3CX vs. FoxDen (Discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

FoxDen tended to work slightly better for very small video conferences. The audio was typically reliable, so it would be ok to use for audio conferencing. It is definitely not ready for prime time: it cannot handle very large conferences. It didn't seem ready to be used on mobile either. I also think it's better suited for a smaller company.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Easy to join meetings
• Audio is fairly reliable
• Moderately easy to host meetings

Incentivized

• I would like to be able to see direct-dial numbers on the handsets. Currently that is not possible but that would be a nice feature.
• You need an SBC per location, which can be a point of failure.
• You also need a server that might get disconnected, which is another point of failure.

Incentivized

• Horrible video quality. It basically never worked, and we stopped using the video feature.
• Buggy behavior all the time. Dropped calls, loss of screen sharing, rendered unusable most of the time.
• Poor response by the vendor to issues. The answer was basically "we know it's unusable, and we're trying to figure that out. There's nothing we can do right now."

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I believe they selected FoxDen because we use ReadyTalk for voice conferencing and FoxDen represented a cost savings compared to our previous Skype for Business investment. However, in the end, most of our company has abandoned ever using FoxDen and, instead, still uses all of the products listed above (Skype for Business, Google Hangouts, Slack) or just plain ReadyTalk voice conferencing.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Increased the length of our meetings due to copious amounts of time spent trying to fix the video and screen sharing.
• Added frustration for everyone who attempted to use it.
• Ultimately resulted in a lot of money lost on video equipment that everyone stopped using in favor of voice-only conferencing due to the faulty video.

Incentivized