Best home lab on premises solution

Hello all — I’m sure this has probably been debated a million times, so apologies if this comes up often.

A bit of background: I’m rebuilding a small home VoIP lab mostly as a hobby/interest project. I used to run 3CX on a Raspberry Pi years ago, but during the COVID years I fell behind on updates, licensing changed, and my free license eventually expired. Rather than rebuild the same setup, I decided to start fresh.

Right now I’m running FreePBX in a VM on an older PC. One of the reasons I moved away from 3CX is that it feels like they’re pushing more toward cloud-centric deployments, and I personally prefer keeping things local when possible.

FreePBX has been interesting so far and I’m enjoying learning it, but I’m noticing that quite a few conveniences seem to live behind paid modules — things like easier phone auto-provisioning. My current hardware is mostly older Polycom phones, and tasks that were very straightforward in 3CX (like paging groups auto-answering instead of ringing) have taken a lot more manual work to figure out.

So that got me wondering — what else are people running these days for home labs or small self-hosted VoIP setups?

Are FreePBX and 3CX basically still the main options, or are there other flexible platforms worth exploring that balance features, learning value, and expandability?

I’m mainly interested in learning and experimenting rather than production use, so I’d love to hear what others are running and why.

Looking forward to the discussion — thanks everyone!