Finding a full scale phone system for your business can be an expensive prospect. It's also not always going to have the exact features that you want either. Here are a few reasons why going with an open source system can be ideal for small businesses.

Major Features for Free

There are a number of open phone systems out there for platforms like Android, and they often have just as many features as more paid systems.

For example, plenty of these free, open source systems have a phone tree designer available so you can make it easy for customers to hit in a few numbers and go to exactly the right area in your company. This could be a particular department where an employee would pick up, but it could also just be an automated voice response with information.

This is especially useful if you are running a company all by yourself or if you only have a few employees because you could allow customers to grab information about their accounts, about your hours, about your specials or about anything else related to your company without needing a live operator in order to do it.

Advanced Customization

As long as open source phone systems have enough popularity, they tend to be highly customizable in two distinct ways. Firstly, since open source projects are often supported by communities not doing it for the money, they tend to have a lot of plugins and support for using the system in a variety of different useful situations.

In addition, open source systems mean that you have access to the source code for the system. Even when commercial companies provide systems like this for free, they often still lock the source code so you don't know how it's made.

Most commercial systems also make it illegal for you to copy the source code and modify it to more perfectly fit your company's needs. But an open source system gives you permission to take the system and change it however you want.

Another consequence of this is that there tend to be a number of modified versions of the system available online that others have worked on. So if you find an open source system that works for Android, for example, it's often worth checking to see if there's a similar system for iOS since people often share mods of open source systems, from places like Communications Plus, for free.

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