3CX Phone System Enterprise 18 Review: Unbeatable Value

Companies seeking to host their very own IP PBX ought to put the 3CX Telephone System 18 on the prime of their listing: it presents a tremendous vary of name administration options at inexpensive costs. Licensing relies on the variety of concurrent calls, with a 16SC license for the Enterprise model in assessment ample for as much as 50 customers, and prices £615 per yr.

Telephone System Enterprise allows the whole lot 3CX has to supply together with internet conferencing, name queues, name reviews, recording providers and integration with Fb, WordPress and Microsoft 365, in addition to CRM and helpdesk options reminiscent of Salesforce and Zendesk. All three editions supply a 4SC model, free for the primary yr, with a Commonplace 4SC license free without end.

The on-premises platform assist is excellent. We virtualized 3CX on a Home windows Server 2019 Hyper-V host; different choices embrace Linux, VMware, KVM, and Raspberry Pi, or you may cloud host it on Google Cloud, Amazon, or Microsoft Azure. 3CX’s personal cloud internet hosting service helps 32SC licenses (120 customers) and appears wonderful worth for cash: the primary yr is free for all variations, and a 16SC Enterprise license prices £300 for following years.

On-site set up is facilitated by a wizard that guides us via every step. To permit distant staff to entry the system, we adopted the 3CX on-line tutorial to create forwarding guidelines for SIP and RTP port ranges on our firewall and watched the total firewall check give us the inexperienced gentle.

You will have to buy a SIP trunk individually; we used the wonderful VoIP Limitless service. The 3CX internet portal marked it as unsupported (because it does with many others), however it labored completely throughout testing.

Including new customers is a breeze. An e mail is distributed to every with their extension particulars, a voicemail PIN, internet hyperlinks to their private portal, and a QR code to register the free iOS and Android cell apps. Distributing {hardware} telephones is even simpler: 3CX found our Yealink handsets after they went dwell, up to date their firmware, and gave them the named consumer profile.

Outbound guidelines management outbound calls, and you’ll assign as much as 5 totally different SIP trunks as backups if the first one is unavailable. Telephone numbers assigned to your SIP trunk are handed to every extension utilizing inbound guidelines, and assigning a quantity to the digital receptionist presents callers with customized messages and a menu of as much as ten choices . Name queues and name teams guarantee calls are by no means missed, and customers can have incoming calls redirected whereas at dwelling.

Backup providers are supplied and may be run day by day or weekly to safe system configuration, name recordings and voicemail. We put this to good use when testing the migration from on-premises internet hosting to 3CX Cloud Internet hosting. We chosen our subscription on the client portal, selected the “change to hosted” choice, and pointed it to the most recent backup, after which it took quarter-hour to load the brand new cloud occasion. After importing our listing of consumer extensions, we loaded the free Home windows Session Controller utility to maintain our handsets operating. The entire course of took an hour.

3CX Telephone System 18 is ideal for SMBs who desire a versatile VoIP system they will handle themselves. Together with simple on-premises and cloud deployments, it presents a exceptional vary of name administration options and its worth for cash is unbeatable.