Elastix or FreePBX and why?
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I know I need to do IT right, but at the moment I don't have the time and I need to start this project.
Several people are running Elastix, other FreePBX.
FreePBX seems to be recently updated to run on CentOS 6.5, FreePBX 12, and Asterisk 11 or 13 (not sure why is says either yet)
and Elastix is running on CentOS 5.11, FreePBX 11 (I think), and Asterisk 11.13.0.0.I've now had recommendations for both. Elastix because it's what that person knew... and FreePBX because it's more recently updated, running on more current version of Linux.
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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It's not as simple as "one is better" or "one is better today", it also comes down to meeting your needs.
The Elastix release that you are testing is 2.5. But they've already released Elastix 3 which was renamed to Elastix MT which is on CentOS 6. And Elastix 4 is in alpha being tested. We have both MT and 4 running in the lab.
For production right now we (NTG) are on FreePBX before Elastix 2 was falling behind so badly and Elastix 3/MT was not a good match for our needs.
FreePBX has a tendency to be the best fit today. But whether it will remain so has yet to be seen. Elastix was the leader for a long time, but slipped up badly. But they are attempting hard to make a comeback after admitting that trying to replace the FreePBX interface was a mistake.
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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?
