3CX vs Microsoft Teams: price it as a phone system

What you are actually comparing

Teams Phone is a per-user add-on that turns Microsoft’s collaboration app into a phone. 3CX is a dedicated PBX that charges per simultaneous call and treats Teams as an optional integration.

3CX sells one licence per phone system, priced on how many calls happen at the same time (simultaneous calls, or SC), with no per-user fees. The 2026 line-up is Basic, PRO and AI Edition, after 3CX retired ENT+ and renamed its Enterprise tier to AI Edition in April. Entry is genuinely free for up to 10 users, two ways: SMB Free (hosted by 3CX) or the on-premises 4SC Basic Free licence introduced in March 2026. You can self-host on your own hardware or cloud, or pay 3CX to host it, and it is sold exclusively through partners, of which South Africa has a deep bench. Full local pricing is in our guide to what 3CX costs in South Africa.

Microsoft Teams Phone is a licence stacked on licences. Every user needs a Microsoft 365 or Teams plan first; none of the Business plans includes phone capability, so Teams Phone Standard is a $10 per user per month add-on (paid yearly). That buys the PBX brain, not the phone line. To reach the outside world you pick one of four routes: a Microsoft Calling Plan, Operator Connect, Teams Phone Mobile or Direct Routing through a certified session border controller. The big 2026 change for local buyers: Microsoft now sells Calling Plans in South Africa, with toll numbers in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. Our full guide to Microsoft Teams as a phone system in South Africa covers the local fine print.

What adding voice really costs a Microsoft 365 shop

Most businesses weighing this choice already pay Microsoft every month. The honest question is the marginal cost of a dial tone, and the gap is bigger than either vendor advertises.

Take a 50-person office that peaks at around 15 simultaneous calls (a typical SME assumption, not a rule). On 3CX, a Basic 16SC licence costs $600 a year for the entire system and covers up to 80 extensions. Add hosting (free if you self-host on existing kit) and an ICASA-licensed SIP trunk, which is sized to concurrent calls rather than headcount. The licence works out below $1 per user per month before the trunk.

On Teams Phone with a Calling Plan, the same office pays $17 per user per month: $850 a month, $10,200 a year, on top of the Microsoft 365 licences underneath. The SA Domestic plan includes 1,200 minutes per user per month, which most desk workers never touch. Even Teams Phone Standard alone, with no minutes and no number, is $6,000 a year for 50 users. The middle route is Direct Routing: keep the Teams client at $10 per user per month and buy PSTN from a local provider. Our Teams guide puts that all-in figure at R280 to R380 per user per month once local trunking and minutes are included.

Head-to-head as a phone system

Strip out the collaboration suite and judge both purely on the job of a PBX. This is how they line up on the facts each vendor publishes.

Score it honestly and the pattern is clear: 3CX takes every row that involves money or PBX capability, Teams takes every row that involves living inside Microsoft’s ecosystem. Neither vendor disputes the other’s ground, which tells you the real decision is about your users, not the products.

The AI receptionist race: shipping vs preview

Both vendors are racing to answer your calls with AI. Only one of them will sell it to you today.

3CX shipped its AI stack in V20 Update 8 (February 2026): AI Call Screening on Windows, Android, iOS and web, a multi-language AI Receptionist that transfers to extensions and queues, an AI Personal Assistant, and agentic AI that can run multi-step workflows against your own knowledge sources. Update 9 added Grok as an LLM option alongside OpenAI. The catch is packaging: the AI features sit in the AI Edition, whose prices rose by roughly 15% in November 2025 when 3CX folded AI into that tier.

Microsoft’s answer is Teams Phone Agent, a natural-language voice agent that answers, routes, books appointments and can be extended with custom agents built in Copilot Studio. It entered Frontier public preview on 15 June 2026 and remains gated to that programme; it is not generally available, and Microsoft has not published GA pricing. Until it lands, the GA voice applications on Teams Phone are the familiar auto attendants and call queues. Buy on what ships, not on the roadmap; if AI answering matters now, compare the field in our guide to the best AI voice agents in South Africa.

Who should pick which in 2026

Three defensible answers, depending on where your people spend their day and how many of them make calls.

The hybrid route deserves more attention than it gets. Executives and account managers keep the Teams client; the warehouse, reception and the call-facing team run 3CX apps against the same trunk. If you want Teams calling without touching your existing PBX at all, a bridging service such as Call2Teams does the same job as a managed SaaS layer.

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