What about receiving faxes? If you still have a multifunction printer that includes the fax service, you may be able to get rid of it if you switch to an online fax service. You must have a paid account to receive incoming faxes using all the fax services we've seen. To recover incoming files digitally, sign in to your online fax service account or, in some cases, you can have them delivered to your email inbox. Faxing is still a hassle, but the best fax services modernize the experience. Here's a list of the best fax services, followed by more information you may need if you're learning to send or receive a fax without using a fax machine.
For people with moderate faxing needs, Fax Plus works great for free. Anyone can submit 10 pages free of charge; if you need to send more pages, they cost 20 cents each. On the free tier, you can send faxes but not receive them. Fax, Plus is great for people who have light or moderate faxing needs. If you need to send a free fax just once and the fax is less than 10 pages long, Fax, Plus is great.
If you need a unique number for inbound faxes and you typically send and receive fewer than 200 pages per month, Fax, Plus is the most affordable fax service you can find. If you need more than what the lowest Fax Plus plan offers, we recommend Hello Fax. FaxZero is a free fax service that can handle most of your faxing needs. While relatively simple, it's the most generous free service we've seen, replenishing page assignments every day.
You can send up to five faxes per day and each fax can have a maximum of three pages (plus a cover page). However, faxes from paying customers take precedence over free ones in terms of delivery speed. In addition, with the free tier, FaxZero adds its own brand to the cover pages and the total size of the fax file cannot exceed 25 MB. HelloFax offers some faxes free of charge.
If you need to send a fax, you'll receive 5 pages for free (for your lifetime, not per month). After that, it costs just 99 cents per fax for faxes of up to 10 pages, plus 20 cents for each subsequent page, with no subscription required. Another advantage of HelloFax is that it offers easy, self-service cancellation through your account. For free users, HelloFax is a great option if you need to send a single fax of 5 pages or less.
It's also ideal if you have very modest but recurring faxing needs, since a 10-page fax costs less than a dollar and doesn't require a subscription, and you also have access to an excellent online interface to keep track of the faxes you've sent. RingCentral is ideal if you run a medium or large company with significant faxing needs, although it's really ideal if you're also looking for another type of business communication and can buy them all together at a good price. Another benefit is that RingCentral allows you to use the same phone number to receive voice calls and send text messages as you do to send and receive faxes. Online fax services allow you to send and receive faxes without using a fax machine. To send a fax, you usually generate a PDF or scan the pages of the document you want to send.
After that, you upload the file to the fax service. Then fill in additional information, such as the recipient's name and fax number, and if you wish, you can add a cover page. The online fax service does the rest. The recipient receives the documents just as if they were sent through a fax machine. Sometimes you can send a fax via email, which we'll talk about later. To receive faxes through an online fax service, you must have a paid account, which will provide you with a dedicated fax number.
In most cases, you can sign in to a web portal to retrieve the digital versions of the faxes you receive or send them to your email. If you plan to use an online fax service regularly, such as sending more than one or two faxes a month, you'll want to have an account with a paid subscription plan. Otherwise, you can get by with a free service, such as FaxZero, or you can pay by fax without needing to subscribe to HelloFax (which is now owned by Dropbox and, in some places, is called Dropbox Fax).). All of the fax services included here offer a web interface, but their usefulness varies greatly.
Well-designed software can inspire user confidence, while archaic services can weaken it just as easily. Of the services we tested, HelloFax is the best when it comes to having a clear and highly functional web interface. When you send a fax from a web portal, all attachments (i.e., fax pages) are sent as images. All of the fax services we tested support a wide range of file types, although the file size limit varies.
Most services allow you to preview attachments before sending them. HelloFax also includes tools for creating and applying digital signatures. For more information, see our article that explains how to send and receive a fax online. Bundled page plans also help avoid paying overuse charges, which are per-page charges that are charged when you exceed your monthly allotment.
These rates are usually around 10 cents per page. HelloFax charges just 5 cents per page for page excess, which is the lowest rate you'll find. Depending on the service you use, your plan may not include sending international faxes, even faxes from the U.S. US to Canada and the UK sometimes not they entail additional costs.
Some payment plans include international coverage. It's not unusual for an online fax company to charge an additional fee for sending an international fax, sometimes gradually, depending on the recipient's location and usually per page. Fax, Plus allows you to send 10 pages for free, every time, from your account. In the same way, HelloFax allows you to send 5 pages for free.
FaxZero allows you to send 5 faxes a day for free, and each fax can include 3 pages plus a cover page. FaxZero's business model is based on advertising. There's simply no reason to opt for a paid service if all you need to do is send a fax from time to time. If receiving faxes is a requirement for you, then you need a payment plan.
Most online fax services offer Android apps and iPhone apps. With a mobile fax app, you just need to take a picture of a document and send it. Of the services included in this list, Fax, Plus, and RingCentral offer mobile apps. We prefer online fax services to have dedicated mobile applications, but at a minimum, they should have a mobile website.
FaxZero and SRFax have sites that are highly usable through mobile browsers. HelloFax allows you to send a fax from your mobile device, but you have to go to your email account to do so. Modern businesses and workers are familiar with email workflows, and most of the fax services included here offer similar fax-to-email capabilities. In practical terms, fax services convert received faxes into email attachments and, conversely, convert email fields and attachments to its fax equivalent.
Because you can send and receive emails from anywhere, this approach makes the fax service more universally available. Most services allow you to select an area code and assign it a phone number available for receiving and sending faxes or allow you to choose from a list of available numbers. Most also allow you to transfer an existing fax number if you have one. If you don't want people to have to pay to send you a fax, consider getting a toll-free fax number, which is usually free once you have a paid plan.
RingCentral offers personalized numbers for your fax number, although we only recommend RingCentral for medium and large companies that send or receive a large number of faxes each month. Some industries continue to rely on faxing for several reasons, and knowing who to turn to when you need to send a fax to one of them is much easier than running around, pages in hand, to find a company that offers internal fax services. But faxing documents isn't the only way to deliver documents, so be sure to check out the many secure methods for sharing files and sending encrypted emails. You can also send and receive faxes that comply with HIPAA and ensure compliance with SOC 2 and ISO 27001 standards when faxing confidential information.
A fax machine works by connecting to a telephone line and sending all kinds of strange tones over the telephone line to a fax machine on the other end that decodes the tones and usually prints the incoming document immediately, as a cheap, low-quality version of a photocopier. This plan includes a toll-free fax number, which allows you to send and receive faxes while ensuring compliance with various industry regulations, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA. If you need a unique number for incoming faxes and you generally send and receive fewer than 200 pages per month, send a fax. Attach the documents you want to fax and enter the fax number of the recipient in the United States.
And if you only have to send a fax once in a while and you don't want to pay, you can send a few pages of fax for free. In addition to allowing you to send faxes from your computer, you can also automate the process by integrating fax functionality into your current business software. The start of the trial version allows you to send, receive and process faxes online for seven days without paying anything.
