3CX vs Yeastar: which PBX actually fits your business?

How do 3CX and Yeastar licensing models differ?

The licensing split decides most of the price gap, and it runs in opposite directions: 3CX counts calls, Yeastar counts people.

3CX charges a flat annual fee per system based on simultaneous calls (SC), with no per-user charges. A 50-person office where 12 people ever talk at once fits a 16SC licence; the other 38 staff cost nothing extra. 3CX publishes its list prices too: Basic Edition runs from USD 300 per year for 8SC (up to 40 extensions) to USD 600 for 16SC and USD 1,015 for 32SC. PRO and the AI Edition cost more, and 3CX raised AI-tier pricing by roughly 15% in November 2025 to cover its new AI features.

3CX also still runs two genuinely free routes after years of chopping and changing its free tier. 3CX SMB Free is hosted by 3CX at no charge, forever, for up to 10 users; you only pay a third-party SIP trunk. 4SC Basic Free, added in March 2026, gives you a free on-premises licence for up to 10 users, renewed manually each year.

Yeastar takes the opposite road. P-Series plans (Standard, Enterprise, Ultimate) are priced per extension, and Yeastar publishes no list prices at all – you get a rand quote from one of its SA distributors. That makes budgeting simple as headcount grows, but it also means you cannot price-check Yeastar from the vendor’s site the way you can with 3CX.

3CX vs Yeastar head-to-head

Nine factors that actually move the buying decision, verified against both vendors’ own sites in August 2026.

Score it and you get a draw, which is exactly the point: these platforms have specialised. 3CX is the price-transparent, software-first system for organisations comfortable with a bit of IT. Yeastar is the appliance-friendly, channel-quoted system built for offices that want a box on the wall or a reseller running everything.

What AI features do 3CX and Yeastar offer in 2026?

Twelve months ago AI was a footnote in this comparison. Since then both vendors have shipped receptionists that answer and route live calls on their own.

3CX V20 Update 8, final since 9 February 2026, added AI call screening on every client platform, an AI receptionist that routes to extensions and queues in multiple languages, an AI personal assistant for executives, and agentic AI that 3CX describes as autonomous, goal-oriented agents handling multi-step workflows. Update 9 added Grok support alongside OpenAI. The catch: professional transcription and the AI feature set live in the AI Edition, the renamed and repriced Enterprise tier.

Yeastar’s AI Receptionist went final in P-Series V23.3 on 15 April 2026. It answers 24/7 in natural language, pulls answers from your uploaded documents and indexed website, routes by caller intent, and hands off to humans with a screen-pop of what the caller already said. It speaks 34 languages and lets you choose the underlying model – GPT, Claude or Gemini. The catch here is double-gated: it needs the Software or Cloud Edition (not the appliance) on an Enterprise or Ultimate plan, and it bills by usage through minute packs or a monthly rolling plan.

How both platforms got here

Teams, hosting and hardware: where they part ways

Both integrate with Microsoft Teams and both run in the cloud. The mechanics, and the invoices, look very different.

Microsoft Teams. 3CX uses Teams Direct Routing: your key users keep Teams as their actual phone client while calls route out through 3CX SIP trunks at local rates, and everyone else stays on the cheaper 3CX apps. 3CX itself is blunt that it is a standalone PBX, not a Teams backend. Yeastar goes lighter: a free embedded Linkus dialer app from Microsoft AppSource puts PBX calling inside the Teams window with no Teams Phone licence needed. Direct Routing is the deeper integration; the Linkus app is the cheaper one. Which is right depends on whether your people live in Teams or merely visit it.

Hosting. 3CX is software wherever you want it: on-prem on Windows or Linux, in your own AWS, Azure, Google or DigitalOcean account, or hosted by 3CX. Yeastar matches the spread differently, with a Software Edition you self-host, a Cloud Edition that MSPs run as a multi-instance platform on their own infrastructure, and Yeastar Hosted as the zero-maintenance turnkey option.

Hardware. Only Yeastar sells you a box. The P-Series appliances replace a legacy PBX without a server in sight, and the range covers real SA office sizes:

Buying either one in South Africa

Neither vendor sells direct. 3CX calls itself a 100% channel company with 10,000 partners worldwide and a partner finder that covers South Africa. Yeastar names four SA distributors on its own site: Even Flow Distribution (Cape Town and Johannesburg), MiRO Distribution, Pinnacle ICT and Headset Solutions, with resellers buying through them. Practically, that means your real price is always a rand quote from a local partner, and the platform only performs as well as the partner who installs it. Whichever you pick, your calls still terminate through a SIP trunk from an ICASA ECS-licensed South African provider – that provider choice matters as much as the PBX.

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