Are you looking for options to send fax from your computer, mobile or tablet? There are many fax services out there in the wild that let you send email to fax, use android or iPhone app to send fax or by filling online forms.
In this article, we will talk about fax services that offer email to fax free, enterprise grade fax solutions as well as apps for iPhone and android devices that come in very handy when you need to send and receive faxes while on the go.
Which online fax services should you go for?
This is a question for you and totally depends on what you need, what you like and the budget at hand. It is always good to try a few before narrowing down to one.
If you are the one who needs to send faxes occasionally for personal use, then my recommendation is to use some basic free fax service offered by websites like GotFreeFax.com, myFax.com and faxZero.com.
Most of these websites let you fax limited number of pages everyday and offer limited features. You might also see lot of ads all over and some of these even place advertisements the cover page of the faxed document.
For limited official or business use, you can use pay per use options offered by GotFaxFree.com, GreenFax.com or onetimefax.com. These are good options when you are not dealing with high volumes and faxing needs are not frequent. You pay only for the faxes you send and there is no license or subscription fee associated. It is more like, you make a phone call and pay for it.
For enterprise grade faxing solutions, aforesaid free service will not offer much and good idea would be to try out some of the most advanced commercial solutions like eFax.com ,sFax, Ringcentral, Metrofax, Nextiva, Greenfax or srFax.com.
These commercial faxing solutions are capable of handling huge volumes and offer modern set of features like mobile apps for sending and receiving faxes, online storage and digital signatures etc.
Medical practitioners are required to be HIPAA compliant and there are fax service providers that let them be compliant when they send faxes. sFax, srFax are two such options.
Over the past few days, we have been checking out various online fax services and compiled a list of 10 best paid as well as free online fax options to send fax from your computer, mobile apps and using online forms.
We will start off with the best free service offered by GotFreeFax.com and the best enterprise grade faxing solutions offered by eFax.com, the rest will follow.
GotFreeFax.com – Email To Fax Free (Paid Options Available)
Looking for free internet fax service? GotFreeFax.com is one of the best options to send fax for free if you need to send faxes occasionally. This service allows you to send 2 faxes per day and upto 3 pages per fax, absolutely free, and without any ads.
If your requirement is more than the free service offered by GotFreeFax.com, then you can opt for their pay per fax service. Payment can be made via Paypal, you can also create a prepaid account and keep balance, you are billed for number of pages faxed.
You can go to gotfreefax.com, enter sender and receiver info, attach the documents to be sent as fax, and you are all set to send free fax.
Free fax service from GotFreeFax.com is available only for sending faxes to US and Canada. For other countries, you have to pay per fax and the charges vary country to country.
If you want to send one time free fax to other countries like united kingdom, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, China, Singapore, Hong Kong and many more, you can try myFax.com.
You can send free fax right now using : GotFreeFax.com – Free Internet Fax.
eFax – Premium Internet Fax Service
Looking for an enterprise grade fax service provider? eFax is a great option. eFax is a premium internet fax service managed by j2 global, a world leader in digital media and cloud services.
eFax is used across the globe by enterprises, it is so huge that around 20 million customers including half of fortune 500 business use eFax internet fax service everyday. Some of the key features of eFax include mobile apps, cloud storage, electronic signature, secure faxing and large file sharing.
You can send fax from desktop, smartphone, tablet, or any other device that connects to internet and email. eFax completely eliminates the need for fax machines, extra phone lines, paper, ink and etc.
There are three key mediums for sending digital fax and eFax has covered them all –
Email Fax
You can send fax by attaching document to the email, the text in the email body becomes your fax cover page. you can email fax in a go to 20 email addresses and use file sizes of upt 3 GB. That is huge!!!
Another power feature includes option for adding electronic signatures. You can drag and drop electronic signatures to include it in the fax.
Send Fax Online With eFax Mobile App
You can take a picture using mobile device and send picture as fax, using the eFax mobile apps. eFax has Android fax app as well as iPhone fax app available, for free download. If you have documents stored in the cloud or on your device, you can directly sign and send document as fax from your iPad, iPhone or Android Phone. Touch screen devices allow you to swipe your finger and type signatures.
Internet Fax – Online Form and Attachments
This is another option for sending faxes online, you can fill up the form, add cover note, attach the documents and distribute your fax across, to whomsoever.
You can know more about eFax here at: eFax – Online Fax Services.
MyFax – Fax by Email, Online or Smartphone
MyFax is another great internet fax service provider that offers one time free fax online to 41 countries including united kingdom, US, Canada, China, Spain, New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, Poland, Germany, France, Hong Kong and Brazil. As per MyFax website, you can use the free service twice in 24 hours.
MyFax targets individual and small businesses in general and offers sending and receiving faxes using your existing email id, online account or smartphone. As of today, if you subscribe for $10/month, you get 100 free outgoing and 200 free incoming fax pages for free. Receiving pages means that you also get a free local or toll free number to share with fax senders.
My fax is a cloud based fax solution and is managed by Canada based subsidiary of j2 global.
You can read more about MyFax here at: myFax – Send and Receive Faxes Online.
sFax
sFax is the leader when it comes to faxing solutions for Healthcare domain. Healthcare professionals as well as organizations are using sFax for HIPAA compliant and secure faxing. The other service providers offering HIPAA compliance include srFax and Interfax.
Some key features of sFAx include –
- Encryption during transfer as well as encryption at rest
- Two factor authentication, access control, IP restrictions
- Physical security of servers, redundant hardware, power and internet
- Online Fax via web browser for both windows and Mac
- iPhone and Android fax apps
- API available to integrated faxing solution to other applications
- Digital signatures, annotations, checks and marks etc. to review and fax PHI
- Private as well as organization wide contact lists
SFax is managed by company named Scrypt, inc. and some of its customers include Square, Enclarity, Central Michigan university, Aids healthcare foundation and CoreCloud.
You can know more about sFAx here at: sFax – Secure Internet Fax.
GreenFax
GreenFax is the internet faxing solution by Meixler Technologies who originally developed this service for receiving faxes for their own company.
Looking at the demand in the market, they added fax sending option, enhanced their solution and started to offer faxing services to other organizations. As of today, individuals, small companies as well as large organizations are using GreenFax services like email fax, fax to email, web fax as well as mobility options.
Some of the big brands who have had taken services from GreenFax include Iron Mountain, McGraw Hill, KBR, Boston College, StubHub and Zynga.
You can know more about GreenFax here at: GreenFax.com – fax to email, email to fax, web fax.
Ringcentral – Online Fax Service (paid)
When it comes to enterprise grade fax services, RingCentral competes with the likes of eFax and offer dynamic, secure, mobile, online and integrated faxing solutions. With Ringcentral you can send and receive faxes from laptops, tablets and smartphones.
You can also send fax directly from third party document stores like Dropbox, Box, Google drive and MS office applications like outlook etc. Faxed documents are transmitted over encrypted connections and stored in your access controlled online account.
Some key features of fax services from Ringcentral include –
- Free incoming and outgoing pages with monthly plan
- Online account to track log of sent and received faxes
- Option to get sms alerts on cell phones with every new incoming fax
- Multiple custom cover pages as per the business needs
- Option to block certain numbers
- Toll free and local number
- 24/7 support
Ringcentral is also into cloud based communication management products like call management, contact Centre, PBX, audio & video conference.
You can know more about RingCentral here at – RingCentral.com.
Metrofax
MetroFax is another big brand managed by j2 cloud services, Inc. and offers faxing solutions to small businesses as well as large enterprises. Other fax companies/brands managed by j2 global include eFax, myFax and RapidFax.
In terms of features, popularity and support, Metrofax easily compete with the top notch faxing solution providers like Ringcentral and eFax. Some of the big brands using Metrofax services include Marriott, US Bank, Stanford University, AllState and Safeway.
MetroFax runs on j2 global’s technology platform and hence its features are comparable to eFax (managed by j2 global). Almost all commercial fax solutions listed in this article come with 30 days of free trial and so does MetroFax.
You can send fax using web form, email as well as android and iPhone apps, get unlimited storage and receive fax from email in emails, online account keeps the documents in the cloud for long term storage.
You can read more about MetroFax here at – MetroFax.com.
Interfax
Interfax is another online fax service that enables businesses to receive and send huge volumes of faxes with ease and in a cost effective way.
Interfax is among the few enterprise fax solutions that comply with privacy and security standards including HIPAA, PCI-DSS and EU privacy directive to name a few. Needless to say it offers all features required by modern businesses like faxes through emails and online web forms etc.
Interfax is also among the most developer friendly fax service providers and offers integration with any development environment via free fax API.
It offers SOAP and REST based interfaces, developers can write program to send fax with just few lines of code and process the received fax before presenting it further.
Interfax is operational since 1996 and its customer base includes biggies like Vodafone, Microsoft, Nokia, HP, Revlon and Philips, Subway and Siemens, to name a few.
You can read more about Interfax here at – Interfax.com
Nextiva
Nextiva is the cost effective and affordable option for small businesses and individuals.At the time of writing this article, this is one of the cheapest among the enterprise grade commercial fax service providers. Its basic prepaid plan starts with as low as $4.95 per month.
Nextiva’s vFax service offers an online portal to manage your faxes over internet. The portal is very intuitive and user friendly, has great dashboards and the service is supported by Nextiva team over chat, email or Phone.
Nextiva is a complete solution for modern businesses to send and receive faxes online.
You can read more about Nextiva here at – Nextiva.com
faxZero
faxZero is a another good option for occasional users. One can send free fax by filling up the online form that asks for sender information, receiver information, attachments to be sent as fax etc.
You can use faxZero to send free fax with some limitations like max 5 free faxes per day, max 3 pages per fax and a cover page that contains faxZero branding, free fax is limited for sending faxes to US and Canada only.
You can pay for specific fax to get rid of the branding cover page, limit also increases to 25 pages, and you send fax by email to multiple other countries, not just US and Canada. The cost varies country to country and you can pay via PayPal.
The main difference between faxZero and gotFreeFax is that gotfreefax doesn’t add its branding on the cover page but allows only two pages a day.
You can check out faxZero here at – faxZero.com.
Few other great options that let you email fax free include topfreefax.com and faxfree.com.
Conclusion
The need is to deliver documents, digital or paper, to the other party in paper form or digital format.I rarely find new business installing fax machines and the faxing needs typically come from old time businesses who have not yet adapted to the new ways of sending documents securely.
Why Email to Fax or Fax to Email?
There were times when we had computers but internet did not exist. During those times, even non sensitive documents were transferred using fax. One would type in the content, take a print (if typed in computer and not using typewriter), scan it and send it to the other party using fax machine. The need of fax was absolutely justified.
Then came the internet, we started to send documents over emails and other online means but digital signatures were missing and hence we continued to print the documents, sign those and send using fax machines.
As of today, fax to me seems more like an age old practice and company tradition rather than the only mode of secure documents transfer.
However, faxing still continues and we need to find the best service providers, this article covered free fax as well as paid options and I hope you find the one that meets your requirements. Cheers!
