3CX

3CX is a business phone system and call center that companies run on premise, self-hosted or hosted by 3CX, licensed by call capacity rather than per seat.

3CX replaces a company's proprietary PBX with software that carries calls, video meetings, live chat and messaging in one system. It started as a PBX phone system and grew into a communications platform built on SIP, open standards and WebRTC. 3CX Ltd has developed it since 2005 and has no parent company. IT teams choose where it runs: on their own hardware, in a private cloud or on servers 3CX hosts, and the first two keep call data on infrastructure the company controls. Inbound calls pass through a Multi-level IVR, office-hours rules and Call Queues, with Skill-based Routing and a Callback option for callers who would rather not hold. Supervisors follow the Wallboard and the Switchboard, and use Barge in, Listen in and Whisper to coach agents during live calls. The Call Flow Designer builds custom call logic, including a predictive dialer that paces outbound calls to the agents free. Call Recording, Call Reports with queue and agent statistics, and voicemail transcription keep a record of each conversation. Its AI tools add Call Summary, Call Sentiment, an AI Receptionist and an AI Personal Assistant. 3CX is aimed at companies that need a full phone system rather than a few lines, from growing offices to enterprises with thousands of extensions. It suits IT teams that want to own the deployment and organisations with strict rules on where call data lives. It is offered as a replacement for Avaya, Mitel and Alcatel systems, with setups for hotels, education, healthcare and the automotive trade. Buyers get it through a worldwide network of reseller partners, and it also runs as a multi-tenant PBX. A support desk on 3CX takes queue calls in the web client or the iOS and Android apps, while the Wallboard shows waiting callers to the whole team. Companies on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace sync users from the directory they already keep, and Microsoft Teams users reach the phones through Direct Routing. WhatsApp, SMS and a WordPress live chat plugin bring customer messages into the same place agents answer calls. When the built-in reports are not enough, data connectors feed call records into PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Grafana or Power BI. For an IT team, the job is one company phone system, deployed wherever its data policy says calls must live.