Favorite Budget Phone System?
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Right now I am looking at 3CX, what are my other options?
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FreePBX and Elastix are the dominant ones. Totally free included the OS license and no limitations on "free versions" like 3CX. Having managed all three, 3CX is the most limited, costly and difficult to use of them IMHO.
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@scottalanmiller said:
FreePBX and Elastix are the dominant ones. Totally free included the OS license and no limitations on "free versions" like 3CX. Having managed all three, 3CX is the most limited, costly and difficult to use of them IMHO.
That all above said (and true), 3CX is a solid phone system. Just realize you additional costs when calculating.
$600 for a Server 2012 R2 license (assuming you are virtualizing)
$995 for 3CX itself restricted to 8 simultaneous calls.3CX is intentionally gimped between the standard and pro editions. For example, voicemail to email? Pro only.
http://www.3cx.com/phone-system/edition-comparison/ -
Yes, we used to be a 3CX partner (they told us if we did not lie about some of their features that we couldn't be a partner so we dropped them - they are a dishonest company and I worry about using their product for that reason beyond any feature issues) and the product was solid but not as powerful even in the expensive versions as FreePBX was - there were some critical features for us that were unavailable that were very basic, mostly around SIP trunk flexibility and we found that it was not suitable for a large number of deployment scenarios. But where it fit, it fit pretty well. But we never had a case where we found it to be the best product, only cases where people demanded running their PBX on Windows (never something that feels like a good idea but I understand the reasoning sometimes) and choosing it on that one feature.
That 3CX's one and only "feature" is that it runs on Windows makes for an interesting ecosystem problem.
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The one feature that I really loved with 3CX was the incredible ease of setting up soft phones over a VPN. They do that beautifully.
