AWS FreePBX v17 with included Technical Support

I have implemented FreePBX in IVR features many times because I am a hardcore developer who first prefers customization. FreePBX provides many services, but sometimes we do not need all of them, so customization is necessary. I have banking customers, hotel customers, and hospital customers, and their IVR requirements are all different.

FreePBX has a lot of GUI that sometimes we do not need. The first problem is reloading. When you do customization, you need to reload every time. This reload process should be fine-tuned because in production servers, we do not need to reload everything. These are suggestions for FreePBX improvement.

There are some limitation issues with concurrent calls. When we have concurrent calls, sometimes the entire PBX fails. We use the channel dump command to check what is wrong with FreePBX.

FreePBX is a solution that gives you the entire communication happening between party A and party B, where party A is your consumer and party B is your producer. The entire communication, discussion, and negotiation happen in one platform, which is what we call PBX. FreePBX is not only about your calling system; it is about solving customer problems. When the customer is having a problem and the producer is not able to solve it, we have that solution through a contact center solution that will provide answers to their higher management. This entire system will ease life.

Let me give a simple example. Suppose you have a company selling printers or electronic devices. I bought electronic devices from you and got a problem with my device. If you build the device, you know what type of problem customers face. At that time, you can place an agentic or AI assistant. When I call the number, they will verify my product ID. Once the product ID is verified, they will check the warranty period and immediately solve the problem with their app. This is fantastic because it provides proactive support from the customer 24 into 7 across the world.

Suppose I am running more than five or ten hotels and hospitals. If I have that type of PBX, my job will be easy because I can monitor the entire team and my agents. I can handle customer queries in a more robust and communicated way, providing proactive support. Customers will get feedback on time.

FreePBX has some monitoring and real-time monitoring features. They also have some SIP packet capturing. There is a third-party tool called Homer that is a great tool because it can capture call traces and SIP session logs and SDP logs. I can see what is going on with a particular call flow. Usually, for each call, you have the activity of that call, what happened with the call, and why the call is dropping. Are the correct codecs being received? Is there a NAT issue? Is there a firewall issue? Is there any packet loss during the call? These are the things we really need in FreePBX, but they are not currently included.

I have been using FreePBX for the last decade, more than 10 years.

I do utilize FreePBX's call recording feature because without call recording, you cannot take proof from the customer or consumer side. Proof is really required. Sometimes customers are not favorable, but sometimes your agent is not working seriously and is not giving the right solution, so you need voice recording as proof.

FreePBX has some pros and cons like every product. For pros, FreePBX is very scalable, very flexible, and open source. It is also easy to be available for open source FreePBX, not for paid. For open source, it is very compatible with CentOS , Linux, and all kinds of open source systems. There is HA availability, high availability, and fault tolerance.

For cons, suppose you have a small company where FreePBX size is comparative to larger systems. Sometimes some customers want minimalistic requirements, and FreePBX is okay for that, but they have plenty of options. We do customization where they need only a very simple inbound and outbound and IVR flow. We need to work on that type of simplex form.

Also, in FreePBX, there is no API exposed as far as I understand. There is no third-party API, plugins, or webhooks. These webhooks would integrate with third parties, but that part is missing.

If you go with paid support, there will be a dedicated customer support team. For free support, they have a forum. You have to post your query on the forum, Asterisk  community, or FreePBX community forum. There you can raise your concern, and the team will revert within four hours or within four to 24 hours response time. Tech support for FreePBX, I would rate it six to seven out of ten.

Apart from FreePBX, I have worked on Asterisk , core Asterisk, VoIP, SIP, Amazon Connect , AWS , and all kinds of AWS services, DevOps, Terraform , Jenkins , and Docker . I am not only dedicated to the telephonic system. I explore things in different ways. The competition is very tough in the market. Amazon launched their services called Amazon Connect , which is a complete CCaaS  platform. Contact Center as a Service  provides customers with an entire GUI and requests them to use their services without worrying about the backend.

It is very straightforward and not complex. However, it depends on which version you are working with. The latest versions have some time-taking parts, but you have to know about the entire setup.

From my side, we have to take extra precautions while migrating. From a global side, we usually worked intra, and once we take the services and install the software, it becomes our responsibility to take care of it. In that case, we should take care of migrating with no downtime. We already take care with extra logics.

I have mostly worked on the Asterisk side, and core Asterisk and FreePBX are both the same. What I have observed in the last couple of years is that I am learning FreeSWITCH as well. Asterisk is a console layer where you have to build everything. FreeSWITCH is the same. The FreePBX UI version name is FreeSWITCH UI, and the FreeSWITCH UI name is FusionPBX. FreeSWITCH in terms of performance is better when you have a huge call tech center solution and when you have third-party scripting using Lua or GoLang or Python. You can go with FreeSWITCH.

SIP is really needed because you do not need to add any external DGM card. You have an ethernet port, and you plug the ethernet port into your system if you are providing services physically to the data center. If everything is on cloud, then the cloud will take care of your SIP. If this PBX is not there, manual work using the phone with one-to-one communication, maintaining data, and tracking records would not be possible. FreePBX also has some monitoring and real-time monitoring features. They also have some SIP packet capturing with a third-party tool called Homer. Homer is a great tool because it can capture call traces and SIP session logs and SDP logs to see what is going on with a particular call flow. I give this review a rating of 7 out of 10.

I use FreePBX  for a specific use case in our call center for internal communication and customer support. FreePBX  fits into our e-wallet system by handling customer queries. When customers call, we do not directly integrate with the e-wallet system, but we use FreePBX for our customer care representatives who receive the phone calls. I use FreePBX as a BPO service as well as for customer needs.

The best features FreePBX offers stand out to me as most valuable. I find that customizing IVRs in FreePBX is straightforward and does not require a lot of technical know-how, as a layman can also use it. However, most of the time, a person should have VoIP knowledge and DTMF knowledge, especially when we are integrating with FXO and FXS equipment, and we should have that knowledge as well as SIP integration in case of SIP.

FreePBX has positively impacted my organization with IVR service and queue management, especially when we have a lot of calls in the queue and customers are not able to get answers from the customer care representatives. In those cases, we may route the calls to specific representatives or go for voicemails. I found valuable functions including queue management, IVR, and many other functions such as call routing to specific designated numbers.

For hospitals as well as internet ISP companies that need IVR services, we can customize FreePBX, which is very useful in those cases. FreePBX is very suitable for small organizations and SMEs, but for bigger organizations, I think we have to pay for that. I have already used their paid version at the subscription level, and I think it is average. However, when the call volume is large, sometimes FreePBX goes on halt, and because of that reason, I give it seven out of ten.

I have been using FreePBX for seven or eight years.

My advice for others looking into using FreePBX is that it is reasonable and most of the features are free, so I recommend it. It is stable, easy to set up, and good for queue management, IVR integration, and SIP integration which is currently available in Nepal for SME organizations. FreePBX is one of my first VoIP systems in my career, so I highly recommend most companies to use it. I gave this review a rating of seven out of ten.

My main use case for FreePBX  is troubleshooting. I use it to set up inbound and outbound routes, configure trunks, manage SIP configuration, and listen to CDR recordings.

A specific example of a troubleshooting task I have handled using FreePBX  is when a call is not dialing. I go to the Asterisk  CLI, try to make a call, and then see what is wrong there. If the issue is the dial pattern inside FreePBX, then I troubleshoot from the dial pattern of the outbound routes.

In addition to my main use case with FreePBX for troubleshooting, we also have our own line, and we use it to set up our trunk. Whenever they make calls, we ensure the call is routed to our trunk to get the revenue from there, and we have to properly set it up to make sure that outgoing and incoming calls are all working.

The best features FreePBX offers in my opinion are the ability to listen to recordings because usually when I make calls, sometimes I want to listen back to the recording. For a call that is being cut off or a call not finding the one we are calling, we can check the dial status, whether it is auto busy or the number is invalid. The CDR report is probably one of the best features and one of the things that I use the most to investigate a problem.

It is easy for me to access and use these features day-to-day because we handle a lot of clients and have full access to FreePBX. Usually, I just log in and check from there, and there is no real trouble in using the features.

I also appreciate that FreePBX is UI-based, making it easier to change things. For example, changing the outbound number in the Asterisk  CLI is more challenging because you have to know where to go and what code to use, but in FreePBX, you can just go and click to change from there. It is easier to use compared to using the Asterisk CLI by itself.

FreePBX has positively impacted my organization, and if I were to compare it to Elastix, I find it a lot easier to manage since it does not have a lot of bugs and is very user-friendly. When I first used FreePBX, it was a lot easier to learn compared to when I first used Elastix, which was about nine or ten years ago.

Its user-friendliness has helped my team because for the extension settings, if we have 1,000 extensions and need to adjust one setting, it takes time if we have to click one by one, maybe taking two minutes per extension. However, if we use the bulk handler, the 1,000 extensions can be done in around five to ten minutes, saving a lot of time.

FreePBX could be improved by adding the feature to identify how many people are in a call right now on the dashboard, which would be quite helpful. Sometimes when I receive reports that a user is not able to make a call out or they are having a call drop issue, viewing the dashboard provides no data. If we have the live call feature, similar to the one in ViciDial, we can right away acknowledge that this is a real issue, not just that the person is dialing wrongly or something of that nature.

That is one of the downsides I can see with FreePBX, but other than that, the other features are working great, including the CDR report, queue, ring group, announcement, and IVR. Everything else is satisfactory, and only the dashboard part that I mentioned needs improvement.

I have been using FreePBX for about two years.

My advice for others looking into using FreePBX is to not be afraid to use trial and error because when I first started using it to troubleshoot, I was afraid to change things. In a controlled environment with FreePBX, try to change some config and see the effect on the call. For example, if you change the outbound route in the Asterisk CLI, what will be displayed? If you change the dial pattern, what will be displayed? Try to route the inbound to an IVR or a ring group and see what will change. Do not be afraid to trial and error the features that FreePBX has because all of the features are very useful in my opinion. Experiment with it to fully understand its capabilities.

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.