Cyprus based company 3CX offers an IP PBX phone system.
$1.08
per user/per month
Ruby
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Ruby, or Ruby Receptionists headquartered in Portland, boasts supporting more than 10,000 businesses with live virtual receptionists and 24/7 available chat services. Users set their preferences to have Ruby answer the phone part-time, full-time, or after hours, and Ruby deploys personalized company greetings to custom call handling instructions.
$129
per month
Pricing
3CX
Ruby Virtual Receptionist Services
Editions & Modules
Pro
$1.08
per user/per month
Enterprise
$1.31
per user/per month
Standard
Free
Chat Ruby 10
$129
monthly
Chat Ruby 30
$299
monthly
Call Ruby 100
$319
monthly
Chat Ruby 50
$469
monthly
Call Ruby 200
$599
monthly
Call Ruby 350
$999
monthly
Call Ruby 500
$1,399
monthly
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
3CX
Ruby
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
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.
Bundled Chat Ruby 10 Your Call Ruby Plan + Up to 10 Chats for $99
Bundled Chat Ruby 30 Your Call Ruby Plan + Up to 30 Chats for $249
Bundled Chat Ruby 50 Your Call Ruby Plan + Up to 50 Chats for $399
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.
Ruby Virtual Receptionist Services is well suited for a business that needs call screening and message-taking services. The service is expensive but if the user is willing to put a lot of time and effort into planning and scriptwriting, as well as call handling instructions, it may work well. Also, if there is not much information that must be captured by the receptionist, I feel this may be a better fit.
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 switched over from Answer First to Ruby Receptionist because we wanted a more full-service answering service. We wanted to be able to call out using our business number as well as text in and out. We also really liked the "call-out request" feature as it freed up our time and allowed Ruby to handle minor client communications, etc.
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.
