalent AI tier — Aircall Professional against Swyx AI Pro — using Aircall’s own quoted pricing at its best available discount of 20%, on a 12-month commitment.
| 20 users, equivalent AI tier | Aircall Professional (20% discount) | Swyx AI Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Licence per user / month | £44 | £18 |
| Total per month (20 users) | £880 | £360 |
| Total per year | £10,560 | £4,320 |
| Annual saving with Swyx | £6,240 | |
That’s £6,240 a year, on a 20-person team, for a system that routes, records, transcribes and analyses calls to the same standard. Over a typical three-year term it’s more than £18,000. Direct dial numbers and international calling are extra on both sides — Aircall’s are published (£5 per number, bundles from £8 per user); ours depend on your setup, so we price them against your actual usage rather than a rate card.
And if a team wants Aircall’s AI Assist Pro real-time layer on top, that’s a further £32 per user per month at the discounted rate — another £640 a month across 20 users. It’s a real capability, but it’s not one most businesses use, and it’s not part of a like-for-like comparison.
The gap doesn’t close as you scale down — it widens. Aircall’s volume discount drops to 10% at 10 users and 15% at 15 users, so the per-user cost goes up as your team gets smaller. Swyx is £12 or £18 per user whether you have five people or fifty. Here’s the equivalent AI tier — Aircall Professional against Swyx AI Pro — at each size.
| Team size | Aircall Professional (licence, best discount) | Swyx Standard (no AI) | Swyx AI Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 users | £495 / month (£49.50, 10% discount) | £120 | £180 |
| 15 users | £701 / month (£46.75, 15% discount) | £180 | £270 |
| 20 users | £880 / month (£44, 20% discount) | £240 | £360 |
Even at 10 users, Swyx AI Pro is £180 a month against Aircall’s £495 for the equivalent tier — a shade over a third of the price. And if your team doesn’t need call intelligence at all, Swyx Standard does the phone-system job from £12 a user, below anything Aircall lists.
Swyx AI Pro is our call intelligence tier. It connects directly to your Swyx system and turns every conversation into structured, searchable, actionable data — without anyone lifting a finger. This is the capability that sits inside Aircall’s £55 Professional licence, at £18 with us.
Every call is automatically transcribed, scored, summarised and analysed. Sentiment tracking, topic tagging, productivity scoring, concern flagging and compliance checking — across every call, every day. Not a sample. Not the ones someone remembered to review. All of them.
Real-time performance displays keep the team focused and managers informed without anyone having to ask. Detailed call data records, exportable data and scheduled reports mean your call data is ready whether you need it for a team review, a compliance audit or a board pack.
Set your thresholds once — a low call score, a failed compliance check, the word “cancel” appearing too often — and the AI handles the rest, alerting the right person within minutes of a call ending. Talk time ratios, silence percentage and interruption counts are calculated automatically from transcripts, so coaching conversations are led by data rather than by gut feel.
The goal and avoidance system lets you define the behaviours, phrases and outcomes that matter to your business — and every call is analysed against your rules, as part of our wider AI solutions practice.
To be even-handed: Swyx AI Pro is post-call intelligence — it works on conversations after they happen. Aircall’s AI Assist Pro add-on adds a real-time layer that works during the call: live transcription, live playbooks, and prompts that surface competitor insights or objection handling to the rep as they speak. That’s a genuinely useful tool for high-volume outbound sales teams, and it’s one we don’t offer. If that live coaching overlay is core to your operation, it’s a fair reason to look at Aircall’s £95 tier. For everyone else, the £18 tier covers the ground that matters.
This one won’t show up on a price sheet, but it came up in the comparison and it’s worth naming. Aircall is a self-serve SaaS product. When something breaks, you’re in a queue. When you need a routing plan changed at 4pm on a Friday, you’re doing it yourself. Swyx from Knowall IT is a managed service — a named support team who already look after the rest of their customers’ IT infrastructure. Whether that matters depends on how much time your team wants to spend administering a phone system.
There’s also where your call data lives. Swyx runs in UK data centres and every call is encrypted, which matters if you’re handling regulated conversations or working to a compliance framework. We’re ISO 27001 certified, and the same team managing your phone system can manage your Microsoft 365 and cyber security alongside it.
Both systems will route a call, record it, transcribe it and analyse it — that much was clear once we lined them up. Aircall does one thing we don’t, in its real-time agent-assist add-on, and for a minority of teams that will be the deciding factor. For everyone else, the question isn’t which one has the features. It’s what you’ll have spent in three years, and who picks up the phone when something goes wrong. At £12 per user, or £18 with full call intelligence — against Aircall’s equivalent £55 — Swyx VoIP answered that comfortably.
The one honest caveat: we ran this against Aircall’s quoted pricing for a specific setup, and your numbers will differ with your user count and call profile. So put our figures next to your own Aircall quote and check. Get in touch and we’ll price it against your actual usage, not a list price on a website.