3CX pricing 2026: what it really costs, vs Voxbi

3CX is one of the cheapest phone systems you can buy. It is also one of the easiest to underprice. The licence for fifty users costs €760 a year. The full phone system costs more.

This page explains that gap. We sell SIP trunks to 3CX installations. Mixvoip certifies 3CX, and it runs on our trunks in Luxembourg, Belgium, France and Germany. So we have no reason to tell you 3CX is bad. It isn't. But the published price only covers the software. A working phone system also needs a carrier, phone numbers, minutes, a place to run, and someone to manage it. Once you add those costs, the gap between 3CX and a managed cloud PBX like Voxbi becomes small. Which way it goes depends on two things: how many people you have, and how many phone numbers you buy.

Table of contents

• The short answer

• Why you can't compare the plans directly

  • The closer structural comparison

• What each side actually costs

  • The crossover point

  • The free option, honestly

• What the flat rate covers, and what it doesn't

• Where 3CX is stronger

• Where Voxbi is stronger

• Hosting, security and who you're really contracting with

• Switching from 3CX

• Questions buyers ask

• The verdict

• Sources

The short answer

Below about thirteen people, Voxbi costs less than 3CX, even when we supply the 3CX trunk ourselves. Above that, 3CX costs less in cash. The difference then gets small enough that it comes down to who manages the system.

That threshold assumes one main number for the company on both sides, which is the costing used throughout this page.

At ten users with one main number, 3CX with a Mixvoip trunk costs about €209 a month. Voxbi Managed Business Flat costs €185. The reason is structural. The smallest commercial 3CX licence covers eight calls at once, whether you need them or not. Trunk channels cost the same whether ten people or thirty people use them. Small teams pay for capacity they can't use.

At fifty users, this reverses. 3CX costs about €701 a month. Voxbi costs €889, a difference of €2,250 a year. Whether that's a saving depends on what the hours cost. At Luxembourg's average hourly labour cost, €2,250 buys about 40 hours: roughly 45 minutes a week of patching, upgrades, certificate renewals, trunk troubleshooting and changes to call routing. If your IT team can absorb that without extra strain, 3CX is cheaper. If the work falls on someone who already has a full-time job, it probably isn't.

That is the whole decision. The rest of this page shows the maths.

Why you can't compare the plans directly

3CX and Voxbi don't price the same thing, so a plan-versus-plan table would be misleading.

3CX charges per system, based on simultaneous calls. You buy a tier, such as 8 SC, 16 SC or 32 SC, and each tier has a maximum number of extensions. Fifty users need the 16 SC tier, because 8 SC caps out at forty extensions, no matter how many calls you actually make at once. Your headcount sets the minimum tier you need. Your busiest moment sets how high you must go.

Voxbi charges per user, with the carrier included from Managed Professional upward.

So the fair comparison is total cost: licence, hosting, trunk, numbers and minutes on one side, against a per-user price plus numbers on the other.

For feature purposes the editions line up roughly like this, though none of the pairings is exact:

Two things in that table catch buyers out. 3CX Basic has no call queues and no call recording. If you compare its €285 entry price to a cloud PBX, you are not comparing equal products. And 3CX's XAPI only comes with the AI plan, so an API costs at least €550 a year on 3CX. On Voxbi One Plus, it costs €2.90 per user per month.

The closer structural comparison

If your telephony depends on how many calls happen at once, rather than headcount, Voxbi Channel is the closer match. It costs €14.50 per channel per month, with a minimum of three channels, priced by simultaneous calls exactly like 3CX. It suits shops, hotels and shared lines, where there are more phones than active callers. We don't use this plan in the tables below, because most buyers comparing 3CX to a cloud PBX count people, not calls. But it is the fairer structural match, and it's worth discussing with us.

What each side actually costs

Here are our assumptions, stated plainly. On the 3CX side: the PRO plan, hosted by 3CX at the listed price, a Mixvoip Business trunk with channels matching the licensed simultaneous calls, our flat rate at €9.90 per user, and numbers from the Mixvoip trunk. On the Voxbi side: Managed Business Flat at €17.60 per user, with numbers at €8.90 each. Both sides exclude setup, administration, desk phones, headsets and network work. 3CX doesn't publish these figures, so we left them out rather than guess.

Both tables below use one main number for the whole company, not one number per user, since extensions sit behind a main number on both a cloud PBX and a 3CX system with an auto attendant.

Licence prices come from the 3CX pricelist. PRO costs €380 a year at 8 SC and €760 at 16 SC. 3CX hosting costs €285 and €430. Trunk, flat-rate and number prices come from our own SIP trunk and number pages. Voxbi prices come from voxbi.com/pricing.

If your team needs a direct-dial number for every person, rather than one shared line, the cost of numbers changes the picture. It's worth being honest about why. On a Mixvoip SIP trunk, a number in Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany or France costs €1.60 on its own, or €3.10 for a block of ten. On Voxbi Managed Business Flat, a number costs €8.90. Both prices are public. If you plan to give every employee a direct-dial number, this difference will affect your bill more than your choice of platform. So decide your numbering plan first, then ask us which product fits it.

The crossover point

Set the two costs equal and solve. With one main number, 3CX has a fixed cost of €109.82 a month at eight channels, and each user adds €9.90. Voxbi costs €17.60 per user. The two lines cross at about thirteen users.

Below that number, the maths favours Voxbi. Above it, 3CX costs less in cash, and the question becomes whether the saving is worth the work of running it yourself.

The free option, honestly

3CX offers a 4SC Free Basic plan with no licence cost. It's real, and for a very small team it's cheap: with four trunk channels, our flat rate for ten users and one number, it costs about €127 a month, plus whatever your own server or cloud instance costs.

The limits are real too. It's self-hosted only. 3CX will not host it for you. Four calls at once for ten people is tight. And it has no call queues, no call recording, no CRM integration and no API. It suits a small office with someone technical and a modest number of calls. It does not suit anyone who needs the features most businesses expect from a phone system.

What the flat rate covers, and what it doesn't

Both columns above use the same flat rate of €9.90 per user, to more than 130 destinations, because we are the carrier on both sides. This keeps the cost of calls the same and removes it as a variable.

The conditions are worth reading before you budget for it. The flat rate is available only for phone systems at our "certified" or "compatible" level. 3CX qualifies. It's also only available when a Mixvoip channel partner manages the system. It's not available for call centres or automated dialling systems, including predictive dialers. Fax is excluded. If you run outbound campaigns, this isn't your tariff, and per-minute rates apply on both products.

The trunk tiers differ in service level, not call price. Standard guarantees 99.80% uptime, with fault handling on weekdays. Business guarantees 99.90%, with fault handling seven days a week. Advanced guarantees 99.95%, with round-the-clock handling plus monitoring and alerts. Our SLA terms explain the details. On Standard and Business, anti-fraud protection needs Mixvoip internet and a certified PBX. On Advanced, it's on by default with no requirements.

Where 3CX is stronger

Cost doesn't grow with headcount. This is the real argument for 3CX, and it gets stronger as you grow. Two hundred staff sharing twenty-four calls at once pay for 24 SC, not two hundred seats. No per-user vendor can match that.

Numbers cost far less on a trunk. Because 3CX buys numbers from a carrier, rather than bundling them, a block of ten direct-dial numbers costs €3.10 a month. If direct-dial numbers for everyone matter to you, this is a real and significant advantage.

You can run it anywhere. On-site, in your own AWS or Azure account, or hosted by 3CX. If your policy requires the phone system to sit inside your own infrastructure, Voxbi has no answer for you, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

You keep the recordings. They sit on infrastructure you control, with no limit set by the vendor. Voxbi's managed plans cap recording storage at 3, 14, 60 or 120 days, depending on the plan.

More contact-centre features for the money. PRO includes queues, recording, queue reports, a switchboard, a wallboard, and the ability to listen in, whisper or barge into calls, plus the Call Flow Designer. AI adds skill-based routing, transcription, sentiment analysis and AI agents. Voxbi has no equivalent for most of this.

Extra features Voxbi doesn't offer at all. Video conferencing for 100 people on PRO and 250 on AI, live chat on your website, WhatsApp, Facebook and SMS.

No lock-in to one carrier, and a short commitment. Bring any trunk, sign up for twelve months, and leave with your setup and your phones.

Odoo works natively. Since Update 10 of version 20, 3CX integrates directly with Odoo: caller ID lookup, call and chat logging, contact creation and click-to-call. You need PRO or AI, since Basic has no CRM integration at all, but it works, and it's documented.

A very large partner network. More than ten thousand partners worldwide, which usually means someone local knows the product.

Where Voxbi is stronger

Small teams with few numbers pay less. Below about thirteen users, on a single main number, the maths favours Voxbi before anyone does any work.

Nobody has to run it. No patching, no version upgrades, no certificate renewals, no firewall rules, no backup checks. At fifty users, that work makes up the entire price difference.

Phone support and an SLA with credits. Voxbi Managed Business and Enterprise include phone support and the Business SLA. With 3CX, your service level is whatever your partner has agreed in writing. As of 26 August 2026, we could not find any published SLA from 3CX with downtime credits.

One supplier, one invoice. PBX, carrier, numbers and porting on a single contract with a regulated European operator. Mixvoip holds registrations with ILR in Luxembourg, BNetzA in Germany, ARCEP in France, IBPT in Belgium, and regulators in Spain, Austria, Portugal, Finland and Switzerland. See the impressum.

An API without the top plan. Available from Voxbi One Plus at €2.90 per user, and from Managed Professional. On 3CX, you need the AI plan. Our API documentation is public.

Microsoft Teams either way. Direct Routing on Voxbi, or on the trunk at €72.50 a month if you'd rather keep 3CX.

Odoo works here too. The Voxbi Odoo integration supports click-to-call, call logs and contact syncing. It's available from Voxbi One Plus upward, with no need for a top-tier plan.

Hosting, security and who you're really contracting with

3CX. The company lists a US head office in Tampa, a European office in Nicosia, and a German office in Hannover. It doesn't say which entity contracts with EU customers on the pages we checked, so ask before you sign. 3CX's hosted service runs on Amazon, Google and Digital Ocean infrastructure. We found no published promise about which region your instance runs in, either way. If where your data is stored matters to you, get it in writing, or self-host, which 3CX genuinely allows. That's a real advantage.

Voxbi. Built and hosted in the European Union, run by Mixvoip SA from Steinsel, Luxembourg. ISO 27001 certificates covering Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg are published at mixvoip.com/company/accreditations.

The key structural point. 3CX supplies no telephony service: no numbers, no minutes, no porting, no emergency calling. Those come from your carrier, whoever that is, along with the regulatory responsibility that comes with them. With Voxbi, they come from the same company that runs the PBX. Neither setup is automatically better. They just place responsibility in different places, and you should know which one you're buying.

Switching from 3CX

If you decide to move, the steps are simple. We do this often enough that our own 3CX page mentions it.

1. Check your contract. 3CX subscriptions run for a year. Find your renewal date before you commit to anything else.

2. Export what you need. Call history, recordings and voicemail live on your own infrastructure. Save them before you shut the system down.

3. Document your setup. Extensions, IVR menus, ring groups, queues, office hours and holiday routing. This is the step people underestimate most.

4. Start porting your numbers. Number porting follows the losing carrier's schedule, not ours, and it varies by country. We'll tell you what to expect for your specific numbers, rather than promise a date here.

5. Rebuild and test in parallel. Both systems run at the same time during this phase.

6. Switch over, and keep your phones. Yealink handsets and Patton, Sangoma or Grandstream gateways work with both systems, so your hardware usually carries across at no extra cost.

If you'd rather keep 3CX, that's fine too. We'll supply the trunk, and our Luxembourg-based team will support it.

Questions buyers ask

Is 3CX really cheaper than a cloud PBX?

Above about thirteen users, with a single main number, yes, in cash terms, and the gap grows as you grow. Below that, it usually isn't, because the eight-call licence minimum and fixed trunk channels don't spread well across a small team. Neither answer accounts for the time it takes to run the system.

What does 3CX actually cost per year?

The licence alone costs €285 for Basic, €380 for PRO and €550 for AI at 8 simultaneous calls, and €570, €760 and €1,045 at 16. Hosting by 3CX adds €285 or €430. Add a trunk, numbers and minutes on top. Check the pricelist. It's public and complete, which is more than several competitors offer.

How many phone numbers will I actually need?

Fewer than most people think. A main number that goes to an auto attendant, plus direct-dial numbers for people who genuinely need to be reached directly, covers most businesses. Because numbers are priced differently on a trunk than on a managed service, decide this before you choose a platform, not after.

How many simultaneous calls do I need?

Count the calls happening at once during your busiest ten minutes of the week, including internal calls, then add some spare capacity. If you get this wrong on the low side, callers will hear a busy tone. Also note that each tier caps the number of extensions: 8 SC allows 40, 16 SC allows 80. So your headcount alone can force an upgrade, even without more calls at once.

Is there still a free version of 3CX?

Yes. The 4SC Free Basic plan has no licence cost, but it's self-hosted only, limited to four calls at once, and has no queues, recording, CRM integration or API. Some blog posts claim the free plan was discontinued in January 2026. 3CX's own pages contradict this.

Can I keep my numbers?

Yes, in either direction. Porting is supported both ways, and timing depends on the losing carrier and the country.

Does 3CX work with Odoo?

Yes, natively, since Update 10 of version 20, on the PRO and AI plans. Basic has no CRM integration.

Can Mixvoip supply the trunk for my 3CX?

Yes. 3CX is certified by Mixvoip and runs on our trunks in Luxembourg, Belgium, France and Germany, among others. Our flat rate applies when one of our channel partners manages the system.

What's the catch with 3CX hosting?

Two things to check. The current pricelist includes a 50% hosting discount running until 30 September 2026, and the page doesn't say whether the listed hosting prices are before or after that discount. Ask what applies when you renew. Also, 3CX hosting your server doesn't mean 3CX manages your phone system. Extensions, routing, trunks and integrations remain your responsibility.

The verdict

3CX is a good product at a genuinely low price. If you have in-house IT, more staff than calls happening at once, or a need to keep the system on your own infrastructure, it's very hard to beat. We'd rather sell you a trunk for it than talk you out of it.

Voxbi wins in a narrower range than the licence prices suggest, and it's worth being precise about where. If you have fewer than about thirteen people and use a main number rather than direct-dial for everyone, Voxbi costs less overall. And at any size, if nobody on your team wants to manage a PBX, the difference at fifty users comes to about 45 minutes of admin work a week. That's not an obviously good trade for every company, but it's not an obviously bad one either. It depends on facts about your team that no comparison page can know.

If you want a direct-dial number for every staff member, buy the numbers on a trunk. That's true whichever platform you choose, and we sell trunks.

The one thing we would push back on is comparing the €285 sticker price to a cloud PBX subscription. That price buys software with no queues, no recording, no CRM, and no dial tone at all. Compare the totals instead.

Sources

• 3CX pricelist — licence and hosting prices in EUR, verified 26 August 2026

• 3CX feature list — edition contents by feature

• 3CX pricing FAQ — what the subscription includes

• 3CX hosted PBX — hosting infrastructure and trunk independence

• 3CX 4SC Free Basic edition — free edition scope and limits

• 3CX Odoo CRM integration guide — native integration, updated 30 July 2026

• Voxbi pricing — Voxbi One and Voxbi Managed prices, including the monthly per-number charge

• Voxbi call rates — per-destination rates

• Mixvoip SIP trunk — channel prices, flat rate and trunk service levels

• Mixvoip flat-rate conditions — destinations and restrictions

• Mixvoip DID and number pricing — number and porting prices by country

• Mixvoip SLA — uptime targets and support windows

• Mixvoip regulatory registrations — operator registrations by country

• Mixvoip 3CX page — certification and trunk compatibility

• Eurostat dataset lc_lci_lev, published 31 March 2026 — average hourly labour costs used in the administration-time calculation