3CX alternatives: 8 solutions compared (2026)
This page brings together what a decision maker needs to know before choosing: what 3CX really is, how its billing by simultaneous calls works, what its users say, what happened in March 2023, and what telephony you host yourself really costs.
The essentials
- 3CX is a Cypriot software vendor founded in 2005. It claims more than 350,000 customers in 190 countries and sells exclusively through a network of 10,000 partners.
- Its billing does not rest on named licences but on the number of simultaneous calls: a fixed price per system per year, from €285 for the Basic edition at the 8 simultaneous calls tier, which covers up to 40 extensions.
- CRM integration and call recording are not part of the Basic edition: they start at the Pro edition, at €380 per year at the same tier. Call transcription and the call summary belong to the AI edition, at €715 per year.
- The software installs on your servers or in your own cloud account. The cost therefore shifts from the licence to running the system: hosting, updates, availability, and support billed per ticket at €100 each.
- In March 2023, the 3CX desktop application served as the vector for a software supply chain compromise, attributed by Mandiant to a group with a link to North Korea. 3CX published a seven point security action plan on 20 April 2023.
- The feature list published by 3CX includes no prospecting dialler.
The 8 solutions at a glance
Eight vendors, three families of product that do not do the same job. Telling them apart avoids comparing a phone system you install yourself with a service run for you, or with a prospecting dialler.
Who sits where
Only one vendor leaves you to run the system
Telephony
3CX
Ringover
Aircall
CloudTalk
Prospecting
JustCall
Nooks
Flunter
Minari
Skipcall, from telephony to prospectingSkipcall, from telephony to prospecting3CXRingoverAircallCloudTalkJustCallNooksFlunterMinari3CX occupies the top half alone: it is the only one in this line-up that you install and run yourself, on your server or in your cloud account. The vendor also offers a hosted option it runs itself, billed on top of the licence. All the others are services that are already run for you, billed per user.
Skipcall crosses the horizontal axis. The same platform equips prospecting teams with the four line parallel dialler, and every other employee who simply needs an extension (management, administration, customer service) with a line at €15 per month. Skipcall is not a phone system and does not install on your premises: it is a service run for you, whose data stays hosted in France.
Business telephony · Parallel dialler, 4 lines
Parallel dialling on four lines for the people who prospect, and full telephony for every other extension, in the same subscription: a business number, inbound calls, voicemail, SMS, mobile and web applications, call sequences, contacts, call transcription and call summary. From €15 per licence, with no minimum.
Software phone system · No dialler
A flat licence per system, from €285 per year. To install and to run, unless you pay for the hosted offer.
Cloud business telephony · Sequential dialling
The same phone system scope as 3CX, with no server to run, billed per user.
Cloud business telephony · Power dialler, one number at a time
Solid on inbound and on the phone system. Three licences minimum, transcription as an option.
Call centre software · Smart dialler and power dialler
Coverage of more than 160 countries. Geared to contact centres more than to prospecting.
Multichannel communication platform · Power, dynamic and predictive dialler
A very broad scope, more than 100 integrations. The breadth is paid for in complexity.
Parallel dialler for large teams · Parallel dialler with a virtual sales floor
Built for large American teams. Pricing on request.
Parallel dialler · Parallel dialler up to 5 lines
The same dialling engine as Skipcall, with a narrower functional scope.
Parallel dialler · Parallel dialler up to 5 lines
The same promise as Skipcall, with a different product logic.
Who 3CX is
3CX is a software vendor founded in 2005 and based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Its product is a software phone system, built on the SIP protocol, which the customer installs on its own server or in its own cloud account, and which works with the SIP provider of its choice. The vendor claims more than 350,000 customers in 190 countries and 12 million daily users, and sells exclusively through a network of 10,000 partners. This is not a marginal player: it is an established reference in the phone system market, whose business is simply not yours if you do outbound prospecting.
2005
Year founded
Head office in Nicosia, Cyprus
350,000+
Claimed customers
In 190 countries
12M
Daily users
Figure claimed by the vendor
10,000
Partners
3CX sells exclusively through this network
Licensing by simultaneous calls
This is the particularity of 3CX, and the most misunderstood point of its offer. The vendor does not bill per user: it bills a fixed price per system per year, based on the number of calls that can run at the same time, internal and external alike. The number of extensions declared changes nothing to the amount, within the cap attached to the tier.
Annual prices shown in euros on the public 3CX price list, excluding tax and excluding current promotions. Commercial licences start at the 8 simultaneous calls tier. Hosting by 3CX and support tickets are billed on top.
In a company where staff are not all on the phone at the same moment, pooling is very favourable. 3CX recommends the 8 simultaneous calls tier for 16 to 40 users: the same annual amount then covers forty extensions, where a named licence would be billed forty times.
A prospecting team spends its day on the line: it consumes almost one simultaneous call per person, and the pooling disappears. You then have to move up a tier at constant headcount, without gaining a dialler, since the 3CX feature list includes none.
The Basic edition covers the phone system: extensions, transfers, voice menus, ring groups. CRM integration, call recording and call queues start at the Pro edition. The call summary, call transcription, the API and automatic failover belong to the AI edition.
Not the server, not the SIP links, not the call charges, not the administration time. Support is not in it either: the public price list from 3CX sells it per ticket, €100 each or €350 for five. It is that gap between the licence price and the cost of the service that the section on self-hosting deals with.
What users say
3CX gets two very different ratings depending on the platform you consult. The gap is instructive: it does not bear on the same things.
The rating is solid and stable over time. Positive reviews almost always cover the same points: the ratio between the licence price and the breadth of the phone system features, and the freedom to choose your own SIP provider.
The distribution is polarised: 53% five star reviews and 36% one star reviews. Negative reviews rarely concern the functional scope, and more often perceived stability, paid support and licence changes.
Distribution of the 175 Trustpilot reviews
Recorded on 3 September 2026
The average hides two populations. A little over half the reviews are five star, and more than a third are one star. The sample stays small, 175 reviews for a vendor claiming 350,000 customers: these responses shed light on friction points, they do not measure satisfaction across the installed base.
This is the most frequent complaint on Trustpilot. The public price list from 3CX confirms the mechanism: a support ticket sells for €100, five tickets for €350, on top of the licence. Otherwise the lower editions rely on the community forum.
Several reviews report difficulties after moving to version 20, notably on the call console. On a self-hosted system, the date of the upgrade is yours: that is a lever you do not have with a vendor who updates for you.
On 6 March 2026, 3CX announced that free SMB keys were losing access to the customer portal and that the SMB licence would be moved down to the Basic edition, with IP phones no longer usable on the free edition. The harshest reviews from that period concern this point.
3CX sells through a network of 10,000 partners rather than direct. The quality of the relationship therefore depends on the partner you pick as much as on the vendor, which explains part of the gap between the most favourable and the harshest reviews.
The March 2023 incident, the facts
This is public information, documented by the vendor itself and by its incident response provider. It belongs here because it sheds light on a fundamental question for anyone who installs software on their own machines, not because it would disqualify 3CX. The timeline below keeps to dated facts and their sources.
3CX announces that its Electron desktop application contains a compromised library. The versions cited are Windows 18.12.407 and 18.12.416 shipped with update 7, along with macOS versions 18.11.1213, 18.12.402, 18.12.407 and 18.12.416. The vendor states that the domains contacted by the library have been reported and for the most part shut down, and recommends the web application instead of the installed application in the meantime.
3CX publishes the initial results from Mandiant, engaged as the incident response team. Mandiant attributes the activity to a cluster named UNC4736 and assesses with high confidence that this cluster has a North Korean nexus. The report details the payloads identified on Windows and on macOS.
The investigation establishes that the initial intrusion came from another compromised piece of software, the X_Trader trading application from Trading Technologies, installed on the machine of a 3CX employee. From there the Windows and macOS build environments were reached. The case is documented by the Google Cloud Threat Intelligence team as a cascading supply chain compromise.
3CX publishes a seven point security plan: rebuilding an isolated and hardened build environment, deploying detection tooling on endpoints, continuous outsourced monitoring, a Zero Trust access policy, static and dynamic code analysis before every commit, a product security review conducted with Mandiant, and reinforcement of the security features of the product.
What to take from it is not a judgement on a vendor: any software supplier can be targeted, and 3CX published its findings and its remediation plan. The point to carry into a purchasing decision lies elsewhere. Software you install on the machines of your teams makes you dependent on the distribution chain of its vendor, and once a security update is published, applying it depends on you. That is one more task to hand to someone, and it is the subject of the last section of this page.
Where data is hosted
On this point, 3CX answers differently from the other vendors: location is not a characteristic of the product, it is a consequence of your deployment. That is a real freedom, and it is also a responsibility.
3CX
On your side, or with 3CX
3CX deploys in three ways: on a server in your own company, in your own cloud account (Amazon, Digital Ocean, Azure or Google), or through the hosted offer the vendor runs on Amazon, Google and Digital Ocean infrastructure. In the first two cases, the place of processing follows from your choice of host and the responsibility for running the system falls to you, which is precisely the vendor argument.
Skipcall
Scaleway, France
Hosting is handled by a French cloud provider, which places processing under the GDPR and European law with no transfer to a third country. You have no server to run and no region to choose.
The real entry cost
The two offers are not billed the same way, and comparing them line by line only means something at a stated scope. Here are the two possible readings.
On this ground the gap clearly favours 3CX: €285 per year for a system covering up to forty extensions, against €15 per extension per month. The price of the software is not the issue, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. What the hosting line does not say, on the other hand, is the server, the backups, the availability and the administration time that come on top.
The price gap stays wide, but the two lines do not cover the same thing. 3CX sells a phone system that you run, and its published feature list contains no dialler. Skipcall sells a service run for you, which dials four lines in parallel and automatically sets answering machines aside. It is the cost per conversation, and not the cost per licence, that separates the two.
Simulator
What does it cost for your team?
3CX
·
Conversations per year: ·
Cost per conversation: ·
Skipcall
·
Conversations per year: ·
Cost per conversation: ·
The detail of the Skipcall plans, per licence and per billing cycle, is on the pricing page. The scope of the line at €15 per month is described on the Business VoIP page.
If your choice comes down to these two tools precisely, the head to head criterion by criterion is in the Skipcall vs 3CX comparison.
Your phone system live in 5 minutes.
Nothing to install, no server to run. One licence is enough, and the data stays hosted in France.
No commitment · Account active immediately
The French legal framework from 11 August 2026
This is the parameter most comparisons ignore, even though it changes the economics of phone prospecting in France.
From 11 August 2026, cold calling of consumers in France moves from opt-out to opt-in: a call is lawful only if the person has given prior consent. Bloctel, the French do-not-call register, disappears on that date. Business to business prospecting remains possible, subject to the rules applicable to data processing.
The direct consequence for choosing a tool: the volume of permitted calls falls, so each attempt has to produce more. A phone system does its job, but it dials one number at a time. A dialler that sets answering machines aside and puts your sales reps into conversation more often is no longer a comfort, it is what makes the channel profitable.
Read the full analysis of the reform, in French →What to check before switching
3CX bills per system per year. Note the expiry date of your key before you do anything else: it sets the switchover window more than the availability of the new tool does. If you bought through a partner, also check the terms of the services contract signed with them, which follows its own expiry date.
With 3CX, your numbers sit with your SIP trunk provider, not with the software vendor. These are two separate contracts, with two notice periods. Identify which one covers porting your numbers before you commit to anything, and start the process with the carrier before you terminate.
On a self-hosted installation, recordings and call logs sit on your server: nobody will send them to you. Take a full backup and check that it restores before you shut the instance down. On an installation hosted by the vendor, ask for the export while the subscription is still active.
Desk phones are provisioned automatically by the system: reconfiguring them for another provider takes preparation, handset by handset. List the estate, note the models and check they are compatible with the solution you pick, or decide on a software only setup.
Hosting your telephony yourself: what it really involves
The software is cheap, running it is not. That is the only statement that counts, and no comparison sets it out because it appears on no pricing page. What follows applies to 3CX as to any self-hosted phone system, and stays useful if you choose 3CX in the end.
Let us say it plainly: hosting your own phone system is a very good choice for an organisation with an IT team. It keeps control of the place of processing, the upgrade schedule and the cost, and it pays a flat licence instead of a per head subscription. It is a poor choice for a smaller company without that team, because the four questions below then stay unanswered until the day of the first outage.
- Name the system administrator and their deputy, and write it into a job description
- Write down what happens on a Friday at 7 pm when the phone system stops answering: who is reachable, on what number, within what time
- Cost the time actually spent, in hours per month, on a comparable system already running at your company
The trap.Relying on the person who installed the system. The day they move on, the skill leaves the company with them, and telephony is the first service whose failure gets noticed.
- Set the acceptable outage duration for telephony, in hours, and have management approve it
- Check what your edition covers: at 3CX, automatic failover belongs to the AI edition and to the features reserved from 16 simultaneous calls upwards
- Test a full restore from a backup, in real conditions, before you go live
The trap.Confusing the availability of the server with the availability of the service. A machine that answers while the SIP link is down is still a total outage for the people calling you.
- Set in writing the maximum delay between a security patch being published and being applied
- Plan a recurring maintenance window, outside calling hours, and announce it to the teams
- Subscribe to the security announcements from the vendor and name the person who reads them and decides
The trap.Putting off an update because the system works. A phone system exposed to the internet is a permanent target, and the March 2023 episode was a reminder that the update chain counts as much as the software itself.
- Add to the licence price the server or cloud instance, its backups, the SIP links and the call charges
- Value the administration time at the loaded hourly cost of the person who provides it, on-call cover included
- Add support: at 3CX it is sold per ticket, €100 each or €350 for five, on top of the licence
The trap.Comparing €285 per year with a per user subscription. The two amounts do not cover the same scope: one is a right to use the software, the other a service run for you.
Before you sign
The 5 costs of self-hosted telephony that go uncounted
None of them appears on the licence invoice. Added up over twelve months, they often weigh more than it does.
- 01The server or cloud instance, its backup and its monitoring, twelve months a year
- 02The administration time: installation, upgrades, adding extensions, troubleshooting
- 03On-call cover, that is, the cost of being reachable outside working hours
- 04Vendor support, billed per ticket as soon as an incident goes beyond what the community forum resolves
- 05Dependence on a single person, which is paid for on the day they leave and never before
What do you actually need?
Three use cases, three families of tool. Most bad choices come from confusing the first two, or from asking a phone system to do prospecting.
3CX belongs to the first family and fills it very well. Looking there for a prospecting dialler amounts to asking a phone system for work it was not designed to do, and that its feature list does not claim.
Who each solution is for
3CX remains the right choice if
- you have an IT team able to run a server, apply patches and restore a backup
- what you need is a phone system: reception, voice menus, call queues, transfers, desk phones
- your users are not all on the phone at the same time, which makes billing by simultaneous calls very favourable
- you want to decide for yourself where your data is processed and when you upgrade
An alternative makes sense if
- your main activity is outbound prospecting and dialling time becomes the limiting factor
- you have no IT team to hand the running of a telephony server to
- call transcription and the call summary need to be included rather than reserved for the top edition
- you would rather have a service run for you, with data hosted in France and a single invoice
Frequently asked questions
What is the best 3CX alternative in 2026?+
There is no single answer: it depends on what 3CX does for you. If you are looking for a phone system with no server to run, the direct alternatives are Aircall, Ringover and CloudTalk, which sell the same scope as a hosted service, billed per user. If what you really need is outbound prospecting, the deciding criterion is no longer the phone system but the dialling mode: Skipcall, Flunter and Minari in France, Nooks in the United States, dial several lines in parallel, which 3CX does not do.
How does 3CX billing by simultaneous calls work?+
3CX does not bill per user. The price is fixed per system per year and depends on the number of calls that can run at the same time, internal and external alike. The 8 simultaneous calls tier covers up to 40 extensions, the 16 tier up to 80, and so on. In practice, a company whose staff are not all on the phone at the same moment pays far less than with a per user licence. Conversely, a team entirely dedicated to the phone consumes almost one simultaneous call per person, and the advantage narrows.
How much does 3CX really cost?+
The public price list from 3CX, in euros and excluding tax, starts at €285 per year for the Basic edition at the 8 simultaneous calls tier, €380 for the Pro edition and €715 for the AI edition. Depending on your setup, add hosting if you choose to hand it to 3CX, support tickets billed at €100 each or €350 for five, your SIP trunk and your call charges. If you host it yourself, you also have to count the server or cloud instance, its backups and the administration time.
Does 3CX offer a dialler for outbound prospecting?+
No. The feature list published by 3CX covers the phone system, voice menus, call queues, recording, reports and the contact centre, but mentions no automatic dialler, sequential, parallel or predictive. A prospecting team therefore dials numbers one by one, by hand, with the dead time that implies between two attempts.
Should you host 3CX yourself?+
That depends on your internal resources, not on the product. Self-hosting is a good choice for an organisation with an IT team: it keeps control of the place of processing, the upgrade schedule and the cost. It is a poor choice for a smaller company without one, because the licence invoice says nothing about the server, the backups, the on-call cover and the administration time. 3CX also offers a hosted option that it runs itself, billed on top of the licence.
Where is data hosted with 3CX?+
Wherever you decide to put it. The system installs on a server in your own company, in your own cloud account with Amazon, Digital Ocean, Azure or Google, or on the hosted offer from 3CX, which the vendor runs on Amazon, Google and Digital Ocean infrastructure. That is a strength when data location is a requirement: you keep control of it. It is less clearly one if nobody at your company has the time to look after it.
What happened in the 3CX security incident of March 2023?+
On 30 March 2023, 3CX announced that its Electron desktop application contained a compromised library, on Windows versions 18.12.407 and 18.12.416 and on four macOS versions. On 11 April, the vendor published the initial results from Mandiant, which attributes the activity to a cluster named UNC4736 assessed, with high confidence, to have a North Korean nexus. The investigation established that the initial intrusion came from another compromised piece of software installed on the machine of an employee. On 20 April, 3CX published a seven point security action plan.
Does the free edition of 3CX still exist?+
It has been progressively restricted. On 6 March 2026, 3CX announced that holders of free SMB keys were losing access to the customer portal, a self-managed or hosted subscription becoming necessary, and that the SMB licence would be moved down to the Basic edition. The vendor states that IP phones will no longer be able to rely on the free edition and that it is supplied as is, with community support only. Commercial licences start at the 8 simultaneous calls tier.
What are the French alternatives to 3CX?+
Ringover and Skipcall are the two main solutions built in France. Ringover positions itself on hosted business telephony, with a phone system scope close to that of 3CX but with no server to run. Skipcall focuses on outbound prospecting, with a four line parallel dialler, a CRM integration and data hosted at Scaleway, in France. Flunter and Minari also build parallel diallers in France.
How many extensions does the 8 simultaneous calls tier cover?+
Up to 40 extensions, according to the price list published by 3CX, which recommends this tier for 16 to 40 users. The next tier, 16 simultaneous calls, goes up to 80 extensions. The right sizing depends on your call density: a sales team on the phone all day consumes far more simultaneous calls than an administrative team of the same size.
How do you migrate away from 3CX without interrupting service?+
By handling the software and the carrier separately. Your numbers sit with your SIP trunk provider: that is where porting starts, before any termination. Back up your recordings and call logs and check the restore while the system is still running. Then run both systems side by side for a few days, until porting completes, before you shut the 3CX instance down.
Further reading
Six analyses to refine your choice, from the phone system through to the criteria for selecting a dialler.
Sources
Public data consulted on 3 September 2026.
- 3CX, pricing page · licensing model by simultaneous calls
- 3CX, full price list · annual prices in euros by tier and by edition
- 3CX, feature list · how the features are split across the editions
- 3CX, company page · founding, customers, users, partners
- 3CX, hosted offer · infrastructure providers used
- 3CX, alert of 30 March 2023 · versions affected and first measures
- 3CX, Mandiant results of 11 April 2023 · attribution of the activity
- 3CX, security action plan of 20 April 2023 · the seven point measures announced
- Google Cloud Threat Intelligence · origin of the compromise
- 3CX, SMB portal and licence changes · changes to the free edition, 6 March 2026
- G2 · rating and review volume
- Trustpilot · rating, volume and distribution of reviews
Prices, ratings and editions change. The figures above reflect the state of the public sources on the date shown. 3CX is a trademark of its publishing company, cited here for the purposes of objective comparison.
Alternatives to the other vendors
The same work, vendor by vendor: company, hosting, public reviews, real pricing and what to check.
Kixie alternative Multi-line dialling for small sales teams. 
Kavkom alternative Telephony and dialler, plans by destination. 
Quicktalk alternative Very small business telephony, no dialler. 
Allo alternative Inbound call handling, not outbound prospecting. Nooks alternative Heavily funded US dialler, contracts on request. 
Orum alternative Nine-licence minimum and no published price. See all 24 alternative pages · all 24 vendors, each with the head to head and the alternatives page.
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