Alternatives to Asterisk
An open-source telephony server for building your own PBX and VoIP phone systems. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Asterisk
An open-source telephony server for building your own PBX and VoIP phone systems.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Asterisk.
FreeSWITCH
A self-hosted software telephony platform for voice, video and chat that runs on commodity hardware.
FreeSWITCH is also open source and self-hosted, handles voice, video and chat, runs on hardware from a Raspberry Pi upward, and is mainly distributed as source code to build.
FusionPBX
A self-hosted web interface and platform for running a multi-tenant PBX on FreeSWITCH.
FusionPBX gives you a multi-tenant PBX managed from a web interface, with call center, fax, voicemail and conferencing, but you must run a FreeSWITCH server underneath it.
3CX Free Basic
A free edition of the 3CX business phone system for up to 10 users on your own infrastructure.
3CX Free Basic is a more ready-to-use business phone system with no licence cost, but it is proprietary and limited to 10 users and 4 simultaneous calls.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Linphone
An open-source SIP softphone for voice and video calls on desktop and mobile.
Zoiper
A SIP softphone for making VoIP voice and video calls through a PBX or SIP provider.
MicroSIP
A lightweight open-source SIP softphone for Windows that makes voice and video calls through SIP providers.
Baresip
A portable, modular SIP user agent for audio and video calls, run from the command line.
ejabberd
An open-source XMPP server, MQTT broker and SIP service written in Erlang.
