I used this tutorial on YouTube and had it working perfectly my first try:
Yes there's a definite plus to having everything fully open source as with IncrediblePBX. Main thing is, there are critical features I need that incredible PBX doesn't support but which are available for free with Fusion. Anyway, everyone will have their own custom needs, experience, and opinion in these things which I respect. The best option for one person may not always be the best option for another.
Fusion has some paid, closed-source modules. But that's no different than Sangoma. And at least with Fusion, you get a whole lot more functionality free and open source than you get with Sangoma. I was really put off by the DefCon security vulnerability that Sangoma took forever to patch and for which they had a really messed up response to the researcher who reported it, trying to not pay him his bounty, etc. And also by the despicably terrible way they treated their competition - the good ClearlyIP folks (who are an absolutely amazing team and I love working with them). And under the hood, I think Freeswitch is a lot better thought out in many ways than Asterisk in my opinion, though I am good with the many who will disagree with me there. And multi tenant is just a huge deal for some folks, including me. Fusion has an amazing free call center and queue functionality and agent monitoring out of the box, it has a much more sensible time conditions module than freepbx, it is far less resource hungry, it has great free endpoint management, it supports a huge number of phones for free, and I could go on. Oh... and did I mention it was multi tenant!?
I know people complain about the Fusion forums and the lack of documentation, but honestly I don't feel like that bad rap is totally warranted from my experience. In my experience, the documentation isn't always as bad as people make it out to be, and some is actually very helpful. If you don't buy a subscription, there's definitely more of a learning and research curve to get up to speed. But it's totally doable, and that phase doesn't last forever. Once you get all the features figured out that you need, it just runs with no further issues. I used a YouTube tutorial to set up my initial Fusion config, which gave me a perfectly working PBX easily and quickly. Then there were a bunch of advanced features I wanted to set up, which took some digging without paying for the full training, but I enjoyed the process. I too feel like the Fusion forums are generally unhelpful, but usually civil. And remember FreePBX forums can be pretty rude too…
And you gotta give it to the poor guy who runs Fusion, that he has to earn a living somehow. He already makes a huge amount of his work available for free, with the caveat that you have to be motivated and dig for advanced functionality if you want to do it on your own. If you want him to make it easy, a temporary subscription to his advanced training materials isn't very expensive. But with some googling and LLMing you can figure out all the advanced stuff out on your own, and get an incredibly functional system. I'm saving a ton of money compared to what I had set up in FreePBX including the commercial modules I had to use to make it functional for my needs. Honestly it only takes a few minutes to solve anything complex in Fusion using GPT o3. In fact, I'm actually planning to support the Fusion dev with a subscription, not because I need his material, but because I'm getting a lot of value out of his work and I feel like it's only fair to support him. In my opinion, I think he's a great guy who has done a great service to the PBX world and deserves a much better spirit than a lot of folks online give him. Anyway, that's just my experience, which will not mirror everyone else's.
Yes there's a definite plus to having everything fully open source as with IncrediblePBX. Main thing is, there are critical features I need that incredible PBX doesn't support but which are available for free with Fusion. Anyway, everyone will have their own custom needs, experience, and opinion in these things which I respect. The best option for one person may not always be the best option for another.
Fusion has some paid, closed-source modules. But that's no different than Sangoma. And at least with Fusion, you get a whole lot more functionality free and open source than you get with Sangoma. I was really put off by the DefCon security vulnerability that Sangoma took forever to patch and for which they had a really messed up response to the researcher who reported it, trying to not pay him his bounty, etc. And also by the despicably terrible way they treated their competition - the good ClearlyIP folks (who are an absolutely amazing team and I love working with them). And under the hood, I think Freeswitch is a lot better thought out in many ways than Asterisk in my opinion, though I am good with the many who will disagree with me there. And multi tenant is just a huge deal for some folks, including me. Fusion has an amazing free call center and queue functionality and agent monitoring out of the box, it has a much more sensible time conditions module than freepbx, it is far less resource hungry, it has great free endpoint management, it supports a huge number of phones for free, and I could go on. Oh... and did I mention it was multi tenant!?
I know people complain about the Fusion forums and the lack of documentation, but honestly I don't feel like that bad rap is totally warranted from my experience. In my experience, the documentation isn't always as bad as people make it out to be, and some is actually very helpful. If you don't buy a subscription, there's definitely more of a learning and research curve to get up to speed. But it's totally doable, and that phase doesn't last forever. Once you get all the features figured out that you need, it just runs with no further issues. I used a YouTube tutorial to set up my initial Fusion config, which gave me a perfectly working PBX easily and quickly. Then there were a bunch of advanced features I wanted to set up, which took some digging without paying for the full training, but I enjoyed the process. I too feel like the Fusion forums are generally unhelpful, but usually civil. And remember FreePBX forums can be pretty rude too…
And you gotta give it to the poor guy who runs Fusion, that he has to earn a living somehow. He already makes a huge amount of his work available for free, with the caveat that you have to be motivated and dig for advanced functionality if you want to do it on your own. If you want him to make it easy, a temporary subscription to his advanced training materials isn't very expensive. But with some googling and LLMing you can figure out all the advanced stuff out on your own, and get an incredibly functional system. I'm saving a ton of money compared to what I had set up in FreePBX including the commercial modules I had to use to make it functional for my needs. Honestly it only takes a few minutes to solve anything complex in Fusion using GPT o3. In fact, I'm actually planning to support the Fusion dev with a subscription, not because I need his material, but because I'm getting a lot of value out of his work and I feel like it's only fair to support him. In my opinion, I think he's a great guy who has done a great service to the PBX world and deserves a much better spirit than a lot of folks online give him. Anyway, that's just my experience, which will not mirror everyone else's.
Phone System 