That’s how open source works; while some may call it “hacking” I’d just call it software development.
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When it comes to TangoPBX (or another cousin, IncrediblePBX) and FreePBX, there’s a lot more value in supporting one another than in trying to tear each other down. Sure, call out mistakes and bad decisions, but do it constructively. I see Tom doing this, I try to do it, and I see others doing it too (kenn10 comes to mind). The open source tech community benefits far more from cooperation than competition, and pretty much not at all from hostility or tribalism.
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I said something similar about ten years ago, right after Schmooze was acquired by Sangoma, before 3CX bought the Elastix project, and before Sangoma later picked up Digium.
My view then is the same now. It makes no sense for open source projects to fight over the same small slice of pie. The actual market we’re all up against is still dominated by proprietary systems. That’s the real competition, not each other.
I see a lot of people across different forums focused on building the perfect mousetrap, tweaking every detail, arguing over who has the “right” approach. If you’re doing this as a business, the play is simple. Sell what exists today. Keep pushing the tech forward, yes, but the goal isn’t to beat another open source project on a feature checklist. From a business and sales standpoint, we aren’t chasing each other. We’re chasing the companies that already hold the bulk of the market.
That’s where the fight is, and always has been.
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Make it multi tenant! 
And make the backed freeswitch instead of asterisk.
Love the people at clearlyIP, I always rave about you to everyone I introduce to VoIP and I’ve gotten you multiple customers. You have the most legendary support - so good it’s almost crazy actually! Very exciting to see what you’re up to!
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Both of these suggestions, either individually or together, would require a complete overhaul of the platform and in the end a completely different solution.
If this is what you want, install FusionPBX.
Is the nudge to FusionPBX because they mentioned Freeswitch?
What’s your take on a multitenant Asterisk solution? There doesn’t seem to be any prominent Asterisk-based multitenant solution. I’ve kept my eye on Sipwise C5 CE, ivozprovider, VitalPBX and Nethvoice as possible solutions for an Asterisk based multitenant offer. I would straight up knock Nethvoice off as it’s multiple instances of FreePBX.
ivozprovider seems to be the most promising, although right now, absence of texting and STIR/SHAKEN means it’s not quite ready for prime time.
Do you, personally, implement any asterisk based Multitenant solution?
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It is because if he wants a multitenant PBX with web UI, built on FreeSwitch, then FusionPBX is exactly that. I have built and supported FusionPBX systems and they are fine.
I don’t have a take on it. I did see a MiRTA system once that seemed to be held together by kludges and so I wasn’t impressed with that particular implementation. What’s your use-case for multitenant Asterisk?
I agree with @billsimon that FreeSwitch/FusionPBX are probably over-powered for small, single client installations but they work just fine in that environment. I have my home running on a 2 GB single processor system without issue. The true value comes into play if you have a bunch of clients and don’t want a bunch of separate VM’s to manage in the cloud. The disadvantage is that if that VM or the network to it goes down, all tenants go down.
The possibility of down time can be mitigated with server replication and hot-standby. Both FusionPBX and FS PBX offer that with continuous database update. If you have phones which support a primary and backup server, a failure of the primary server can be almost unnoticeable. There are also load balancing and DNS SRV record options that can come into play for enhanced redundancy.
According to FusionPBX afficianados another advantage is that you can export a particular tenant partition on the system and move it to a different domain on a different system if you choose.
So it comes down to what your business mission is and how you want to handle the systems. FreePBX has advantages of its own but does not readily offer a multi-tenant environment. At its core, FreeSwitch is basically a high-powered switch that can handle 100’s of thousands of endpoints if sized and administered correctly. It doesn’t get a lot of open-source updates but all the pieces needed are already there. One negative I found is that FreeSwitch call center functionality is pretty basic unless you become a pro at XML and LUA programming.
Bottom line is that you need to do adequate research, spin up test systems, become proficient in the systems and then decide what you want to do. That’s the beauty of open-source.
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We currently utilize VitalPBX. They’re great people and support is very responsive. Their v4.5 platform if extremely good, but the one thing they fail to do is allow you to export or backup a single tenant to be able to migrate that tenant to another server, whether it be for a multi-tenant host server upgrade, or creating the client an on-premises instance if the customer’s needs change. Also, for their multi-tenant system, it is not capable of multi-domain, such as FusionPBX or FSPBX is. Therefore, this is why I have stated that they are not a true multi-tenant solution. But basically “shoe-horned” into the package. Otherwise, if those items don’t matter to you as the provider, then VitalPBX is a wonderful system and works great. Plus it is an actively developed platform. It does have HA builtin, so redundancy is available, but only if it’s on the same network. And for commercial moduls for features such as billing system, call center, call recording, operator switchboard, WebRTC, and Connect Mobile app, they have these integrated, but OEM brand (or White Label) them from other companies such as Acrobits or Sonata Suite. Which I don’t mind much, but would love to see them create their own modules, or at least integrate them better instead of having to launch each module administration UI to perform Adds, Moves, & Changes for each. Even though they’re all integrated, you still have to manage each module individually instead of have a single tenant and user management system that orchestrates that between all the modules. Just the little nuances that are irritating. Doesn’t mean they don’t work. Everything works great…it’s just a lot of extra clicks and duplications to achieve the goals for a single user when this could all be managed from the users’ accounts and orchestrated out to the modules you give them access to.
Strange you want to point this out to me, yet your friend Tom does this religiously on public forums trying to make out he knows all (and we know what they say about those types of people ) and tries belittle people, they have a term for that too, bully, you’re on enough of these places to know this too.Its why i rarely read anything he posts. one day chatgpt will fail him.
Oh, bless your heart. AI is fun and helpful but I didn’t rely on it for 25+ years I’m not going to start now.
lol if… you… say… so…
anyway, I’m on leave now and I wont be wasting that time reading what people like you dribble on with.
To all else, Merry Christmas, have a safe and prosperous New Year.
Why would I want multi tenant? Well… It is a wonder why would anyone not want multi tenant if they manage more than one PBX.
Some pros:
1 Scaling and onboarding are faster, as you can spin up a new tenant/domain very quickly (few clicks) instead of taking time to deploy a whole new PBX each time. Much of your work for new tenants is already done including a lot of the sip trunking config.
2 Resources can be pooled for lower cost per customer since compute/storage is shared, as well as shared core services.
3 Updates/security fixes apply across tenants, rather than having to repeat the same things across dozens of PBXs. You have only one place to patch, monitor, back up, and standardize config/templates instead of dozens. This is huge.
4 For businesses who have multiple locations which each need highly individualized phone systems but also need to communicate between each other by dialing extensions, multi tenant makes this much easier to set up vs IAX trunks.
The only obvious con is that if the PBX goes down, all tenants go down. But that can be ameliorated with well implemented HA and frequent backups.