FreePBX vs. Sangoma Asterisk

FreePBX is greatly suited for both small and medium business (less-so enterprise-sized businesses). It can be as easy or complex as you want it to be. Basic maintenance can be done by anybody with minor tech support experience, and support hours / outsourced configuration assistance is readily available.

Incentivized

Digium Asterisk is well suited for a city government as a communications solution for internal and external use. Other options like PBX are more expensive and hard to escalate. VoIP makes it easier to use the communications infrastructure instead that already exists rather than having to wire every phone when the solution is a digital or analog phone. In my city, government offices are not in the same place, which makes it harder to communicate everything together.

Incentivized

• Standard telephony.
• VM to email.
• Firewall
• Expandable extensions.

Incentivized

• Call forwarding that I can trust stays on even if my phone "refreshes."
• Ability to setup various call rules and save them to use as needed.

Incentivized

• APIs - many of the modules have API Stubs, or only have REST, or only GraphQL APIs
• Quality Control - acccepting open source contributions without much vetting has led to a decline in code quality.

Incentivized

• Documentation is scarce, so you have to learn by trial and error.
• Not cloud-based, and there's no mobile app.
• The ability to email voicemail messages would be great.

Incentivized

We are deeply integrated with the FreePBX APIs and their workforce management utilities.

Incentivized

I have asked in the not so recent past about having my phone updated with my saved Digium "favorites" list but it doesn't seem that this is possible

Incentivized

FreePBX is as functional and easier to set up and manage, at least compared to the version of UCM we were on. The menus are more intuitive and you do not need to have Cisco command-line memorized to make things work. Plus, there is no cost overhead with an open-source software.

Incentivized

[Based on] my experience, we initially had to deal with Avaya PBXs, the same applies to client instrumentation (telephones, etc.). Surely we are talking about a product much more "business-like", but the management and implementation has a high cost and is not as simple as it can be (or better) with Asterisk.

Incentivized

• Drastically reduced our direct telephony cost as we don't need to have the hardware and support.
• Very functional and added new functionality that we did not have previously.

Incentivized

• being zero cost, we saved at least 3 million on what a legacy pbx would have cost
• the savings and speed means lower cost on our service making us more competitive
• stability

Incentivized