Phone Systems - 3CX?

Business IT/MSP Talk
1

Greetings All,
I’m looking to setup a phone system for my organisation. About 250 employees spread over multiple sites. I’ve been looking at 3CX. It seems to have a good feature set, good vendor support, free training and be realatively easy to use. I’ve looked at FreePBX and similar systems, the learning curve is a bit steep and I don’t want to be the only one able to maintain it.
Any one used 3CX before? Looking to do a cloud deployment.

2

Hello

We are 3CX Gold Partners and use 3CX Phone System for our customers since 2007 and we got many installation on Hotels and Companies. 2 Years ago we had also some cloud deployments without any problems

We chose 3CX instead of FreePBX because It is a commercial product and offers support.
Also It offers VoiP phone provision, Mobile application, CRM integration and a powerful CFD (Call Flow Designer).

I totally suggest 3CX

3

Thanks Eleftherios,
I’ve been playing with a 3CX system on a Raspberry Pi at home. I have a Yealink W60P cordless phone and a few 3CX apps on phones. The app works most of the time on my Google Pixel but doesn’t work on a Nokia 8.1 :frowning: Generally speaking it’s a polished product but sometimes odd things happen like the app failing to ring when there is an incoming call.
Your thoughts?

4

Dear Greg

We had also some issues with 3CX mobile and some Xiaomi devices.
Try to Join the 3CX Beta Program a through the Google Play Store.

Keep in mind that the application in order to save battery, It wakes up via google push service. Some times It require q few seconds in order to wake up the application

I also suggest to install 3CX on a PC or VM, Raspberry in not powerful enough

5

Thank you Eleftherios,
I’ll give the beta program a go on the Nokia to see if that provides a solution.
I believe the Raspberry Pi is a fully supported solution for up to 8 simultaneous calls. Currently I only have one sip trunk and 3 extensions on it. Performance has been very good with this setup. The only exception being the Nokia 8.1 cellphone which seems to be having some network issues. Production deployment for my organization will be on better hardware. I note the Raspberry Pi can also be used as an SBC for up to 20 devices.
What has your experience of 3CX support been like?

6

Dear Greg

Yes, you can use Raspberry Pi for SBC. I prefer having VPNs betwen remote Offices.

3CX offers quite good support (From partner prospective, I do not have expirience on end user support).
But you have to be carefull, 3CX offer support only if you use supported 3rd party devices (VoIP Phones, gateways etc).

7

Thanks for the recommedation to use supported hardware. I’ll be sure to follow that.

Loving the functionality I’m getting out of the little 3CX system I’m running at home. It’s good practice for the org deployment :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Hi remember that 3CX come with an annual fee.

9

@ninjoan I don’t have a problem with paying the annual fee for an enterprise deployment. That pays developers to improve and maintain the product. That said it’s not any expensive product. They have a very interesting pricing model based on the number of simultaneous calls and not the number of extensions as other comercial products do. They also have soft clients for Windows, Mac, Android and IOS for free. Training is free. The product’s UI is web based and easy to use. It’s self hosted either on prem or cloud. We are looking to deploy about 200 extensions. We are a small busy IT team so having a fully tested and supported solution is very important. There are too many moving parts in a FreePBX type solution for us to worry about.
The Rasberry Pi solution I am running at home uses the standard version of the product. This is free for up to 8 simultaneous calls. Perfect for a small business.