Cyprus based company 3CX offers an IP PBX phone system.
$1.08
per user/per month
LiveChat
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
LiveChat serves as a customer service platform with live chat support, help desk and web analytics functionalities, with the goal of allowing users to provide 24/7 support to customers. The core feature of the software is its chat tool, where both service and sales team can answer customers' questions in real time. Online businesses can interact with customers on their website, to be more accessible. With LiveChat, users can identify people on the website and engage them…
$20
per month per user
Pricing
3CX
LiveChat
Editions & Modules
Pro
$1.08
per user/per month
Enterprise
$1.31
per user/per month
Standard
Free
Starter
$20
per month, billed annually per user
Team
$41
per month, billed annually per user
Busniess
$59
per month, billed annually per user
Enterprise
Request Quote from Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
3CX
LiveChat
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.
We needed a mechanism in place to make contact with visitors to our website easier. What we discovered is that it's an excellent tool for creating reports and dashboards that show how soon issues are handled. Our website can now be updated in real-time, and all of our internal teams are really excited to use this fantastic technology. I really recommend [LiveChat] to many friends and past colleagues.
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 most important factor of Livechat is their own chat support, I had many requirement from the Sales Head, Support Head to implement features that I was unsure if the product could do. However, as I did the implementation one by one I constantly used the chat support which helped me step by step all the way.
The UX of the product is pretty simple and intuitive to use. There are quite a few features that we could easily plug and play. We tried going to the market to find a solution that could help us but they did not have as many out of the box features and simple to use
Their integration between LiveChat and Chatbot is pretty seamless and since both of them are from the same company, it's works pretty well.
It has a limited amount of agents, so when you have many customer care employees during one shift it is hard to manage the quantity of active agents.
When system is overloaded and many customers are waiting in a queue it starts to works slowly (sometimes the program even lags) and you need to refresh the system to write a message.
Occasionally when you open a new tab, you might lose your current conversation.
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 only issues I have had with LiveChat are the technical glitches within the program. These are not common as in everyday occurrences but when the glitches do happen they tend to have very negative repercussions. This is due to chats with customers being dropped, this may be an internal server issue though and may not happen for everyone.
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
Overall very similar in design, but LiveChat had a better interface, better reporting and analytic tools, better mobile support, and just an easier overall feel. The two products are very much alike in the vast majority of ways, but I ended up preferring this product overall. Price points were similar as well, as well as the allowed number of users.
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.
We have a small team so the overall impact is that it is easy for one or two employees to handle a large number of tickets without hiring more people. Plus, you can use this software remotely, save a ton on traveling to and from and office.
