3cx - My new favorite Phone System
Are you looking for a up-to-date Phone System?
I work with a Mitel phone system day in and day out, and if it were up to me we would get rid of it as soon as possible. It is very outdated and due to all the conditions of working today (COVID) it sorely lacks in the ability to provide simple remote worker support.
With the need for a replacement looming, I have been looking into replacement phone systems for a year or so now. Being me, I of course want to move to a fully cloud solution but they are extremely expensive. We are talking anywhere from $8/u/m to $30/u/m depending on what you need.
This is when I discovered 3cx, it is actually what I am using for Fleming Systems and I love it! The way they price their licensing is fantastic, especially for the small/medium business use case. If you don’t expect more than 8 calls at once it’s free. They are also offering free licenses due to COVID.
3cx is a SIP based phone system, so you will need to bring your own trunk into their system in order to make and recieve calls. There are many different providers for this, SIP.US, Twilio, FlowRoute, etc. You can choose to host 3cx on-premise or within a cloud provider like Microsoft Azure.
What can 3cx provide a business?
Here are some of the features that newer business want but have to pay a rediculous amount for.
- Extension Dialing
- Multiple SIP trunk support for failover
- CRM Integration
- Mobile Applications for both Android and IOS
- People can answer their extension and dial out from their cell phones!
- Web Browser Extension
- Video and Audio Conference Calls
- Reporting, Live and Historical
- IVR (Auto-Attendant) for inbound calls
Licensing : 3cx Pricing
What makes 3cx so awesome? The way they license their product! Traditional phone systems you have to pay per extension and/or per user, voicemail may even be an additional cost!
3cx licensing is only concerned with one thing; concurrent calls. That means you can have as many extensions as you want and physical devices as you want. They also have different SKU levels, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise; some of the features (like CRM integration) require the Enterprise SKU.
To me there is no argument needed for a smaller business, you SHOULD be using 3cx! If you don’t need more than 8 concurrent calls at once you shouldn’t look anywhere else. The only cost to you would be the hosting costs for the 3cx server itself and the SIP trunk.