Many teams who come to PBXfactory aren't buying their first phone system — they're leaving one. Lately, that's very often 3CX: licensing changes, hosting changes, and a feeling that the ground keeps moving. Whatever your reason, the technical side of a 3CX migration is smaller than it looks — and we built a tool to make it smaller still.
The real work in a PBX migration
The new PBX is the easy part — on PBXfactory, a Yeastar P-Series Cloud PBX is live in minutes. The tedious part is everything you've typed into the old system over the years: every user, every extension number, every email address, every mobile number — all typed in again by hand. For a 40-person company, that's an afternoon of copy and paste, and at least one wrong digit someone finds three weeks later.
Crane gives you that afternoon back.
How Crane works
Your PBXfactory portal includes Crane, a tool that moves a PBX setup from one system to another. Today, it takes a 3CX backup and recreates it on your Yeastar PBX; more sources and targets will follow. Here's how:
- Export a backup from 3CX. In the 3CX management console, take a full backup — the standard .zip export, nothing special.
- Upload it to Crane in your PBXfactory portal. The file stays in your browser until you analyse or convert it. Crane reads the backup and shows you exactly what it found — extensions, SIP trunks, inbound and outbound rules, IVRs, ring groups, queues, company contacts — and you untick anything you don't want, before anything is created.
- Pick your new PBX. Choose the Yeastar PBX in your account that should receive the setup, and enter its API credentials (you create them on the PBX under Integrations → API). They're used for this one run and never stored — and neither is your backup.
- Convert. Crane creates everything you selected directly on your Yeastar PBX — extension numbers kept, caller IDs carried over, user emails in place so the Linkus invitations reach the right people — and years of typing appear in one go. You get a report of everything that was created and anything that wasn't.
Your extension numbers survive the move, which is what people care about most — nobody wants to reprint business cards because extension 142 became 217.
What Crane doesn't do
We'd rather be upfront about the limits. IVR menus, queue strategies and routing rules don't map one-to-one between 3CX and Yeastar P-Series — the ideas are similar, the details differ — so Crane recreates them as their closest Yeastar equivalents. Walk through them in the Yeastar admin panel before you go live, with Yeastar's documentation at hand. Use a fresh PBX if you can: existing items with the same names or numbers make individual items fail, and the report lists each one. For a typical small business, that check is an hour of focused work instead of a day of typing.
Trunks are recreated too, but you stay in control of the switch-over: calls move the moment you point your SIP provider and your phone numbers at the new PBX. Until then, 3CX keeps running and you can prepare without any risk.
A 3CX migration plan in one paragraph
Start a PBX — with the 3-day free trial, your test run costs nothing. Run Crane, have your team sign in to Linkus, and make test calls over a temporary trunk. Happy? Point your main trunk and phone numbers at the new PBX, and switch off 3CX whenever it suits you. If the test run turns up a problem instead, cancel during the trial — you've spent nothing but an afternoon, compared with the weeks a traditional migration quote takes just to arrive.
Crane is waiting in your portal, right next to your new PBX.