Asterisk

Is Asterisk actively maintained?

Over the last 11 months the project absorbed 283 commits, of which 94 arrived in the most recent quarter — roughly 31 commits a month.

The most recent tagged release, 24.0.0-rc1, shipped within the last month — a current, installable version exists today.

Of the 13 projects we track in Communication - SIP, Asterisk ranks #3 by health score — in the top quarter of its category.

What Asterisk actually does

Asterisk is an open-source IP PBX system, VoIP gateway, and conference server. It allows you to route phone calls, manage extensions, and handle digital telephony traffic on your own hardware.

Best fit: It suits system administrators and telephony engineers who need to build custom voice communication infrastructure or private branch exchange networks from scratch.

Worth knowing: Configuring telephony routing and SIP trunks requires deep technical knowledge, and mistakes can result in misconfigured audio paths or security vulnerabilities like toll fraud.

Deployment notes

As a compiled C application distributed via deb packages, it typically requires persistent storage for call logs and voicemails, and may integrate with a separate database backend for configuration data.

Links

• Official website
• Source code