RingCentral is a familiar name in business communications, and its fully hosted approach can be convenient for companies that want their phone system packaged into a single cloud service. However, convenience is not the only consideration when choosing a business phone system.
For organizations that want more control over their infrastructure, telephone carrier, support relationship, licensing costs, and integrations, a 3CX system offers some important advantages. Here are five reasons businesses may want to take a closer look at 3CX.
Choose Where Your Phone System Runs
One of the biggest differences between 3CX and RingCentral is the amount of control you have over where your phone system operates.
RingCentral is a cloud-hosted platform managed by RingCentral. A 3CX system, on the other hand, can be installed on a server at your location or deployed within a private cloud environment such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, or Vultr.
That flexibility allows your business to choose an environment that fits its existing technology, security requirements, budget, and management preferences. You are not forced into a single hosting model simply because that is how the provider delivers its service.
This can also provide more options when planning for disaster recovery. Because you control the deployment, backups, and underlying infrastructure, you can build a recovery plan around your particular business. For example, a system operating at your office could be backed up and restored to alternate infrastructure if the original environment becomes unavailable. A cloud deployment can also be designed around the redundancy and recovery capabilities offered by your selected provider.
Of course, disaster recovery does not happen automatically. It still needs to be planned and tested. The advantage is that you have more freedom to decide what that plan should look like.
Work With a Local 3CX Partner
When something goes wrong with your phone system, it helps to have someone who already understands your environment.
3CX has a global network of partners that can assist with planning, deployment, configuration, training, troubleshooting, and ongoing support. This gives businesses the option to work with an experienced provider in their local area rather than relying exclusively on support from a large national cloud platform.
A local 3CX partner can become familiar with your network, internet connections, phones, call routing, office locations, and business processes. When you need to make a change, you are working with someone who understands why the system was designed the way it was.
That relationship can be especially valuable when opening a new office, changing internet providers, modifying call queues, adding failover service, or integrating the phone system with another business application. Instead of starting from the beginning every time you need assistance, you can work with a partner who already knows your organization.
Select the Telephone Carrier That Works for You
With many cloud phone services, the phone platform and telephone service are closely bundled together. While that can make purchasing simpler, it can also reduce your control over pricing, call routing, phone numbers, redundancy, and carrier relationships.
A 3CX system separates the phone system from the SIP trunking provider that connects it to the public telephone network. You can choose from a broad range of supported SIP trunk providers based on pricing, reliability, geographic coverage, customer service, or other business requirements.
You can also configure multiple trunks when appropriate. One carrier might handle your primary calling while another provides backup service. Different trunks could also be used for particular locations, phone numbers, or routing requirements. The exact options will depend on the providers and configuration, but 3CX gives you considerably more room to design the carrier portion of the system around your needs.
RingCentral does offer a Bring Your Own Carrier option in certain enterprise and multinational configurations. However, for many small and midsize organizations, RingCentral is still purchased as a hosted cloud service with telephone features and user subscriptions bundled together. With 3CX, selecting and managing a SIP trunk provider is a normal part of the system design rather than a specialized deployment model.
This carrier flexibility can be particularly useful when you want to negotiate better calling rates, keep an existing carrier relationship, create additional redundancy, or avoid placing the entire phone system and telephone service with one provider.
Add Extensions Without Automatically Adding Another Monthly Seat
Per-user pricing is common among hosted phone systems. RingCentral, for example, promotes plans priced per user per month. That means adding more employees or phone lines can also increase the recurring bill.
3CX takes a different approach. Its licensing is based primarily on the number of simultaneous calls the system needs to support rather than charging a separate monthly software fee for every individual extension.
As a result, you may be able to add employees, conference room phones, warehouse phones, common-area extensions, or other users without automatically increasing your recurring software cost (some limits may apply).
This can make budgeting more predictable, especially for organizations that have many extensions but only a portion of their users are actively on calls at the same time. You can select a system capacity based on actual calling needs instead of assuming that every new extension should create another monthly charge.
Connect Your Phone System to the Tools You Already Use
A business phone system should not operate in isolation. It should work with the applications your employees already use throughout the day.
3CX includes integrations for many popular CRM and help desk platforms. Depending on the application, these integrations can provide features such as caller identification, contact lookup, click-to-call, automatic call journaling, and the ability to create new contacts from the 3CX interface.
3CX can also integrate with Microsoft Teams through Direct Routing, allowing Teams users to make and receive calls through the 3CX system. Microsoft 365 integration can provide additional features such as user synchronization, phonebook synchronization, and presence status synchronization between Microsoft Teams and 3CX.
For businesses with more specialized requirements, 3CX can connect with Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL databases. This opens the door to more customized workflows, contact lookups, reporting, and application integrations.
There is also a 3CX CRM Integration Wizard, previously referred to as the CRM Template Generator. When a prebuilt integration is not available, the wizard can help create a custom integration for CRM, help desk, or ticketing applications that provide a compatible REST API.
The real benefit is not integration simply for the sake of integration. It is reducing the amount of time employees spend switching between applications, manually searching for customer information, or recording the same information in multiple places.
Which Approach Is Right for Your Business?
RingCentral may be a good fit for organizations that want a fully hosted service, prefer a bundled per-user subscription, and do not want to make many decisions about the underlying phone system infrastructure.
A 3CX system may be a better fit when your priorities include:
Greater control over where the system runs, more options for disaster recovery, the ability to select your telephone carrier, access to a local support partner, a licensing model that is not based entirely on individual seats, and more flexibility for integrations and custom workflows.
Ultimately, the question is not whether one platform is right for every company. It is whether you want your business phone system to operate as a standardized cloud subscription or as a flexible communications platform that can be designed around your organization.
At Contoured Solutions, we help businesses plan, deploy, and support 3CX systems in on-premises and private cloud environments. We can also assist with SIP trunking, call routing, phone provisioning, carrier redundancy, integrations, and ongoing management.
Contact us to discuss whether 3CX would be a good fit for your business.