On top of the telephony you already own.
CodeB isn’t pitched as another Zoom alternative — that market is crowded. We sit in a narrower niche: the browser meetings + browser-phone layer for organisations whose calls can’t leave their building. Keep your PBX (3CX, FreePBX, Asterisk, FRITZ!Box, hosted ITSP — anything SIP). Keep your trunk. Add CodeB for video, click-to-call, signed recordings, and a desk-phone-in-the-browser. Below: side-by-side with the cloud tools we’re most often compared to, with the gaps spelled out.
Skip the matrix → Top 10 buyer reasons
CodeB isn’t a phone-system replacement.
CodeB is the meeting tool — a privacy-first alternative to Zoom and Teams — that integrates with the phone system you already run. Keep your existing PBX (3CX, FreePBX, Asterisk, a residential router, a hosted ITSP — anything that speaks SIP); CodeB sits alongside it and extends what it can do: browser video, signed recordings, click-to-call from any web page, and a PWA desk phone that ties the two together. The right framing isn’t “us versus your PBX” — it’s “us alongside your PBX, instead of Zoom or Teams.”
Capability matrix
| Dimension | CodeB | Zoom | Microsoft Teams | 3CX |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Self-host on-prem; air-gappable | Cloud SaaS only | Cloud SaaS (Microsoft 365) | Self-host or hosted |
| Media routing | Peer-to-peer mesh, encrypted end-to-end | SFU via vendor cloud | SFU via vendor cloud | SFU + bridge |
| Participants per call | ~6 (mesh ceiling) | Up to 100–1000+ | Up to 300–1000+ | 250+ |
| Native desktop / mobile apps | None — browser / PWA only | Win, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android | Win, macOS, iOS, Android | Win, macOS, iOS, Android |
| Installable desk-phone | Yes — PWA, auto-updates | Add-on (Zoom Phone) | Add-on (Teams Phone) | Yes — core product |
| PSTN dial-out / dial-in | Built-in, BYO SIP trunk | Paid add-on (Zoom Phone) | Paid add-on (Teams Phone) | Core strength |
| Mid-call “invite someone by phone” | Built-in — uses your existing trunk | Requires Zoom Phone add-on | Requires Teams Phone add-on | Yes (PBX feature) |
| Click-to-call widget for public websites | Built-in (one-line script) | No | No | Live-chat widget only |
| Telemetry / analytics | None | Extensive | Extensive | Limited |
| Data residency | Your data centre | US-centric | M365 region | Yours (when self-hosted) |
| Calendar integration (Outlook / standard formats) | .ics download — no live sync | Native | Native (M365) | Limited |
| Forensic-grade signed recording | Yes (ECDSA-P256 sidecar) | No | No | No |
| Recording-consent gate | Per-participant, signed | Banner only | Banner only | Banner only |
| Click-to-call from any web page | Built-in (embed widget + alias) | No | No | Live-chat widget |
| Air-gap / offline deployable | Yes | No | No | Partial (license check) |
Genuinely unique to CodeB
Most rows above show "CodeB has it too, also others." A few features go the other way — CodeB has them in a shape we don’t see in the alternatives. Worth calling these out explicitly because they’re the genuine differentiators, not just rebadged table-stakes:
PSTN integrated into the meeting tool — without a separate telephony product
Inviting a phone number to an ongoing meeting (or dialing out to add a participant mid-call) is technically possible in Zoom and Teams — but only after buying Zoom Phone or Teams Phone, separate paid products that bundle their own carrier service. With CodeB it’s part of the base meeting tool, pointed at whatever SIP trunk you already use for company calls. No extra license, no extra vendor, no per-minute uplift beyond the trunk you already pay for.
Mid-conference “add a phone” button using your own trunk
While a meeting is going on, anyone in the room can press Dial phone, type a number, and the SIP bridge calls them into the room as a participant. They appear as a tile alongside the video peers, audio bridged in. Useful when an unscheduled person needs to be pulled into a discussion — no need to rejoin, no need to switch tools. Comparable to 3CX’s “Add participant”, except CodeB does it in a browser-based meeting tool rather than a phone-system UI.
Click-to-call embed widget → conference room → PSTN dial-out
Drop a single <script> tag on any web page. A visitor clicks the floating button, lands in a fresh CodeB meeting room, and the SIP bridge calls your team’s phone. The visitor and the answering phone now share a private meeting. The visitor’s page never sees the real phone number (it’s referenced by an unguessable alias). Built-in — no separate live-chat product needed.
The full combination, in one self-hostable bundle
Peer-to-peer end-to-end encrypted meetings + bring-your-own SIP trunk for inbound & outbound PSTN + mid-call PSTN add + click-to-call embedding + forensic-signed recordings + on-prem / air-gap deployable. Each individual piece exists somewhere else in some form; the combination in a single open product that runs on your own Windows Server is what we haven’t seen elsewhere.
Forensic-grade signed recordings — including PSTN participants
Every recording (whether all participants are browsers, or some are bridged-in phone calls) ships with a sidecar JSON containing the file SHA-256, an ECDSA-P256 signature, the participants list, a speaker-turn timeline, and a per-participant consent log. Tamper-evident, audit-ready, and applies just as much to a call where Sarah dialed in from a mobile as to one where everyone joined from a laptop.
Unguessable alias-based dial numbers
Every callable destination has an unguessable 64-bit alias (e.g. n_dbbe66524a5cd792). Public URLs and embed widgets reference the alias, never the real number. A scraper crawling your site sees nothing it can use; to change which phone receives clicks you edit one config line server-side.
Where CodeB genuinely wins (broader strengths)
Privacy posture you can prove
Peer-to-peer media with end-to-end DTLS-SRTP encryption means your video never traverses our infrastructure — or anyone’s, in the on-prem case. A security team can verify this by reading the source. Zoom and Teams require trust; CodeB lets you check.
Truly air-gap deployable
Zoom and Teams are cloud SaaS products and need internet connectivity to operate. CodeB will run inside a fully disconnected LAN once installed — useful for defence, healthcare, regulated finance, and any environment where data leaving the perimeter is unacceptable.
The desk phone that installs in seconds
CodeB Phone is a PWA — users install it from their browser, no IT ticket, no MSI deployment. Updates self-deliver on the next reload, so the version running on every user’s machine stays current without any rollout planning.
Forensic-grade signed recordings
Every recording ships with an ECDSA-P256-signed sidecar JSON: file hash, participants list, speaker-turn timeline, and a per-peer consent log. Tamper-evident, audit-ready. Useful for healthcare consultations, legal calls, regulated-finance discussions — categories none of the other three target.
Bring your own everything
Bring your own SIP trunk, your own TURN relay, your own domain, your own TLS cert. No vendor lock-in. Your call records belong to your trunk provider. Switching trunks is a config edit, not a migration project.
Zero analytics, zero telemetry
No usage pings home, no third-party analytics, no event tracking. The privacy story isn’t just policy — nothing in the call path phones a vendor, and the access logs are yours alone.
Where CodeB genuinely loses
Worth being explicit about so you can disqualify us early if these are dealbreakers:
Scale ceiling around six participants
Mesh topology means each browser sends to every other browser — bandwidth grows with the square of participants. A 30-person all-hands isn’t practical. Zoom, Teams and 3CX use a media server (SFU) and scale to hundreds.
No live calendar sync
We offer .ics download — works everywhere — but no Outlook plugin, no calendar add-on, no "join via room" sync. Teams in particular is deeply integrated with M365 calendars; we’re not.
Smaller ecosystem
Teams has thousands of third-party integrations. Zoom has a marketplace. CodeB has webhooks-on-demand and a source tree you can extend yourself. Different shape of "extensibility" — better for some teams, worse for others.
Smaller mobile experience
iOS Safari restricts PWA capabilities intentionally. We work, but with rough edges — no install prompt, limited notifications, no real background. If your team is mostly on phones, the native apps from the alternatives are a better experience today.
Who each tool fits best
CodeB Conference
Small-to-mid teams that need a meeting tool plus a desk phone, value privacy and on-prem control over scale and cloud features, and are willing to trade large-meeting ceiling for a clean privacy story. Defence, healthcare, legal, regulated finance, sovereignty-conscious public sector, small consultancies.
Zoom
Organisations that need to host large meetings (50+) regularly, want a polished cross-platform native-app experience, and don’t have a strong "data must stay on-prem" requirement. The standard if scale and reliability are the top criteria.
Microsoft Teams
Organisations already deep in the M365 ecosystem — calendar, files, identity, chat, meetings — that want everything in one stack and don’t mind the cloud-coupling. Best if persistent channels and calendar integration are core to how your team works.
3CX (and CodeB alongside it)
If your primary need is a PBX — IVRs, queues, ring groups, hold music, classic phone-system features — 3CX is purpose-built. CodeB isn’t a replacement for it. The natural combination is 3CX as the phone system, CodeB as the meeting tool: keep the PBX you trust, and add private browser-based video, signed recordings and click-to-call on top — instead of bolting Zoom or Teams onto the side.
Choose CodeB if…
- You can’t (or won’t) put your meeting audio on a vendor cloud
- Your meetings are usually under six participants
- You want a desk-phone experience without deploying a heavy client to every workstation
- You have a SIP trunk or PBX already and want to integrate with it rather than replace it
- You need recordings to stand up as legal evidence (signed sidecars)
- You want to embed click-to-call on a public website without exposing a real phone number
- You operate inside a regulated environment (defence, healthcare, finance, public sector)
- You value being able to read every line of code that runs in the call path
Choose something else if…
- You regularly need to host 20+ person meetings
- Your team lives in Outlook / M365 calendar and wants tight integration
- Your team operates entirely from mobile devices
- You need extensive third-party integrations / marketplace apps
This page reflects our honest read of the alternatives as of writing. Their feature sets evolve; if you spot something out of date please let us know. The matrix doesn’t mention licensing terms or commercial models — for those, see each vendor’s own site. Marketing terms like "best-in-class" are unavoidable in a comparison page; treat them as relative ordering rather than absolute claims.