I am looking to add either the Fop2 or iSymphony operator panel to our system but would like to get some feedback from the forum if possible. Both look capable but Fop2 looks cleaner, is much cheaper and seems to be the better value. iSymphony on the other hand comes pre-installed with FreePBX so Fop2 is much more difficult to integrate. Unless one is really that much better than the other, personally I think both should be offered as modules instead of favoring iSymphony over the other. Comments?
have not played with fop2. we and our customers use isymphony and it works quite well.
The folks who created FOP2 made it pretty easy to integrate. Took me all of 5 minutes to setup. Download, make, create Asterisk Manager user and you should be good 
We are using Fop2 on our FreePBX HA system. It is a lot cheaper than iSymphony (unless you have very few extensions), works well and we are pretty happy with it.
I can’t speak to how well iSymphony works, cause we haven’t tried. Would have been quite expensive for our 500 extensions environment, so we went with fop2 in the first place and haven’t regretted it.
Frankly, I doubt that you will find someone who has enough experience on both Fop2 and iSymphony to be able to give you an honest evaluation and comparison for both systems. Most people will recommend what they are implementing or working with. And that makes sense, cause they are both decent products, that do their job.
People surely appreciate the fact that iSymphony is integrated into FreePBX, but fop2 in my experience it is not difficult to integrate at all. You install from the command line and everything after that is GUI based and very straightforward.
Install is easy:
cd /usr/src
wget http://www.fop2.com/download/centos64 -O fop2.tgz
tar zxvf fop2.tgz
cd fop2
make install
service fop2 restart
That’s all you need to do on a FreePBX distro (apart from creating a Asterisk manager user, which is also easy). If you don’t want to install it yourself, open a ticket with them and they will install it for you.
We have also had a lot of feature requests, and many of them were implemented by the developer who also provides competent support on the live chat at no charge.
You can definitely give it a try. It’s free up to 15 extensions/buttons. If you have more extensions, then try it on a test server and see how you like it. The basic license per server is $40 (up to $100 if you want more features, regardless of the number of extensions you have), so it’s pretty affordable. A growing number of extensions also doesn’t mean you have to purchase more licenses, unlike with iSymphony.
I have played with it a lot, so feel free to ask me about it, but there is also a forum, where the developer answers questions.
We have customized our install a bit more, cause we are using High Availability and have added fail2ban to jump in to block unwanted fop2 login attempts.
I can only agree with what avayax says. We also have a Freepbx HA system with about 700 extensions. I went for fop2 since its a lot cheaper and we could try the free version. Its does all that we need, and our reception people use it all the time.
I would try both out and see which one you like better.