3CX vs RingEX: Which is a better fit?

Kelsey B.: My name's Kelsey, and I'm an IT specialist for a volunteer fire department in rural south Louisiana. I give 3CX a five star rating. We've tried other providers such as Vonage, RingCentral, and all those were primarily not cost-effective for us because they were on a per user basis and all the extra bells and whistles were a whole lot more money. Since we're basically operate off of fundraising and grants, it was well out of our budget. So, 3CX enabled us to basically provide phone service for everybody in our office at a very, very low cost compared to the competitors. Again, we chose 3CX because it was flexible, easy to implement, and the cost was very, very low compared to the others. I mean, when we were paying for a small business license as opposed to paying $300 a month for everyone having phone access at their desk, it's a very, very big cost difference. And when you're relying on fundraising to pay the bills, it's always good to try and find a good option at a really good price. Implementing 3CX was very easy because we use CallCentric, and that again, is also a very affordable option. So, combining the two and getting it all set up for all of our people, it required minimal effort. I mean, it was really, support was great when we had to call in. But the online tutorials were also great, so it was an ease to implement 3CX in our workplace. For anybody out there considering options for phone service in their small business, I would highly recommend 3CX to anyone to try out, because again, with the feature rich aspect of it, as far as the cost and the ease of implementation, you won't be disappointed. I think you highly appreciate the value for the product you receive.

Anjan: Hi, my name is Anjan. I'm a managing director. For RingCentral Office, I give it a rating of four out of five. For more reviews like this, click below. The other applications that we considered prior to going with RingCentral were Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangout. For Zoom, we found the file sharing capability was limited. As I recall, Microsoft Teams really did not meet our needs at all in terms of a collaborative approach, because we were going to have about 25 to 30 people logging in simultaneously. Being able to send and receive files seamlessly through the application while being engaged in a video call did not really match up, and the same thing was with Google. I think the reasons that we chose RingCentral was, number one, cost. It was very, very affordable, more affordable than some of the other enterprise licensing parameters. From an actual application standpoint, we liked the seamless ability to be able to send and receive files back and forth. These were a group of students that we were working with. They were dispersed globally, and I needed to be able to access their submissions and their projects in a seamless manner, and be able to collaborate on them and provide them with feedback, and we found that RingCentral was offering the best opportunity and the platform to do that. RingCentral was extremely easy to integrate. Being a SAS application, there was no major installation or requirement. As a matter of fact, our participants could actually just log in with their browsers, so that was actually really beneficial as well. It also allowed for people that were participating in the seminar, if they had a lower bandwidth or if they did not have adequate internet access in terms of bandwidth, that they could still participate in the RingCentral forum without losing any of the direction or visibility or collaborative efforts that the application itself provides. So those were all great, great things with RingCentral, and again, allowed us to very easily and seamlessly utilize the product. The recommendation that we would give for people using RingCentral is that it is not Zoom. So it is powered by Zoom, it looks a lot like Zoom, but it is not Zoom. So my first learning was the fact that, hey, I can't change the background on this thing very, very easily, or as seamlessly as I could in Zoom. When I actually got over the fact that it is not Zoom, but it is powered by Zoom, the application itself became a lot more usable. Where I recommend people focus on is that collaborative element and being able to sort of transfer files back and forth, collaborate on a project, collaborate on a seminar. Those are things that RingCentral is really known for and can be used for. So not Zoom, but RingCentral has some great features.