Cyprus based company 3CX offers an IP PBX phone system.
$1.08
per user/per month
Zoom Phone
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Built on Zoom's platform, Zoom's cloud phone consolidates business communication and collaboration into a single system. Available in 40+ countries, with expandable coverage through a bring-your-own-carrier offering, Zoom Phone supports inbound and outbound calling through the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Features: Post call summary & next steps A post-call summary from Zoom’s AI Companion keeps the focus on the conversation instead of…
$10
per month per user
Pricing
3CX
Zoom Phone
Editions & Modules
Pro
$1.08
per user/per month
Enterprise
$1.31
per user/per month
Standard
Free
US & Canada Metered
$10
per month per user
US & Canada Unlimited
$15
per month per user
Global Select
$20
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
3CX
Zoom Phone
Free Trial
Yes
No
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.
No fees for emergency 911 Service
No fees for compliance and administrative cost recovery Fee
No 10DLC SMS fees
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.
Zoom Phone is great for remote work. It's pretty user friendly. You can easily transfer calls to those who have Zoom extensions programmed into the address book. Obviously, this would apply to most tech nowadays, but call quality can suffer during bad weather.
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.
Voicemail handling for queues and groups can't have their own shared voicemail box.
They recently starting limiting how many greetings you can have per user, so you have to do some annoying workarounds by setting up additional users to accomplish it when you have a number of ACD.
Does not yet support texting.
I wish they had built in text to speech to quickly build new greetings or phone tree options when needed.
You can't just assign a phone number to a call queue or group. You have to use a specific user. Fortunately, the cost is reasonable per user so its not a big problem, but annoying none-the-less.
The Salesforce integration could be better, I hope they improve it. For example, voicemails and call logs don't show up in the native lightning case feed, but as tasks.
When callers call, I wish it would pop up how they called and what tree they went through. So we could see what number they called into and perhaps what menu options they used.
I'd love to be able to ask them questions to gather info for reps answering phones when appropriate.
Zoom Phone has a very sleek design which makes it very easy to operate and use both in the setting up of and interacting in a meeting space. That being said, certain features can seem a bit crowded while trying to screen share or display video which somewhat defeats the purpose of the application as compared to a standard conference call.
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.
Support have been great during the time for implementing Zoom Phones to our team of 50 people. There were times where they kept supporting us through links but more and more we had actual people getting back to us via emails so we are very happy overall. The product is so great, too.
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
The big draw for us to Zoom Phone is that they shook up the market. They entered the phone market by taking their overwhelming success in video conferencing, and bringing that innovation and skill to designing a game changing phone system. There is really not much difference among the other systems, except maybe their interface. They're a dime a dozen. Zoom does things differently, focusing in on the needs of the end users, and delivers a solid system that is worry free for I.T. departments
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.
