About 3CX

3CX Phone System is an open standards communications solution, suitable for any sized business that wants all the features of an advanced contact center at a fraction of the cost. 3CX can take your business communications to the next level, helping to improve collaboration, boost productivity, increase mobility and enhance the customer experience. Installation and maintenance can be handled effortlessly by anyone, whether installed on-premises on Windows or Linux on an appliance or server, or in the cloud.
3CX Software - 3CX chat box in website
3CX Software - 3CX incoming call
3CX Software - 3CX management console
3CX Software - 3CX wallboard
3CX Software - video conference
3CX video
3CX Software - 3CX chat box in website - thumbnail
3CX Software - 3CX incoming call - thumbnail
3CX Software - 3CX management console - thumbnail
3CX Software - 3CX wallboard - thumbnail
3CX Software - video conference - thumbnail

3CX pricing

3CX has a free version and offers a free trial. 3CX paid version starts at $0.00/month.

Starting Price:
$0.00/month
Free Version:
Yes
Free trial:
Yes

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3CX Reviews

Feature rating

Value for Money
4.3
Functionality
4.4
Ease of Use
4.4
Customer Support
4.2
5 reviews of 342 View all reviews
Ryan
  • Industry: Information Technology & Services
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 29/11/2019

The best VoIP phone system for small businesses

We had a customer that had 3 different companies within the walls of the building. We were able to configure each company separately so that their rules, hours, and each had different SIP providers that needed to be configured up properly. Each had their own digital assistant and the system setup took only a few hours to complete with all the complexity that was involved. Technical support was outstanding in assisting with the troubleshooting and setup.

Pros

The 8 concurrent call Standard License is free to all companies. This makes it a perfect solution for churches, small businesses, and as the small businesses grow into medium sized businesses, the annual cost for the license with higher concurrent calls is nominal. When companies switch from the POTS lines, they need to figure out a good solution for VoIP. 3cx is lower cost than RingCentral and 8x8 as well as many other competing VoIP softwares.

Cons

Putting in supported APAP adapters is great, but when a customer has a non supported adapter, it usually works, but doesn't play nicely with the software as far as configuring it easily.

Response from 3CX

Sincere thanks for your feedback.

Replied 29/11/2019
Sam
  • Industry: Logistics & Supply Chain
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1+ year
  • Review Source
Value for Money
3
Features
3
Ease of Use
4
Customer Support
0

4
Reviewed on 31/05/2022

3CX is fine, but it is all about who handles the hosting

3CX feels like it is a step up from a normal landline, but I don't see any wow factors that I feel like I could get from some of the other VoIP names.

If you're looking for something less expensive than Ring Central, Phone.com, and OnSip, then you should be able to find a small VoIP provider willing to offer you a hosted package with 3CX for a lower price.

Pros

3CX is straightforward. It seems to have all the necessary features for a small business. Still, as a business owner who cannot work on the admin side, I can only comment on the usability and stability.

Compared to other softphone apps, I've never had significant issues. I use 3CX as a softphone on an iPhone, through a Yealink desk phone, via Chrome plugin, and on an iPad. Surprisingly, the limitations I see are not due to the daily functions.

There are some features I would like, but there is nothing about this app that hinders my company's ability to operate without delay. We have users in China, Thailand, the Philippines, Jamacia, Venezuela, and the US. All locations work well, and the apps work even with limited internet access.

There are times when the connection is not great, but this is usually due to the internet and not the apps.

Cons

There is no way for my ringer on my softphone or desk phone to be customized to ring differently when someone calls my extension vs. ring group. I wish there were connectivity with Zapier so that I could push contacts from other services into our address book.

It would be nice if the SMS chat feature worked more similarly to a shared inbox, where everyone could see it. You can only transfer the chat to another extension, which makes SMS hard to use as a group.

Overall, the cons are not about the ability to use 3CX but the features I wish it had that could provide a better overall experience.

Response from 3CX

Hi Sam and thank you for your review! We are glad to hear that you are enjoying using our software and that it has helped you stay in touch with your employees throughout the world!
Regarding the points you raised, desk phones can be configured to have distinctive ringtones for Queue Calls, so you should certainly consider switching to using Queues instead of Ring Groups. Apart from this, you would also get better reporting capabilities and a lot more polling strategies to choose from.
For syncing you phonebook contacts, we do currently offer integration with Microsoft 365, but in the coming updates we will have a REST API that may also allow you to interact with the 3CX Phonebook, giving you the maximum flexibility in syncing your contacts between various platforms.
Incoming SMS messages can be sent either to an Individual Extension or to a Queue, in which case all logged in members of that Queue will see incoming messages.

Replied 01/06/2022
David
  • Industry: Telecommunications
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Weekly for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
2
Features
4
Ease of Use
4
Customer Support
2

3
Reviewed on 24/01/2019

Effective Phone System For Small, Simple Offices

For under 50 extensions and without any special functionality, 3CX is a very user-friendly platform. However, for any project that requires any custom functionality, 3CX will simply not be able to offer help.

Pros

The 3CX installer on both Linux and Windows is incredibly easy to use and users can go from nothing to a fully-featured phone system in less than 20 minutes. Once installed, the user interface is very clean and straightforward.

The 3CX Softphone that can be installed on Windows and mac computers pairs effortlessly with 3CX provisioning files.

Cons

3CX offers very little customization outside of the user interface, and commonly phone system managers will be simply unable to perform more-complex call routing. As an example, dynamic outbound routes are simply not possible outside of the overly-simple Outbound Routes tab, and you are limited to only prefix, length of destination, and from extension.

Compared to FreePBX and FusionPBX, the ability to customize 3CX is almost non-existent.

3CX Support will 100% of the time deflect any technical issues to the carrier, and after numerous ticket responses later, they will finally admit to being able to help.

SIP SRV records are completely broken and not compliant with the SIP RFC. It's hilarious how catastrophic this lack of functionality is.

Faxing is completely broken. It will be a complete nightmare if you attempt to run T.38 faxing over a 3CX phone system.

Ian
  • Industry: Hospital & Health Care
  • Company size: 201–500 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1+ year
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
4
Customer Support
3

4
Reviewed on 27/12/2022

VOIP and Soft Phones

The experience with 3cx was great, along with the company that oversaw the upgrade once everything was in place and ready to go we switched off our analogue system overnight and removed desk phones the next day.

Pros

The 3cx software makes remote changes a breeze. The ability to allow end users access to a phone over their computer without a physical phone saves cost of a phyisical phone. Users have reported that it is easy to use both making and receiving calls and have noticed no quality loss from our old phone system. It is infinitly easier to administer than our old system and i would not go back under any circumstances, even at the cost of my employment.

Cons

The software has no cons, the only issues i have with any part of this are unrelated to the software just the servers hosting and in places were physical phones are installed.

Cliff Ian
  • Industry: Outsourcing/Offshoring
  • Company size: 51–200 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1-5 months
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 18/07/2022

3cX for your call center and VoIP needs

Overall, I have no complaints on 3CX as we are very satisfied.

Pros

I love all the features of 3CX. I love how easy you can set it up, you can find the calls logs and recordings, plus it has a very comprehensive dashboard. Also, when we reach out to them to increase our accounts SC (concurrent calls), they are very responsive as they have a local partner from where I'm from and it was solved immediately.

Cons

The only thing I don't like about 3CX is the provisioning of the softphone as in our setup, people come and go, and we need to provision whenever there's a new employee who'll use it. I think it's better if 3CX can have the login/logout functionality on the desktop app instead of provisioning every time. But it is really negligible and not a deal breaker at all.

Alternatives Considered

VICIdial

Reasons for Choosing 3CX

Freepbx for me is very hassle to setup as it is asterisk based and Dialfire is very laggy on our side.

Switched From

Dialfire

Reasons for Switching to 3CX

VitalPBX is much more expensive on our current setup and we are not comfortable on using Asterisk based system yet. Also vicidial, it's a great software yet we don't really like the design of the app as it looks outdated.

Response from 3CX

Hi Cliff and thank you so much for taking the time to review 3CX! We are so glad to hear that you love the ease of setting up 3CX and all the great features offered!

Replied 03/08/2022

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