As RasPBX looked like it was no longer being updated, there is another project, Incredible PBX, serving the Pi as well as several other operating systems and virtualized servers. And looking through their forum, the project is active with a version out for Raspberry Pi 4’s, Incredible PBX 2027, with support through 2027. I fired up an image just to check it out, and they have quite a few customizations and CLI functions while also using their own update server with some preconfigured extensions. When you SSH in as root it automatically runs updates and has a CLI dashboard showing system status as well as rebranding the FreePBX dashboard to Incredible PBX. I wasn’t super keen on all the customizations and reverted to my RasPBX installation until I look into the project further.
What’s Included? Incredible PBX 2027 serves up a never before available VoIP powerhouse featuring Asterisk 20 and all FreePBX 16 GPL modules, an Apache web server, the latest MariaDB SQL server (formerly MySQL), SendMail mail server, Webmin, and most of the Incredible PBX feature set including SIP, PJSIP, SMS, voice recognition, AsteriDex, gTTS Text-to-Speech VoIP applications, Call-By-Name Dialing, News, Weather, Telephone Reminders, and hundreds of features that typically are found in commercial PBXs: Conferencing, IVRs and Email Delivery of transcribed voicemails, AutoAttendants, Voicemail Blasting, and more. We’ve also incorporated the Zero Trunk Configuration feature from the LITE build which lets you sign up with one of our VoIP providers and start making and receiving calls instantly. Or you can use the new ClearlyIP trunking module included in the GUI for seamless integration of SMS messaging into FreePBX® and its User Control Panel.
And when some serious vulnerabilities were disclosed at Def Con 31, Incredible PBX had excellent coverage. And the video below showed that Sangoma wasn’t taking their stewardship of FreePBX seriously enough. Consequently, you were safe if you didn’t expose the system directly to the internet though tricky with a cloud PBX (I’d configure a VPN connection as FreePBX isn’t security tested enough to trust exposed to the internet).
So Incredible PBX is very promising in that you can continue to use a Raspberry Pi for your home PBX instead of having to switch to an X86 system and another operating system. And hopefully, Sangoma will allow FreePBX to be transitioned to another group to manage the project going forward. And even though FreePBX is supposed to be an open source project, Sangoma obfuscates code for their proprietary PHP modules and even some of the open modules. That being said I’d switch off the Sangoma update servers to the Clearly IP mirrors, as they originally created FreePBX and patched the one module before Sangoma.