3CX Live Chat pricing 2026: what free chat really costs

What you pay for with 3CX Live Chat

The chat widget is the cheapest part of the bill, because it is free. The plugin on WordPress.org, "3CX Free Live Chat, Calls & Messaging", costs nothing, and 3CX's pricing FAQ lists 3CX Live Chat as "Free for all users" among the things every subscription includes. What you are really pricing is the system the chat lives in.

That is the shift I want readers to leave with. 3CX Live Chat is not a chat product with a price list; it is a feature of a phone system, and you only pay when the phone system outgrows the free tier. A team with 30 people and lots of calls pays for chat it barely uses. A team of 5 with a busy website pays nothing at all, and the real cost shows up somewhere else: unanswered chats after hours.

The four layers in plain terms:

• The plugin: free, on WordPress, plus an HTML snippet for other sites. My guide to adding live chat covers the setup side.
• The 3CX licence: free on SMB Free, then a flat yearly fee set by simultaneous calls and edition.
• Hosting: free on SMB Free and during the one-month trial, then a yearly fee if 3CX runs it for you. Or you host it yourself on Windows, Linux, or a cloud account.
• Calls and numbers: never from 3CX. Its SMB page says you pick a SIP trunk provider, "where you'll get your phone number from and where you'll pay your phone bill", with prices "from as little as $1 per month."

Is 3CX Live Chat free?

Yes, for small teams, and with fewer catches than most free plans. 3CX SMB Free is "free forever - for up to 10 users", hosted by 3CX, with no contract. It includes live chat, inbound WhatsApp, SMS, video calls and the iOS, Android, Windows and web apps.

Three limits are worth knowing before you build on it:

• The 10-user cap. On 3CX's feature list, the SMB column marks live chat as "< 10", while every paid edition includes it without a cap.
• Three free systems per account. The FAQ allows up to three SMB Free subscriptions and one PRO trial.
• Free features can change. The same FAQ says 3CX "reserves the right to revoke any of them from free subscriptions at any time without prior warning." That is standard small print, but it is there.

There is a second free option, the 4SC Free Basic edition, which you host yourself. It includes live chat but not WhatsApp or Facebook, so for most small teams SMB Free is the better free pick. If you are weighing free chat tools in general, my list of free AI for customer service and the website live chat roundup show what else costs $0.

What happens to the price at user 11?

This is the moment most 3CX Live Chat pricing questions are really about. Add an eleventh person and SMB Free no longer fits, so you buy a licence. The smallest one, 8 simultaneous calls, covers up to 40 users, which means the jump is the same whether you are 11 people or 39.

Your choice at that step comes down to two questions:

1. Do you want to run a server? 8-call Basic is $300 a year but self-managed only; 3CX does not host it. If you have IT help or a cloud account, it is the cheapest paid 3CX.
2. Do you use WhatsApp or Facebook? Those are PRO, AI and SMB only. Moving off SMB Free onto Basic would switch them off, which surprises people who started on the free plan with WhatsApp running.

For a team that answered "no" and "yes", the answer is PRO hosted by 3CX at $395 plus $295, so $690 a year. Spread across 15 people that is $3.83 per user a month; at 40 people it is $1.44. That is lower than most per-seat chat tools, and you get a phone system with it. My LiveChat pricing and Olark pricing guides show what chat-only seats run for comparison.

3CX pricing by simultaneous calls: the full ladder

Every paid 3CX licence is a flat annual price for the whole system. 3CX's FAQ defines a simultaneous call as "the number of calls happening at the same time", and tells you to count internal calls too. Chat sessions are not calls, so a busy chat day does not push you up a size. Each size also has a hard user cap.

Prices from the 3CX price list on October 21, 2026, in USD, excluding tax or VAT. Two discounts sit on top, both on the vendor page: prices from 24 simultaneous calls up are already about 10% lower than last year's list (15% from 256 calls), and a 3+ year renewal takes another 10% off from 24 calls up, so 24-call PRO renews at $891 a year instead of $990. Hosting is never discounted.

The ladder flattens fast. 3CX's own per-user equivalent for 8-call PRO is $0.82 a month at the full 40 users, and by 256 calls it is $0.38. The catch is that those figures assume you fill every seat, which small teams do not. Use your real headcount in the calculator above.

Basic, PRO or AI: which edition does live chat need?

Live chat itself is on every edition, so the edition question is about what sits next to chat. Here is what changes, from the feature list and 3CX's AI features page.

For most live chat buyers the decision is short. PRO is the sweet spot: chat, WhatsApp, Facebook and CRM integration, and it can be hosted. Basic only makes sense if you never touch WhatsApp or Facebook and are happy to self-host at 8 calls. AI adds call transcription, sentiment, summaries and the AI Receptionist, which are all call features; the $180 a year jump from PRO at 8 calls buys nothing extra for website chat.

That last point is the one I would underline for anyone searching "3CX AI live chat". 3CX's chat docs describe greetings, offline messages and agent templates, and a 3CX staff member put the chatbot question plainly on its own forum:

"Hi there, there are no options for chatbots with 3CX im afraid. We have templated replies for live chat but none for WhatsApp currently."

Charles_3CX, 3CX staff, 3CX Forums

That reply is from 2022, and the current AI features list is still built around calls. If you want automated chat answers, you add them from outside 3CX. More on that below.

What 3CX Live Chat costs at three team sizes

Prices on a grid are abstract, so here are three setups I see often, priced from the vendor list. All three assume hosting by 3CX and include live chat for every user.

Add your SIP trunk on top of each row. One thing to check before you pick a size: the user cap is a ceiling, not a target. 3CX recommends a range per size (16 to 40 users at 8 calls, 41 to 80 at 16), and if your team is on the phone all day, size by how many calls happen at once, not by headcount.

3CX users tend to rate the value well. On G2, where 3CX holds 4.4 out of 5 from 548 reviews, one reviewer summed up the price side:

"3CX's feature set to price value is all but unmatched in the industry."

Dan K., G2

The costs the 3CX price list does not show

The licence is honest about what it covers, and "no hidden extras" is printed at the top of 3CX's pricing page. Still, four costs land outside it, and only one of them is money you pay 3CX.

• SIP trunk. Numbers and call minutes come from a provider you choose. 3CX names Callcentric in the US and Telxi in the UK and Europe as examples.
• WhatsApp fees. 3CX's WhatsApp integration needs a WhatsApp Business Platform account and answers inbound messages only, with a 24-hour reply window. Meta's own charges are separate; my note on WhatsApp Business pricing explains them.
• Tax and currency. List prices exclude tax or VAT, and the price list notes they are "subject to FX rate fluctuations."
• The unanswered chat. When the queue is empty, 3CX shows an offline greeting and a form. The visitor leaves a message and waits until morning.

That fourth one is a cost, even though it never shows up on an invoice. One r/3CX user who runs 3CX chat for hotels and guesthouses described the questions that open most chats:

"When my client is starting a "Live Chat", they often start with "Hi are you available" or "How much does this cost"."

EntEff, r/3CX

Those are questions a help page already answers. On a 3CX setup, they wait for a person. My write-up on live chat deflection puts numbers on what that costs, and the guide to after-hours support covers the options.

3CX Live Chat pricing vs other chat tools

The comparison only works if you compare the same job. 3CX sells a phone system with chat included; most chat tools sell seats. Here is how the billing unit differs.

For the exact seat prices, see my guides to Tidio pricing and Crisp pricing.

If you are mostly a phone team, Dialpad pricing and CloudTalk pricing are the closest per-user comparisons.

If you want AI inside WordPress itself rather than next to it, my AI Engine pricing post covers the most installed plugin.

My take: if you need phones anyway, 3CX is hard to beat on price, and chat is a free bonus. If you do not need phones, you are taking on a PBX, an admin console and a SIP trunk to get a free chat bubble, and a chat-first tool is less to run.

Adding AI answers to a 3CX website, and what it costs

You do not have to replace 3CX to fix the after-hours gap. Keep it for calls, WhatsApp and the agents' inbox, and put an AI teammate on the website chat that answers from your own content. eesel's chat bubble goes on a WordPress site with one script tag, reads your help center, website and past tickets, and answers in 80+ languages at any hour. When a visitor needs a person, it hands over with the chat attached.

I have watched this setup work on businesses shaped a lot like a 3CX customer. BEAUTEK, a B2B equipment supplier in Siegen, Germany, staffs its phone line on weekday office hours. eesel runs as the chat on beautek.de, answering product and order questions in German and turning quote requests into Zendesk tickets for sales. In one month, August 8 to September 8, 2026, it answered 77 website chats live and created 20 Zendesk tickets from chat, most of them sales leads, answering from 6,700 pages and documents, per the BEAUTEK story.

Seasonal businesses are the other strong fit. Norden-Frisia, a ferry line to the North Sea islands, runs its bot CaptAIn on the website chat, a public chat link and Zendesk, answering from 346 knowledge items, with a plan sized for up to 10,000 interactions a month in high season and scaled back down from October to March. And IC Intracom runs a separate chat on each of its web stores.

On price, eesel is one fixed monthly plan, not seats: free to try with 100 credits, then $299 a month for 500 credits, where one chat or ticket is 1 credit however long it runs. Paying a year upfront gets two months free. That is more than 3CX's $0 chat, and it buys a different thing: the answer, not the inbox. If your site gets a handful of chats a week and replying in the morning is fine, 3CX alone is enough. If the same questions arrive every evening, my guide to AI live chat and the AI live chat software roundup are the next read.

If you are unsure whether a bot belongs on your site at all, my explainer on AI chatbots vs live chat covers when a person should still answer, and the guide to multilingual live chat helps if your visitors write in several languages.

If you work from a terminal, the eesel CLI does the same setup without the dashboard. npx @eesel/cli init chat-bubble --site https://your-site.com creates a chat bubble that reads your site and prints the embed snippet, and eesel chat "what are your opening hours?" lets you test answers before a visitor sees them. Coding agents like Claude Code can run the same commands, which is handy if your 3CX admin also looks after the website.

Is 3CX Live Chat worth the price?

For a business under 10 people, 3CX Live Chat pricing is the easiest call in this post: $0, hosted, with WhatsApp and a phone system included. For 11 to 40 people, $690 a year for hosted PRO is a fair price for a phone system that happens to include chat, and cheaper than most per-seat chat tools. Past that, the ladder keeps getting cheaper per user.

Where the money stops working is the hour nobody is at a desk. 3CX's licence covers the people who answer; it does not answer for them. My small business helpdesk picks and the question of whether AI support is worth it for a small team are where I would go next if that hour is costing you sales. For the full feature picture, my 3CX Live Chat review goes deeper.

Try eesel on your 3CX website

Your 3CX licence already pays for the people who answer chat. eesel covers the hours they are not there: it answers your website visitors from your help content, books the sales lead into your helpdesk, and leaves the calls to 3CX. BEAUTEK runs exactly that split, with eesel on the website and the phone line on office hours. Try eesel free with 100 credits, connect your website, and ask it the questions your chats open with before a visitor does.