Choosing an open-source PBX platform — feature comparison

LYLIX offers PBX VPS images built on three platforms — FreePBX®, FusionPBX®, and bare Asterisk®. The right choice depends on what you're building, your team's familiarity, and whether multi-tenancy matters. This article compares them honestly so you can pick on first deploy rather than discovering the wrong fit after months of config.

The 30-second comparison

Pick FreePBX if

• You're new to PBX hosting. Largest community, most Stack Overflow answers, most YouTube walkthroughs, most third-party docs.
• You want a single PBX for a single organization. FreePBX is designed for single-org deployment; everything in the UI assumes one org.
• You'll lean on the module ecosystem. EPM (endpoint provisioning), CRM connectors, call recording, custom modules from third parties — all FreePBX-specific.
• You're following along with tutorials/courses. Most "how to PBX" content uses FreePBX.

Pick FusionPBX if

• You need multi-tenancy. One VPS, multiple customer organizations, each isolated. FusionPBX's domain model is built around this; FreePBX requires one VPS per org.
• You prefer FreeSWITCH's architecture. Cleaner module model, better at WebRTC, generally lighter per-call resource use at scale.
• You're building a hosted PBX product (reselling PBX service to your own customers). FusionPBX makes per-tenant billing/quota much easier.

Pick bare Asterisk if

• You want one specific simple thing — a SIP-to-trunk bridge, a call recording server, a custom IVR with logic that doesn't fit GUI module models.
• You're comfortable in config files, have specific performance goals, and don't want a GUI overlay imposing its conventions.
• You're building a developer-facing voice product where Asterisk is one component of a larger application.

Migration paths

• FreePBX → FusionPBX: rebuild from scratch. The data models are too different for a tool to convert. Plan a real migration window.
• FusionPBX → FreePBX: same — rebuild.
• FreePBX → bare Asterisk: possible, painful. The FreePBX-generated configs are non-idiomatic; you typically rewrite by hand.
• Bare Asterisk → FreePBX: rare; FreePBX's import of existing configs is poor.

The lesson: pick once and stay. The cost of getting it wrong scales with how much you've configured.

What ships pre-configured on each LYLIX image

• FreePBX VPS: Sangoma's FreePBX Distro installer, Asterisk pinned to a stable version, admin credentials generated per-clone, HTTPS up with self-signed cert (replace with Let's Encrypt early), fwconsole ma upgradeall at first boot to pull module updates.
• FusionPBX VPS: FreeSWITCH + FusionPBX on Debian, default domain created, PostgreSQL + ESL passwords regenerated per-clone, admin credentials in welcome email.
• ViciBox® (Vicidial® on openSUSE): Vicidial admin password regenerated per-clone, IP-rewrite script runs at first boot so the database knows its own IP, HTTPS up with self-signed.

See the related setup articles in this category for the post-deploy walkthroughs.

The trademark caveat (relevant to the product names)

FreePBX and Asterisk are registered trademarks of Sangoma Technologies Corporation. FusionPBX is a trademark of FusionPBX, LLC. FreeSWITCH is a registered trademark of SignalWire, Inc. Vicidial and ViciBox are trademarks of The Vicidial Group. LYLIX hosts VPS deployments running each; we don't sell or modify the upstream products themselves.