Elastix or FreePBX and why?
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I no longer recommend Elastix because the 2.4 line was abandoned in favor of the new 3.0.
The massive failure of 3.0 caused 2.5 to get released (poorly)as a minor (yet broken) update to 2.4.The Elastix team then held a crowd funding drive to get money to be able to afford to update Elastix to CentOS 7. That was 6 months ago and nothing has been announced officially. A forum mod posted a thread in the comunity forums on March 26th to stating that Elastix 4.0 beta 1 was available. This mod is not a developer or privy to any information from the developers. He is a community member. There were known errors in April posted to the thread and no followup.
http://forum.elastix.org/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=130604As a general rule the Elastix forums are useless. It is only a very few community members helping posters generally.
FreePBX is constantly updated and developers actively participate in their forums.
FreePBX as a distribution is relatively new to the scene, but the FreePBX GUI has been the core of most Asterisk distributions for years.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's not as simple as "one is better" or "one is better today", it also comes down to meeting your needs.
All things are like this. Unfortunately Elastix meets no needs.
The Elastix release that you are testing is 2.5.
It is a mutilated version apparently as the ISO does not actually result in a full 2.5 install.
But they've already released Elastix 3 which was renamed to Elastix MT which is on CentOS 6.
Elastix 3.0 is a completely differnet product than Elastix 2.X The FreePBX core was abandoned for an new in house system. The MT moniker means Multi-Tenant for the curious.
And Elastix 4 is in alpha being tested.
Elastix 4.0 has been in beta 1 since the end of March. Elastix 4 was only released because 3 failed.
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I don't have need for Elastix MT, I don't plan to host anyone but myself - so I considered it a non starter.
I do need to dig in and find what the basis for Elastix 4 is, but since it's alpha now, it's out of the picture since I need to put a solution in place in the next 60 days.
That leaves Elastix 2.5 or FreePBX 12.
Seeing all of the strap on features in Elastix while probably not effecting the phone functions makes me wonder if they just couldn't keep their eye on the prize, and instead wasted resources creating crappy apps just so they could say they were a Unified Communication package.
I'm leaning toward FreePBX.
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@Dashrender said:
I don't have need for Elastix MT, I don't plan to host anyone but myself - so I considered it a non starter.
That's probably a good decision. No one seems to like Elastix MT. But keep in mind that it wasn't built to be multi-tenent. It's name was changed from Elastix 3 only after it was released to try to find a niche for it. So while that is now how people are thinking of it, it was not what they were thinking when making it. It was simply Elastix with a FreePBX interface replacement.
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@Dashrender said:
That leaves Elastix 2.5 or FreePBX 12.
For sixty days, yes, those would be the best choices almost certainly.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I don't have need for Elastix MT, I don't plan to host anyone but myself - so I considered it a non starter.
That's probably a good decision. No one seems to like Elastix MT. But keep in mind that it wasn't built to be multi-tenent. It's name was changed from Elastix 3 only after it was released to try to find a niche for it. So while that is now how people are thinking of it, it was not what they were thinking when making it. It was simply Elastix with a FreePBX interface replacement.
Considering they dumped that line, all the more reason to skip right over it.
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@Dashrender said:
I'm not leaning toward FreePBX.
This I find a little surprising. Most people lean towards FreePBX. Both are fine. But FreePBX at the moment has the better base and activity.
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@Dashrender said:
Considering they dumped that line, all the more reason to skip right over it.
What was dumped?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I'm not leaning toward FreePBX.
This I find a little surprising. Most people lean towards FreePBX. Both are fine. But FreePBX at the moment has the better base and activity.
Whoops... one to many words in there.. I removed the NOT from the line.
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It Elastix MT was dumped, which it might easily have been, this is news to me. My understanding is that it is alive and kicking, just not super popular, and being continued as a new line to run parallel to Elastix #.
That's why the rename. So that there could be two Elastix lines without people thinking that they overlapped. The name change was specifically because it was not being dumped.
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Ah okay, so FreePBX is the current leader? That makes the most sense to me.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Considering they dumped that line, all the more reason to skip right over it.
What was dumped?
Maybe I read to much into @JaredBusch's post (an other posts in the past) that Elastix had a failing with trying to replace the FreePBX interface with their own, and figured they'd abandoned development on it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Ah okay, so FreePBX is the current leader? That makes the most sense to me.
Yes, I am currently downloading the ISO for FreePBX x64. I'll install it tomorrow and delete my Elastix download.
Using this ISO should be infinitely easier to setup than the trouble I went through a few months ago installing FreePBX from scratch on C@C.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Considering they dumped that line, all the more reason to skip right over it.
What was dumped?
Maybe I read to much into @JaredBusch's post (an other posts in the past) that Elastix had a failing with trying to replace the FreePBX interface with their own, and figured they'd abandoned development on it.
It was a failure with their customers. People were not too happy with the result (and it took forever - that's why they are in such bad shape now because they fell a year or more behind trying to get it out.)
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What was dumped was the 2.X line in favor of the 3.0 line (now MT). But when MT failed to work for the largest portion of people actually using Elastix they had to back step and revive the 2.X line as 4.0.
3.0 was renamed MT for a reason. That was developed for the large resellers wanting a Multi-Tenant solution. Those customers were the main paying customers to Elastix for support. Of course they were catered to. It was just unfortunate they were catered to exclusively to the detriment of the product as a whole.
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What about Incredible PBX? Is it a viable alternative?
Also, can any of these be run on DO with decent performance / reliability?
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PBX in a Flash is a perfectly viable alternative. It has a few security tweaks that some find very nice.
IncrediblePBX is simply a set of scripts ran on top of a base PBX in a Flash install. It adds a lot of functionality that I personally find bloated. I want my PBX to be a PBX.
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So is freepbx a good choice for a voip novice? Also looking for opinions on hosted vs on-premise. Am I better to spin up a vm internally or host on DO?
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I'm on board with FreePBX being better than Elastix at the moment (even though my heart belongs with Elastix because that's what I learned when I first dove into VOIP). I think all of the commercial features they are offering for the latest version could be quite powerful as well if they will help your business (like Parking Pro, Endpoint Manager, Fax Pro, Q-Xact reports, etc.). Elastix had several paid add-ins too, but I don't think they have had the firepower that some of the new ones from Schmoozecom have.
I will say I really like the fact that in newer versions of FreePBX you have the ability to use device and user mode and can register more than one device to a single extension. I have not tried it, but I can think of many use cases for it.
But, I do look forward to playing around with Elastix 3 (MT) and 4 to see if Elastix can return to its former glory someday.
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@Danp said:
So is freepbx a good choice for a voip novice? Also looking for opinions on hosted vs on-premise. Am I better to spin up a vm internally or host on DO?
Just be careful when you are talking about running something like FreePBX in-house on a VM versus with a hosting provider on a VM. There may be differences in the kernel that can cause buggy behavior in the PBX (like running Elastix on VMWare vs. Xen and call reports working in one case but not the other). It can work, but you want to test it to make sure.
But I'd say for a VOIP newb, FreePBX is a decent choice to dig in and start playing.
