3CX vs Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Call Manager)

• 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.

Read full review

• The solution is probably one of the most robust IT solutions we have today. Although it works 24/7, it never required a reset "just because it needs to free memory" for example. In our deployment, the servers never went down due to a bug or software/hardware problem. We only reboot when we need to update or install some software fix.
• Compared to other platforms on the market, Cisco Unified Communications Manager is the most complete and flexible one. You can manage not only Cisco endpoints but 3rd party too. Also, you can run on bare metal appliances or even in virtualized environments, which gives you more freedom of choice. Considering the amount of model of endpoints available, you can have several options for any use case, from the simplest no display desk phone to a wireless, LCD display, full-featured phone. That also gives you the freedom to select what works best in each environment.
• If you consider both statements above, you'll see that Cisco Unified Communications Manager as the best ROI on the market. As an example, I can say that we're running instances (both hardware and software) of CUCM for the last 5 years. That's a huge advantage if you compare how short the lifecycle of digital platforms are these days. No upgrades, no parts replacement, no support tickets, no TAC calls, nothing.

Read full review

• Logs - They give you general or really high-level info but you can't really drill down to specifics of what happened and who did what
• Better segregation of roles or implementation of RBAC - sometimes you provide permissions to manager to be able to manage queue or ring group and they have way more permissions that are needed but no way to scale them down

Read full review

• CUCM is overly complex and requires a very capable engineer to maintain it. Similarly, implementing anything new requires a great deal of specialized knowledge of CUCM.
• CUCM is difficult to troubleshoot because of it's complexity.
• CUCM is expensive licensing and they nickel and dime you with a plethora of tiny little license charges for every little feature. They have the most convoluted licensing models, ever, for their CU products in general.

Read full review

• 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.

Read full review

• The Cisco TAC is fairly efficient at identifying bugs and Cisco is quick to develop fixes for said bugs, leaving minimal impact to SLAs.
• The ease of deployment and configuring new users reduced on-boarding time in comparison to our legacy Avaya solution.
• The ease of maintenance has reduced labor hours required for things like upgrades and routine reboots of equipment.

Read full review