Yealink desk phone with a colour touchscreen on a dark blue background
Avaya alternative

Avaya alternatives for UK SMEs: move off IP Office, Aura and Cloud Office.

Book a free audit Why ACO is RingCentral

The honest position.

Avaya builds solid telephony engineering, and after two Chapter 11 restructurings the company still operates and still supports IP Office. This page is not a claim that Avaya is finished. It is about what your options actually are.

UK Avaya customers fall into two camps. Most run on-premise IP Office or Aura, often over ISDN or analogue lines. The rest have moved to Avaya Cloud Office. Both camps have a reason to look around right now.

If you are on-prem, the UK PSTN switch-off completes in January 2027. ISDN and analogue lines are being withdrawn, so your on-prem Avaya needs a SIP migration regardless of vendor loyalty. You are moving anyway. The only question is where to.

If you are on Avaya Cloud Office, you are already paying for a cloud phone system. It is worth knowing exactly what you are paying for, which is the next section.

Avaya Cloud Office is RingCentral.

Avaya Cloud Office runs on RingCentral's platform under an Avaya badge. The two companies have run the partnership since 2019. RingCentral operates the infrastructure and drives the roadmap. ACO follows RingCentral's release cycle on a slight delay, so the features you get are RingCentral features arriving a little later with Avaya branding on top.

The 2023 restructuring renegotiated that RingCentral deal, which tells you the commercial relationship underneath the badge is where the real decisions get made. If you are evaluating Avaya Cloud Office as a fresh cloud choice, you are really evaluating RingCentral. Our comparison of that platform lives on the RingCentral alternative page, and it applies to ACO too.

None of this is a criticism of RingCentral's product. It is a per-seat SaaS platform that works. The point is that you should price and judge it as what it is, rather than as a distinct Avaya cloud offering.

The cost model, not a fake price table.

We will not print invented ACO or 3CX figures here, because your Avaya invoice depends on your tier, your reseller and how your contract was written. What matters is the shape of the two models.

Avaya Cloud Office is per-seat SaaS. Every user is a monthly licence, so your bill scales in a straight line with headcount. Add ten salespeople and you add ten licences forever. On-prem IP Office and Aura carry maintenance, SIP trunk and support contracts that are often bundled through a reseller, which makes the true annual cost hard to read line by line.

Managed 3CX splits the bill into parts you can see. We charge per user per month for the managed service. The 3CX licence itself is per-system and based on simultaneous calls, so it does not carry a per-seat SaaS tax the way ACO does. A team where many people have a phone but few are on calls at once tends to sit well under a pure per-seat model. We show you the licence, the hosting, the SIP minutes and the management as separate lines on our honest pricing page, so you can compare like for like against your Avaya renewal.

When to stay on Avaya.

The direct UK relationship question.

Avaya sells through resellers, and Avaya Cloud Office sits on top of a RingCentral platform that Avaya itself renegotiated during restructuring. Depending on your setup, your support path can run through a reseller, then Avaya, then in some cases RingCentral underneath. That is several hops between you and the people who can actually change something.

Managed 3CX via Port Phones removes those hops. We host it, we manage it, we bill it, and we answer the phone. Your support tickets, your billing questions and your strategic planning all sit with one named UK contact.

If your Avaya reseller relationship is part of the friction, replacing both the platform and the chain behind it at once is the quiet benefit of switching.

Switching mechanics.

  1. Week 1, audit. We look at what you actually run: on-prem IP Office or Aura, or an ACO subscription. We note your ISDN and analogue lines, your user count, your call volume and your handsets. If you are on-prem near the PSTN switch-off, this doubles as your SIP migration plan.
  2. Week 2 to 4, 3CX provisioning. UK hosting, Gamma SIP trunks, new Yealink handsets ordered where Avaya phones need replacing. We rebuild your IVR and call-flow logic from your current Avaya setup so the caller experience stays the same.
  3. Week 4 to 6, number porting. Your Avaya UK numbers port out via LoA on a standard two to four week timeline. On-prem ISDN and analogue number ranges sometimes port more slowly than SIP-native ranges, so we plan for the longer window.
  4. Week 6 to 7, cut-over. Avaya handsets are replaced with Yealink handsets during the cut-over week. Training on the new phones takes about fifteen minutes because the day-to-day actions are the same.
  5. Contract timing. ACO subscriptions and on-prem maintenance deals both run to fixed terms with early-exit clauses. If you are mid-contract, we model whether the switching saving outweighs the exit cost before you commit. For on-prem systems facing the January 2027 switch-off, the SIP migration is happening either way, which usually makes the timing straightforward.

What about my IP Office handsets?

Avaya desk phones such as the 9600 series and the J-series use Avaya-specific provisioning that does not port cleanly to 3CX. It is easier and cheaper to replace them with Yealink at cut-over than to force old handsets onto a platform they were never built for.

Yealink trade-rate handsets are inexpensive and the swap is quick, so most firms treat the hardware refresh as a one-off cost that pays for itself against the ongoing licence saving. We spec the right models for your desks during the audit so there are no surprises on the day.

Common questions from Avaya customers.

No. Avaya filed Chapter 11 in 2017 and again in February 2023, and it restructured through both. The company still operates and IP Office remains supported. The point is not that Avaya is dead. The point is that most UK on-prem customers are moving for the PSTN switch-off anyway, and Avaya Cloud Office is a RingCentral platform under an Avaya badge, so it is worth knowing what you are buying.
Yes, in substance. Avaya Cloud Office runs on RingCentral's platform under an Avaya badge, a partnership that has run since 2019. RingCentral operates the infrastructure and drives the roadmap, and ACO follows RingCentral's release cycle on a slight delay. Our RingCentral alternative page covers the same ground and applies to ACO.
If your Avaya IP Office or Aura runs over ISDN or analogue lines, yes, because the UK PSTN switch-off completes in January 2027 and those lines are being withdrawn. Your on-prem system needs a SIP migration regardless of which vendor you choose. Our PSTN switch-off guide explains the deadline in full.
The 9600 and J-series handsets use Avaya-specific provisioning that does not migrate cleanly to 3CX, so we replace them with Yealink at cut-over. Yealink trade-rate handsets are inexpensive and the swap is quick, so the hardware refresh usually pays for itself against the ongoing licence saving.
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