Verdict
We found everything very easy to set up and use, and were impressed by the level of functionality provided. As well as basic call handling facilities, for example, there's support for hunt groups (routing inbound calls to multiple extensions), music on hold and so on. Voicemail comes as standard, along with Outlook integration and a fax server. An Integrated Voice Response system ('Press button 1 for sales', and so on) facility is also included, and proved remarkably easy to configure.
In fact, our only real concern is scalability. Performance shouldn't be a problem: we were only able to test a small setup, but given suitably specified hardware the 3CX software ought to be handle the demands of quite large organisations. However, it does rely on the use of third-party gateways and SIP services, which means that sourcing, configuring and managing large populations of these components could be an issue -- especially if they're from multiple vendors. The 3CX software also lacks many of the survivability features found on other IP PBX products, although support for Windows clustering is built into the Enterprise edition.
Editor's note: the original price for this software is available in US Dollars or Euros. The Australian price in this review reflects the exchange rate at the time of publication. Actual price may vary.
I tried this product. Compare to asterisk and hardware PBXes this system has a bad latency. For home use it is OK but for professional use it is not usable
The good: cheap
The bad: latency, resource hungry, installs lots of packages such as apache without asking, uses open source code (bad for a commercial company)