FIVN vs NICE: How Five9 and NICE Ltd Compare (2026)

Same yardstick, side by side (as of August 2026). Valuation lined up like this is most meaningful for two names in the same corner of the market, which these are. Figures are approximate; verify before investing.

The metrics above tell you which is the marginally better business. The bigger risk for most people is not picking the slightly worse stock, it is over-concentrating. FIVN and NICE share themes, so owning both, or adding either to what you already hold, can quietly push a large share of your portfolio into one bet.

This is the part a generic comparison page cannot answer, because it depends on what you own. Connect your brokerage and Walnut shows your real, combined FIVN and NICE exposure, flags overlap with your existing positions, and tells you if adding one would tip you past a concentration you are comfortable with, read-only by default, with your login staying at your broker. Walnut is not an investment adviser.

Five9 sells contact center software as a service, usually shortened to CCaaS. Instead of a company buying phone hardware and dialer systems for its support floor, it rents Five9's cloud platform, which routes calls, chats, emails, SMS and social messages to agents, records and scores those interactions, handles workforce scheduling, and increasingly answers routine contacts with automated voice and chat agents before a human is involved. Customers are mid-market and enterprise operations with anywhere from dozens to tens of thousands of seats, in industries like healthcare, financial services, retail and outsourced customer support. Revenue has historically been billed per agent seat per month, with usage-based telephony and, more recently, consumption-based AI charges layered on top.

Full FIVN guide

NICE Ltd is an Israeli-headquartered enterprise software company listed on Nasdaq and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Its larger Customer Engagement segment offers CXone Mpower, a cloud contact center platform (CCaaS) that handles routing, digital channels, workforce management, quality and analytics for large enterprises, increasingly bundled with AI agents and self-service automation. Its smaller Financial Crime and Compliance segment, NICE Actimize, provides anti-money-laundering, fraud detection and trade surveillance software to banks and financial institutions. Roughly three quarters of revenue is now recurring cloud revenue, and the company also retains a legacy on-premise and public safety business.

Full NICE guide

Both fit overlapping themes, but they are not interchangeable. The useful comparison is which set of drivers and risks you want exposure to.

• FIVN drivers: AI revenue outrunning seat pressure; Subscription reacceleration and enterprise mix.
• NICE drivers: Cloud migration and CXone Mpower; AI monetization and the Cognigy acquisition.

A faster-growing, richer-valued name usually swings harder, so it suits a longer horizon and a higher tolerance for volatility; a steadier, more cash-generative business suits a more conservative or income-minded investor. The honest test is which set of risks you could hold through a drawdown: The core risk is structural: if AI agents resolve a rising share of customer contacts, companies need fewer human agents, and Five9's per-seat pricing shrinks with them, so the AI products have to grow faster than the seat base declines. For NICE, the central risk is structural: generative AI could compress the number of human agents enterprises staff, and NICE's contact center economics have historically scaled with seats.

Growth-minded investors who believe the theme has years to run tend to accept the richer multiple for more upside; value-minded investors lean toward the cheaper forward earnings and steadier profile. Pick FIVN if you believe its drivers more; NICE if you believe its. Many investors hold both, but since they share themes, that is a concentrated bet, not diversification. Decide deliberately and check overlap. For the full detail, see the FIVN and NICE guides.

FIVN. At roughly $2.2 billion of market value against about $1.27 billion of guided 2026 revenue, Five9 trades under about 2x sales, a level far below where cloud software with low-teens growth and positive free cash flow normally sits. The gap between a trailing GAAP price-to-earnings ratio near 44x and roughly 9x the midpoint of non-GAAP earnings guidance is almost entirely stock-based compensation, so the two framings tell very different stories. Cash and marketable investments of roughly $724 million as of the first quarter partially offset about $650 million of convertible notes due 2029.

NICE. NICE trades at roughly single-digit earnings multiples and a mid-single-digit EV/EBITDA, unusual for a software company still compounding cloud revenue in the mid teens. That multiple embeds a market view that AI erodes the seat-based model faster than AI products replace it. The counterweight is a net cash balance sheet, about ~$1 billion of remaining repurchase capacity, and an Actimize sale process valued near ~$2.5 billion against a ~$5.1 billion market cap.

Headline figures (approximate, August 2026): FIVN shows revenue (ttm) ~$1.23 billion, q2 2026 revenue ~$312 million, up ~10% year over year, fy2026 revenue guidance ~$1.26 billion to ~$1.272 billion, fy2026 non-gaap eps guidance ~$3.22 to ~$3.30; NICE shows revenue (ttm) ~$3.0B, q1 2026 revenue ~$769M (+9.8% YoY), cloud revenue (q1 2026) ~$603M (+14.6% YoY), 2026 revenue guidance ~$3.17B-$3.19B (~8% growth).

FIVN and NICE are related but distinct: same themes, different businesses and risks. Neither wins in the abstract; the right pick is whichever thesis you actually believe, sized so you are not over-concentrated in one theme. Walnut can show your combined FIVN and NICE exposure against your real portfolio. It is not an investment adviser.