AWS FreePBX v17 with included Technical Support

My main use case for FreePBX  is that I've had instances where somebody had a Cisco call center and the licensing fees were too high, and I migrated their call flows from Cisco to FreePBX . Mostly it's smaller systems, but I've been in one place in El Segundo, where the in-house phone system was FreePBX and it had over 100 stations. It's quite a good system, as it's a Windows wrapper around an Asterisk-based system.

A quick specific example of how I used FreePBX in one of those migrations is the one client I had with the Cisco call center; they had their call flows laid out in Visio  and I was able to replicate them on a FreePBX system. They did sales of musical instruments for schools from upstate New York. But they were so enamored with the solution that they had two call centers, so they bought two FreePBX systems, and there's a hot standby that you can do where if one goes down for any reason, everything switches over to the standby system.

I developed a demo for a university on the West Coast  as my main use case, and we were going to do 900 phones, something along that line. They decided to go with something else, but I was able to stand up a demo on a DigitalOcean  droplet, a system in the cloud, and restore one of my old demo systems and modify it. I was able to stand it up within a week and be able to show them the call functions and the call flows and give them softphones and really flesh out the demo. I've had demo systems on DigitalOcean  for many years and it's been quite beneficial.

The best features FreePBX offers are that the software is free, but usually for someone to install it, there's a cost.

FreePBX positively impacts my organization because I'm a one-man organization. I get some work doing FreePBX installs and migrations and maintenance. For my clients, they call me up and ask for an address move change or some new call flow and I can have it done in very short order.

The speed at which I can make changes with FreePBX depends on the change, but I know the system well enough that I can make normal call flow and announcement changes and IVR changes in very short order, sometimes in less than an hour, with testing. Depending on what they want, it can take some time. When I've done large systems, some of the migrations took three or four weeks, and some have taken a couple of months depending on what they're asking for.

FreePBX can be improved as they come out with a new version every year or so. Their current version is FreePBX 17. The user community and the FAQ are great; you can search for just about anything you want to do on FreePBX and they're getting new AI engines and new text to speech engines from third party vendors all the time. So it's a very rich community.

Sometimes the security is a bit odd with FreePBX, but security is a bit odd overall, so I don't know if that's a valid concern. I appreciate it; it's a good environment. Sangoma is the owner of the system. If I ever get stuck on something, and it doesn't happen very often, I can call and get help from Sangoma, and sometimes they want me to pay for it. It's fine if that's what it takes, but there's great support.

I have been using FreePBX for 10 to 15 years, over 20 installations, and maintenance and migrations.

FreePBX is stable in my experience; I've run into clients who run the server for years without anybody touching them. In fact, their call recordings sometimes would choke the hard drive out of free space.

The scalability of FreePBX is all about memory and CPU. FreePBX has an appliance, and I use that as a baseline for scalability. The big one is 400 users and 350 simultaneous calls. That uses an Intel i7 and 8 gigabytes of RAM. You can do that pretty easily in a cloud environment. For my demo system, I had 4 gigabytes of RAM and a two-core processor and 80 gigs of hard drive, and it worked great, flawlessly.

The customer support for FreePBX is very good. I can search for just about anything. I can call VoIP-Supply, who's the retail supplier of Asterisk  and FreePBX and some other systems as well from Grandstream. But if I really get in a pickle over something, I can purchase support hours and get an answer.

I previously used different solutions including Cisco, Avaya, and NICE CXone , and I have some experience with AWS . This is such a rich environment where the base software is free, and that's quite attractive to people.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for FreePBX indicates that most of the general features are available for free. But if you want to do a hot backup or an AB style backup system, there's a fee for that, and some of the call center reporting options can be very expensive, but nothing compared to what Avaya or Cisco would ask for that sort of thing.

I have seen a return on investment with FreePBX; for example, the musical instruments group saved over $30,000 a year by moving from Cisco to FreePBX for their licensing.

Before choosing FreePBX, I evaluated other options, including Avaya, Cisco, and NICE CXone . They're very expensive in comparison, and that tends to be the differentiator.

The user interface of FreePBX is web-based. You just hit the URL as an admin and log in with your username and password. It's very flexible. The logging is tremendous. In Linux, you can get out to the command line and do certain diagnostics for things that are not working or how to get around the problem. It's such a rich environment that there are add-on products for just about anything you would want to do. I've worked on very large Avaya and Cisco and NICE CXone systems and some of those things are much more difficult and exponentially more expensive.

I advise others looking into using FreePBX that if you're not familiar with it, I would recommend having someone to walk you through the process, and I can give whatever level of support that you would want. I'm not the only one; there are some very good groups out there who would do the install or even host the server in the cloud for you.

There are softphones, some of which are free, some of which charge. With softphones, if somebody's PC is very busy, it can't give it enough CPU cycles to sometimes answer the phone. There have been instances where the president's secretary had a large Excel spreadsheet and she was doing something that required a lot of CPU cycles and she was backing up the receptionist. So softphones can have their own set of oddities. Hard phones are beautiful; I've got some Polycoms that are very durable and very reliable. I rate my overall experience with FreePBX as a 9 out of 10.

I use FreePBX  in many different ways depending on the need. Sometimes I use it as a contact center solution with a third-party plugin such as FOP. I do integrations with the operator panel so that operators can assign calls and manage queues. I also use FreePBX  as a Session Border Controller (SBC ) because some customers still run FXO or PRI lines. To convert those to SIP, I prefer to use FreePBX since I compile my own version and can compile additional drivers such as DAHDI to make PRI or FXO lines work.

When I use FreePBX as an SBC  or for integrating with operator panels, I recently had a customer with a Grandstream device connected to what is called a SIP MLS, which is a private SIP line obtained from a local provider. The Grandstream device was unable to support that PRI interface, so I compiled Asterisk  and the DAHDI drivers, configured the PRI interface, and delivered it to the customer.

FreePBX is an IP PBX  that I sometimes use as an SBC to move traffic from one box to another, making one FreePBX instance act as an SBC for PRI to SIP conversions or FXO to SIP conversions. I have also used FreePBX for outbound dialers and outbound dialing, though that was a custom project involving custom dial plans and call files developed specifically for a customer.

I believe the best thing FreePBX offers is the ease of use to get it running and the features it provides. From my perspective, the greatest feature is the community support forum. Since FreePBX is a free product, the responsibility to fix issues falls on the user, making the community forum invaluable. Additionally, FreePBX is built on Asterisk , so anyone who understands Asterisk can accomplish anything with FreePBX.

Customization is the primary feature I appreciate about FreePBX. As long as you understand how to work with dial plans and Asterisk, and you have some programming knowledge and understand how APIs work, you can make many things happen. You could even build your own cloud PBX with FreePBX by integrating WebRTC and building your own SIP client with your custom design to create your own version.

FreePBX has made a positive impact on my organization, and we have completed many projects with it. It is a great application and one of the best open-source projects available. As an engineer, I appreciate working with FreePBX because I love Asterisk. It improves ease of configuration since we are all familiar with it, and for many situations, FreePBX is simply the better solution.

I believe FreePBX could be improved regarding the user interface. Sometimes the user interface has bugs, and when you apply configuration changes, they do not always apply properly. I have needed to access the command line interface and run commands to complete tasks. A more modern, responsive, and faster user interface would be beneficial.

I have been familiar with FreePBX for at least ten years.

I love FreePBX and Asterisk. The pricing for FreePBX is reasonable, and the licensing is fair. I use the free tier because I support the product, so I do not use the paid version of FreePBX. The free version is excellent. Regarding cloud providers, I use Linode, which sometimes has occasional issues, but they always resolve them and are easy to use. I would like to use other cloud providers, but I am more familiar with Linode. I rate this review a ten out of ten.