The Best Online Fax Services of 2017

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Sometimes you need to send a fax, but odds are you don't have a fax machine. Of course, you could always pay to use a fax machine at a FedEx Office or similar store, but making a special trip just to send a fax is a real productivity killer. And do you really want to want to hang around until you can confirm that the machine on the other end correctly received and printed every page of your document? Fortunately, there are many services that let you send and receive faxes from your computer—no modem screech or paper printouts required. If you need to send or receive faxes on the regular, these are the services to trust.

How Does Online Faxing Work?

Online fax services either assign you a new fax number or let you port over your existing fax number. Once your fax number is set up, you can send or receive faxes through a web portal operated by the fax service of your choice.

Most fax services also let you send and receive faxes as emails through your existing mail client. It's a fast and easy to way to integrate faxing into a modern office workflow, and because you can email from anywhere, this approach makes the fax service available on both desktop and mobile devices. It's a great way to start making your office truly paperless.

Every fax service I tested lets you attach image and document files to your fax, which are sent through as if they had been scanned by a physical machine. That's great in this age of editable PDFs and digital signatures. If you need to get a paper document onto your computer to fax with one of these services, you can buy yourself a new scanner. Alternatively, you can snap an image using your smartphone and send the photo to your computer. There are even apps, such as Evernote Scannable and Office Lens, that make it easy to digitize documents with only a smartphone.

Pricing

All the fax services I've reviewed charge a monthly fee. What you get in return is an allotment of pages. Sometimes companies distinguish between how many pages you receive and how many you send. That's the case for eFax and MyFax. The other services I've tested offer a pool of pages, which is the more flexible approach. With a pool of fax pages, you don't end up paying for, say, received pages you might not end up using if you're more likely to be the sender.

Pooled page plans also make it easier to avoid paying overage fees. These are per-page fees assessed when you exceed your monthly budget of pages. Nextiva vFAX and MetroFax have the lowest fees, at a mere 3 cents per page. That's not bad at all. Send2Fax, on the other hand, has the highest, at 12 cents per page. If you opt for the free version of our Editors' Choice winner HelloFax, you can send faxes for 99 cents each once you use up your free pages. That's a handy solution, if you don't need to fax often.

Note that, depending on your service, international faxes may not be included in your plan. If that's the case, you'll likely have to pay an additional fee—sometimes on a graduated scale depending on the recipient's location, and usually per page. If you do a lot of business overseas, be sure to check the fax company's terms of service before faxing to Timbuktu.

Setup fees are annoying, and thankfully a rarity in the world of online fax services. Only one of the services, eFax, charges one. It already has the highest monthly cost of any service I've reviewed, and its first-month cost is nearly doubled when you factor in its setup fee.

What's Included?

All of the fax services I looked at have the same core features. The most important is a fax number. These services let you select an area code and assign you an available phone number for receiving and sending faxes. Some services, like eFax and Editors' Choice winner MyFax, will even let you select a fax number with the country code of your choice for no extra fee. All the services also let you port over an existing fax number, if you have one. That saves you the step of telling regular fax contacts to update their databases, which I like.

Don't like making faxers pay money to reach you? Consider getting a toll-free fax number. Most fax services off toll-free numbers free of charge. You can also select the area code for your fax number, and here is where several faxs services diverge. MyFax and eFax have a wide variety of area codes outside Canada, the UK, and the US. Most other services cover only these three regions, and a handful only offer numbers from within the US.

At the heart of most fax services is a web interface through which you can send documents and text from your computer to a fax machine. Received faxes are also accessible through the web interface, usually as PDF attachments. Sometimes they are viewable directly from your browser, though some services insist that you download faxes before you can read them. HelloFax in particular has an excellent web interface, one that won me over with its simplicity and ease of use. It is, without a doubt, the best looking fax service I've tested.

The easiest way to use any of these services is through your existing email client. Simply type the fax number—including country and area code—into the address line, followed by an "@" and an email domain specific to the fax service. The subject line and body text appear on the fax cover page, and any attachments are faxed as separate pages. Best of all, your fax number appears as the sender, so there's no confusion about where the message originated.

Some services, such as HelloFax and eFax, include image editors and tools for applying digital signatures. These are great tools for filling out forms that must be sent via fax. Both include the ability to add text over documents before faxing, so you can easily fill out forms even if you don't have an editable PDF.

Fax Performance

By and large, these services perform the basic function of faxing quite well. The hardest part of testing them turned out to be finding a functioning fax machine to receive the messages!

The only real trouble I ran into was a quirk with eFax that prevented me from sending faxes via email. The company quickly solved my problem, but you might experience it as well if you are using a single Gmail account to manage multiple addresses. I also had some issue sending email faxes with Nextiva VFax. That is surprising, since the service worked without a hitch when I used it last year.

Finally, I encountered some unusual overlaps in our testing. eFax, MyFax, and MetroFax all use an identical web interface (though they each have a different pricing structure and feature set). The connection goes even deeper: I discovered that it's impossible to sign up for a new account with eFax, Send2Fax, or MetroFax if you've already used your email address with one of the others. That's odd, but it's unlikely to be a problem for most users, who will only require, or sign up for, a single fax service.

Hit Send

Buying a fax machine and paying for a dedicated landline just to send the occasional fax is a tough sell these days. Online fax services can do it all, and do it better, for a single monthly fee. And with plenty of capable services in the space, you're sure to find the one that's a perfect fit for your home or office.

Featured in This Roundup

  • the-best-online-fax-services-of-2017 photo 2

    HelloFax

    the-best-online-fax-services-of-2017 photo 3
    $9.99
    %displayPrice% at %seller% HelloFax is a top tool for sending and receiving faxes online. Its built-in editor makes short work of attachments, and its slick interface is a pleasure to use.  Read the full review ››
  • the-best-online-fax-services-of-2017 photo 4

    MyFax

    the-best-online-fax-services-of-2017 photo 5
    $10.00
    %displayPrice% at %seller% MyFax is a dead-simple tool for sending and receiving faxes from the web or email. It's a top choice for online faxing, especially if you need international fax numbers. Read the full review ››
  • the-best-online-fax-services-of-2017 photo 6

    eFax


    $16.95
    %displayPrice% at %seller% eFax lets you send and receive faxes from the web or email, and it does this quite well, but it's expensive compared with the competition. Read the full review ››
  • the-best-online-fax-services-of-2017 photo 7

    MetroFax


    $7.95
    %displayPrice% at %seller% MetroFax makes it easy to skip the fax machine and instead send and receive documents online. It's a solid service at a great price, provided you don't need a fax number outside the US or Canada. Read the full review ››
  • the-best-online-fax-services-of-2017 photo 8

    Send2Fax


    $11.99
    %displayPrice% at %seller% Send2Fax is a good, simple service for sending and receiving faxes without having to fuss with fax machines, provided you don't need an international fax number. Read the full review ››
  • the-best-online-fax-services-of-2017 photo 9

    Nextiva vFAX


    $8.95
    %displayPrice% at %seller% Nextiva vFAX makes it cheap and easy to send faxes via email or the web. A reliance on Flash and problems in our testing make it tough to recommend, however.  Read the full review ››

Editors' Note: eFax, MetroFax, MyFax, and Send2Fax are owned by J2 Global, the parent company of PCMag's publisher, Ziff Davis.

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