Takeaways from the FreePBX 17 Survey

At FreePBX, we value the voice of our community. We recently got some great feedback from our FreePBX 17 Experience Survey, which gave us awesome insights into the features and improvements our users want. We believe in transparency, so we’d like to share the key responses and suggestions that resonated with us.

From technical professionals to decision-makers, FreePBX 17 continues to be well received by users across the world. Our recent survey collected over 85 responses, with nearly half coming from outside of North America.

It was wonderful to witness such a large and diverse representation of countries among our FreePBX users. We took great pleasure in shipping swag packs internationally among those 25 lucky winners!

Didn’t hear about the survey? You’re not alone. Most of our respondents were frequent visitors of FreePBX.org, Sangoma Portal, and the FreePBX community forums. We identified a need to reach out better with our customers and partners to gauge end-user satisfaction with FreePBX 17.

For those who did respond, over 90% were satisfied with the installation procedure, rating it four or five out of five. Overall satisfaction was nearly as high, with about 85% giving a four or five out of five. And more than 80% rated the backup and restore experience as four or five out of five.

However, documentation and support were not rated quite as high. We hear you! 👂 We encourage you to continue submitting your questions and walkthroughs to the forums. Rest assured, we are actively working on creating more installation videos and tutorials to help bump these categories up to 5/5 for all users.

Digging into more details, the transition to Debian GNU/Linux was well received – over 60% of you said Debian OS compatibility is highly valuable! The support for PHP 8.2 has also been warmly welcomed, which is especially encouraging considering the significant effort required to make FreePBX compatible with modern PHP. This involved subtle adjustments – and some not-so-subtle – across many modules due to changes in language constructs upstream. Big hat tip to the developers and all the wider community members actively filing issues on The FreePBX Unified Issue Tracker on GitHub.

One of the most significant takeaways from the survey is a list of desired integrations and improvements that users hope to see in future releases. Respondents highlighted key needs for FreePBX, including expanded support for popular CRMs, improved hotel and call center features, and a more intuitive installation process with automated options for easier cloud deployment.

We were so excited to see so many of you join in, strengthening our belief that users not only see FreePBX as essential telephony software, but also that the project continues to foster a strong community spirit and enthusiasm for what FreePBX represents.

Thanks again to everyone who participated! Your feedback is invaluable as we work to enhance FreePBX to meet your evolving needs.

Sincerely,

Sangoma’s Open Source Team