3CX is a popular phone and unified communications platform, particularly among MSPs, but is it the best choice for your MSP?
There is a wide range of unified communications platforms on the market today, and many of them present compelling advantages over 3CX.
In this article we explore the top 5 reasons to replace 3CX in your MSP today.
Top 5 reasons to replace 3CX in your MSP

Trust
Trust in partnerships is critical for the success of your MSP. If you can’t trust your partners, you’ll never be happy selling and supporting their products and you’ll never be sure what actions they make take in the future that could hurt your business.
Many MSPs have expressed concerns about the behaviour of specific vendors and suppliers and how partners and resellers are treated, and some of the key factors mentioned online are:
- Concerns over partnership policies.
- Erratic or ‘toxic’ behaviour by the vendor towards partners.
- Changes to product features or inclusions with little to no prior warning.
The last thing any MSP has time for is being in a partnership with a company who does not respect them, and can’t be trusted to behave in ways that benefit customers and partners, and we feel this may be one of the key reasons to replace 3CX in your MSP.

License complexity
The majority of MSPs use a monthly billing cycle where the services they provide to customers are billed each month and typically based on usage levels. As a result, customers are used to this model and it saves the MSP and the customer time and money if they can align their offerings to a monthly usage-based cycle.
3CX is offered under a license structure with multiple editions of the product that vary in the features that are included. While a customer may only need one specific feature that’s not included as part of a lower edition of the platform they are forced to upgrade to a higher version in order to access that feature, creating a need to manage license upgrades and changes at any time.
The licensing of 3CX is also structured around an annual renewal cycle, which means that all of your customers have different dates for their license renewals that need to be managed.
Many alternative unified communications platforms are licensed on a monthly usage-based cycle, and we feel that the complexity of 3CX licensing is another of the key reasons to replace 3CX in your MSP.

Responsibility
Another of the top reasons to replace 3CX in your MSP is the high level of responsibility that you need to accept as part of offering 3CX to customers.
After all, 3CX is provided as a software license that you need to install on a suitable host, and then arrange for the patching, updating, monitoring, backup and overall management of the platform. Aside from the costs involved with all of those aspects of the system, the level of responsibility your MSP is accepting is significant. MSP is responsible for the correct setup of the platform for your customers, but you’re not required to manage all aspects of the hosting of those platforms.
It’s natural for MSPs to be comfortable with taking on those sorts of responsibilities for many different applications and platforms of their customers, but it just makes sense to properly account for the costs and risks attached to those duties and to make sure that you evaluate the many alternatives to 3CX to see if better options are available for your MSP.
Another aspect to consider is how version upgrades of the platform are deployed. With 3CX, when a major update to the platform is released, as compared with a minor update or ‘patch’, your MSP is obliged to arrange for a project to upgrade the software for each customer, one at a time. Your MSP may also need to arrange for the deployment of new applications to the various devices of all of the staff of all of your customers.
Managing deployments of this sort is a natural thing for your MSP to take on for your customers, but have you factored in the cost of these works when considering how profitable your 3CX offerings are? A typical version upgrade of 3CX can take anywhere from two to four hours per customer to complete depending on how the system is setup, and if for example your MSP has 100 customers to manage that translates to 200 to 400 hours, or 10 to 20% of the annual hours of a staff member to manage!

Competition
One of the issues with offering the same platforms that your competitors offer is that it can make it hard to stand out in a crowded marketplace. If your customer is comparing your 3CX offering to one of your competitors, how can you make sure that your offering is attractive, and also profitable?
If your competitors are all selling the exact same solution that you are, putting pressure on margins and making your MSP seem like every other MSP in the market, we think that is one of the most obvious reasons to replace 3CX with one of the better alternatives.
Another concern that partners of 3CX have expressed relates to direct contact to their customers. As a 100% channel-only wholesale distributor, we know how inappropriate it would be to be in contact with the customers of partners without their knowledge, so anything of this nature would be a valid concern for any MSP, and just one more reason to consider replacing 3CX as the voice offering of your MSP.

Supply chain risks
With cybersecurity threats growing every day it’s always possible for a vendor or platform to suffer an incident, but it’s how the company responds to the incident that really affect the risks to customers and partners. MSPs have every right to consider the prior history of their vendors in dealing with issues of these kinds, and weighing up the risks for that vendor
Another factor to consider is the structure of the vendor supply chain. When the software “supply chain” of a product is distributed and includes external contractors or entities, your MSP may well consider this to increase the risk of that vendor suffering an issue.
Alternatives to 3CX for your MSP
There are many alternatives to 3CX that any MSP in Australia or New Zealand could consider, and many of them present compelling reasons to replace 3CX.
Single-tenant systems
Single-tenant systems such as 3CX share the same benefits, and drawbacks, for an MSP seeking to reduce hosting and platform costs across multiple customers, but nevertheless are a viable choice for your MSP. Some of the single-tenant alternatives to 3CX include:
SaaS systems
Some of the alternatives to 3CX that are offered as SaaS platforms include:
Xelion
As the exclusive distributor of Xelion in Australia and New Zealand we may be a little biased, but we believe that Xelion is the ideal balance between single-tenant systems like 3CX, and SaaS systems like RingCentral, 8×8 and others.
Xelion is a powerful, flexible Unified Communications platform that empowers the operator to control their communications in ways that other systems can’t match. After a comprehensive update and rebrand in 2024, Xelion is growing rapidly and provides MSPs in Australia and New Zealand with compelling reasons to replace 3CX.

If you are interested in learning more about how our Partner Program works, or how it can benefit your business, we’re ready to talk.
You can learn more about our Partner Program by clicking HERE. If you’re ready to apply, click HERE.
Proudly written by a human being without AI assistance.