Users and customers frequently ask why Sangoma offers both the free-and-open Asterisk engine and commercial IP PBX solutions. The answer is simple: they have very different purposes and are geared towards very different audiences.
Asterisk is built by and for communication systems developers. It is an engine that handles all of the low-level details of initiating, maintaining and manipulating calls between endpoints (phones). Sangoma offers turnkey IP PBX phone systems based on the Asterisk engine, which are administered through an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), rather than raw configuration files and custom scripts. Examples of these are FreePBX, which is also an open source project, its hosted commercial version PBXact Cloud, and other business phone systems offered as managed services.
