demystifying 3cx licenses

Demystifying 3CX Licensing

3CX Standard License, 3CX Pro License, 3CX Enterprise License, and now 3CX StartUP License – that’s a lot of licenses, but how do the license features differ? 

The folks at 3CX haven’t made it super easy to understand the differences so we’ve dedicated a blog to demystify 3CX licensing.

Want to get an overview of all the 3CX features and what they mean? Check out this 3CX features blog post.

3CX Standard License

The 3CX Standard License is now discontinued and only available as a renewal. The 3CX Standard License is quasi replaced with StartUP license.

The 3CX Standard License doesn’t have: 

3CX Pro License

At Lightwire we typically default to the Pro license as it allows for a unique customer FQDN which is essential for efficient and controlled failover.

However, we have a number of partners using Enterprise as well due to a couple of high value additional features it offers.

When it comes to 3CX Pro Licenses, they can do everything the Standard/StartUP License can, as well as:

3CX Enterprise License

When it comes to 3CX Enterprise licenses, they can do everything the 3CX Pro license can do, as well as:

Of the above features, skill based routing and call recording restrictions are the ones to look out for when looking to design your clients’ 3CX deployment.

Inbuilt failover sounds important, but if hosting the instance in a private or public cloud you will almost certainly have more cost effective failover strategies available to you. To utilise the in-built failover feature, you have to have 2 copies of the PBX running, which is an inefficient use of resources.

What's next?

The licensing space is very fluid at the moment. A pending release (release 6) will see a StartUP option offered where self hosting providers can setup a true multi-tenant instance and segment into multiple tenancies. 

The Standard license has been discontinued and is being quasi-replaced with StartUP which is limited to 4SC and has the same feature set.

Standard will still be available to renew where already in use.

Looking to self host 3CX?

The Lightwire voice engineers and advanced certified 3CX engineers put together the ultimate playbook that your MSP team needs to scope, design, sell, provision, and support self hosted 3CX.

No forms, no spam, no cold calls – the 3CX Playbook is 100% free.

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