Cyprus based company 3CX offers an IP PBX phone system.
$1.08
per user/per month
Amazon Connect
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Launched in 2017 and available on AWS, Amazon Connect is a cloud-based omnichannel contact center designed to provide a seamless experience across voice and website live chat, featuring skills-based routing, task tracking, and analytic tools to track customer interactions, or evaluate agent activity. It can support office-based or virtual contact centers. The service is pay-per-usage, per feature.
$0
per profile/per month
Pricing
3CX
Amazon Connect
Editions & Modules
Pro
$1.08
per user/per month
Enterprise
$1.31
per user/per month
Standard
Free
Customer Profiles
$0.0025
per profile/per month
Chat
$0
per message
Contact Lens (5 million+ monthly minutes)
$0.0125
per minute
Contact Lens (first 5 million monthly minutes)
$0.015
per minute
Voice
$0.02
per minute
Voice ID
$0.025
per transaction
Tasks
$0.04
per task
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
3CX
Amazon Connect
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Price displayed is based on 25 users.
3CX pricing is based on the number of simultaneous calls your business requires or in other words, how many calls your system needs to support at once. Unlike other PBX vendors there is no per extension cost.
In many scenarios decision is driven by budget and compared to other solutions at the time of purchase [3CX] was simply the cheapest solution for what it has to offer. If you are looking for integrations, extensibility, and advanced functionalities, this might not be a solution for you. At the time of use (and this may have changed by now), there was a lack of APIs, CLI commands, and similar so nothing could be automated with the system. There are ways of importing data through CSV but automation would solve us so much time and support calls if we were able to connect with other systems.
Our company is a startup that is just starting to get wholesale customers. When we realized our customers needed support using our products, we set up a Contact Center via Amazon Connect. It has been very useful in allowing us to scale up very quickly, and provide services to our company as if we were a large corporation.
Simplicity: Using a single 3CX interface we can manage every phone and extension used throughout our company.
Flexibility: There are a wide variety of options to configure each extension and phone. Changing anything after the hardware is deployed is very easy.
Portability: Phones with 3CX can be easily moved or repurposed within an office or at remote locations, including users' homes. The mobile app allows users to use their office extension anywhere without exposing their cell number.
The 3CX Phone System is only a five because while they provide set-up/how-to/Q and A documents to help your district or company get started, they do not offer support for free. The documents provided, though, are good enough for you to get you up and running. We also found a good source of help through a sip trunk provider, which was a 3CX reseller provider.
The main differences between 8x8, Inc. and 3CX is pricing and ease of use in my opinion. The 3CX system uses annual based pricing plans based on of simultaneous calls your company needs, not the number of extensions/users and offers a free plan. 8x8, Inc. charges per extension with different plans. We currently have 19 extensions so the 3CX system makes more sense for us, however, if your company only has a few extensions you may want to throughly consider both options. In my experience, it was difficult to add new extensions and phones with 8x8 because at least at that time we had 8x8 I could not add anything on the web admin. I had to call a sales rep which took a lot more time. Also, if you didn't purchase a phone and/or headset directly from 8x8 at a usually higher price than Amazon for example then you would have to spend anywhere from 30 minutes to hours on the phone with 8x8 tech support to program the phone to work with the 8x8 system so adding a new extension could turn into a long ordeal. I can easily add new extensions on 3CX directly in the web cpanel. Granted, if you are actually adding a new phone number you would need to purchase that number from a company like ATT first before adding it to 3CX. The difference between a phone number and an extension would be a phone number allows a customer to call in directly using that number. The extension would require the customer to call the main business number then be transferred to the extension. 3CX provides a list of supported phone models on their website
We worked through a Request For Proposal to check different Contact Center platforms, we evaluated Talkdesk, Amazon Connect and Genesys PureConnect, all of them as a SaaS platforms, and trying to go to a pay per use model. The best option for us was Amazon Connect, with a pure pay per use model according to the minutes of use, instead of the number of agents. As our goal was to automate the maximum number of contacts, we didn't want a license model based in the number of agents
3CX has a lot to offer for a very low cost as its business model is based on simultaneous calls and not per device. It's very cost effective and very affordable.
As the 3CX server does not require a high-performance server to run, with the Public Cloud option, it might allow even further savings.
