The research
- Why you should trust us
- Who this is for
- How we picked and tested
- Our pick: Dropbox Fax
- Best for faxing sensitive information: mFax
- An online fax-service alternative: Windows Fax and Scan
- The competition
Why you should trust us
As a senior staff writer, I’ve written a number of Wirecutter guides to software, including tax software, website builders, and team messaging apps. Prior to joining Wirecutter, I covered technology and productivity for more than a dozen years for sites such as Consumer Reports, Lifehacker, PCWorld, and Laptop Magazine. I remember using an actual fax machine for work, back when that was common practice.
Who this is for
This guide is for anyone who doesn’t have a fax machine and landline but still needs to send the occasional fax as quickly and reliably as possible.
Why would anyone still need to send faxes? Well, if you want to request your medical files from your doctor’s office or public records from the government, they’re likely to require you to either send a fax or go the slower route by mailing in your request. Heck, even your ability to get bailed out of jail might depend on faxes.
If you regularly send or receive faxes for work, an online fax service can be more cost-effective than a dedicated landline and a physical fax machine. Faxing remains alive and well (PDF) in industries such as government, finance, health care, and manufacturing. These highly regulated industries accept faxes as secure documents, but they don’t accept unencrypted emails for sensitive information.
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How we picked and tested
People who send or receive faxes do so because they have to, not because they want to. So when we were deciding which fax services to test, we prioritized the features that make the chore of online faxing as hassle-free as possible:
- Free faxing or low fees: For occasional faxing, we looked for services that let you fax for free or charge no more than a one-time $1 to $2 fee to send a long document. For professional and HIPAA-compliant use, we focused on options that had straightforward subscription pricing.
- Fax reliability and quality: For each service we considered, we sent three test faxes to a virtual Kall8 phone number: a one-page PDF, a one-page DOC, and a 25-page PDF. To test fax receiving, we faxed our top contenders using HP’s fax testing service and faxed twice from a laptop with a fax modem connected to a VoIP line.
- User-friendly interface and convenient fax features: Sending a fax should be as easy as sending an email. We appreciated services that made uploading a file as simple as dragging and dropping or connecting a cloud storage account, as well as those that provided cover-page templates and the option to save fax numbers in an address book.
- A variety of supported file formats: Some fax services support only one or two file types, such as PDF and TIFF. We preferred those that could fax more formats, so you don’t have to convert files before sending them.
- A strong security policy: In many cases, people need to fax sensitive information, such as phone numbers and even Social Security numbers. We examined the privacy and security policies for all the services we tested, and we asked the companies how they secured faxes during transmission and in storage. Features that give customers control over their data, such as the ability to set how long a fax is stored and the ability to delete old faxes, provide added peace of mind. HIPAA compliance was a deciding factor in our evaluation of fax services for professional use, because even if you don’t work in the health-care industry, a service that’s HIPAA compliant has privacy and security safeguards in place to protect customer data.
Our pick: Dropbox Fax
Our pick
Dropbox Fax
Best free or inexpensive faxing for occasional use
This service lets you send high-quality faxes for free or a low flat rate. No monthly subscription is required, unless you also want to receive faxes.
Buying Options
Dropbox Fax is the best option for anyone who needs to send a fax for free or for a low, one-time fee.
It’s the best service we found that offers free faxing. With Dropbox Fax, you can securely send up to five pages for free just by signing up.
In addition to those initial five free fax pages, you can get up to 20 more to send by doing things like sharing the Dropbox Fax website on Facebook or Twitter (five free pages each) or referring other people to the service (five free pages for each person who signs up).
Additional pages are affordable and don’t require a subscription. If you go over the maximum of 25 total free pages, you can send faxes for a flat 99¢ for the first 10 pages and 20¢ per page after that.
And your account offers you convenient features, such as a quick method for faxing to previously entered fax numbers, if you have to send a fax more than once in your lifetime.
If you want to receive faxes, subscription pricing is reasonable. Dropbox Fax’s most affordable subscription plan, called Home Office, costs $10 a month and gives you 300 pages to send and receive every month; if you go over, it’s an additional 5¢ per page.
In addition to giving you the ability to receive faxes, a paid plan gives you access to more-advanced features, such as extra account users (up to four more), the option to send faxes by email, and multi-recipient faxing.
It has a simple, easy-to-navigate interface. Sending a fax is simple in Dropbox Fax’s clean, straightforward interface. You can drag and drop PDFs, image files, text files, HTML files, and Microsoft Office files, or you can upload a file from Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Google Docs, Google Drive, or OneDrive.
Cover-page options are minimal—you can edit only the to, from, and message fields in one basic design. But unlike with some other fax services, such as FaxZero, this service’s cover page includes the number of pages sent, so the recipient will know whether everything came through.
Its fax quality is above average. In all of our tests, the faxes we sent with Dropbox Fax were crisp, with excellent contrast, regardless of the file type. Even small, 6-point text was easy to read. Overall, the quality was better than that of all the other services we tested, except for mFax.
You can sign faxes digitally. One standout feature that Dropbox Fax offers for both free faxing and paid plans is integrated fax signing. This isn’t surprising, since Dropbox Fax is on the same platform as Dropbox Sign, but it’s a convenience that other fax services don’t provide.
If you upload a PDF to fax, you can easily add a digital signature, which is often required for business transactions or for signing agreements like loan documents.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
- All 15 faxes that we sent or received with Dropbox Fax went through smoothly, but they took a minute or two longer to transmit than with some of the other fax services.
- If you run into a problem with Dropbox Fax, its customer service might frustrate you. Dropbox Fax does not offer live customer support, and the two times we filled in a support request via the online form, it was days (in one case, as long as a week) before someone emailed us back.
- While Dropbox Fax’s interface is easy to use on a computer, it doesn’t use responsive web design, so faxing from a phone browser is clunky. No mobile app exists, either.
- Although Dropbox Fax does have some security features (such as two-factor authentication via Google Authenticator, or via SMS if you upgrade to a Business plan), and even though the company assured us that it encrypts customer data in transit and in storage, there’s no setting to automatically delete faxes or to avoid storing them in the first place.
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Best for faxing sensitive information: mFax
Also great
mFax
The best fax service for sensitive documents
This service meets high-security legal requirements, including those of HIPAA. It offers robust features, and it had the best fax quality in our testing. But it’s more expensive than our top pick.
Buying Options
mFax is the best online fax service for health-care professionals and anyone else who needs to send and receive secure, HIPAA-compliant faxes on a regular basis.
It offers a free 14-day trial. Unlike Dropbox Fax, mFax doesn’t provide a free tier, and you won’t find a pay-per-page pricing option here. But during mFax’s free trial period, you can fax willy-nilly to see if the service works for your needs.
Subscription plans are affordable. The cheapest mFax plan starts at $25 per month for 400 pages, which is more expensive than Dropbox Fax but still reasonable considering this service’s higher security. Additional pages on this plan cost 9¢ per page.
Plans range all the way up to $500 per month for the Enterprise plan, which includes 10,000 pages per month and a number of other features, such as 50 user accounts, 10 fax numbers, live support, single sign-on, and API access.
Here’s how Dropbox Fax and mFax compare when it comes to per-page price for monthly subscriptions:
| Dropbox Fax | mFax | |
| Tier 1 | $10 (Home Office) | $25 (Professional) |
| Pages included | 300 | 400 |
| Price per page | 3¢ | 6.3¢ |
| Tier 2 | $20 (Professional) | $150 (Business) |
| Pages included | 500 | 2,500 |
| Price per page | 4¢ | 6¢ |
| Tier 3 | $40 (Small Business) | $500 (Enterprise) |
| Pages included | 1,000 | 10,000 |
| Price per page | 4¢ | 5¢ |
The service is reliable, and the fax quality is the best around. mFax was as reliable in our tests as Dropbox Fax, sending and receiving faxes without a glitch, and the fax quality was easily the best of all the services we tested.
Most of the fax services we tested struggled with graphics-intensive files, but mFax sent our PDF fax without any additional noise or quality degradation.
It has lots of great extra features. Aside from lacking two-factor authentication for account security, mFax checks all the boxes for a great online fax service.
You can upload files from your hard drive or select them from the cloud storage service of your choice, and you can also customize the fax cover page. In addition, mFax has special features, such as tagging faxes and converting a file to PDF, that other fax services don’t provide.
The live chat support is excellent. We contacted chat support several times during testing, and in every case the US-based live agents responded quickly and helpfully. Overall, the customer support experience was one of the best we’ve had, period.
An online fax-service alternative: Windows Fax and Scan
If you already have a phone line and a Windows computer, you can send and receive faxes from your computer anytime you want using the built-in Windows Fax and Scan software and a $40 USB modem.
It’s convenient, but the image quality isn’t the best. The process is simple, much like sending a file to a printer, though the quality isn’t as nice as what you can get from online fax services.
In particular, images and any kind of shading look pretty bad. But for simple text-only faxing, Windows Fax and Scan can do the job.
It’s easy to use. You might need to enable the fax service in your Windows settings. After that, to send a fax from your computer:
- Open Fax and Scan (Start > All Programs > Windows Fax and Scan).
- Click the New Fax button.
- Fill in the recipient’s fax number.
- Add a cover page, if you want.
- Either attach a document to send or type in the text you want to fax.
You can send only one kind of file. The attached document must be a TIFF file, but if you use Microsoft Office, you can just go to the Print menu and select the Fax and Scan virtual printer; the software will convert the file for you.
Mac users are out of luck. Macs are unfortunately no longer able to send faxes via USB modems, though they can still send faxes through all-in-one printers and online services such as our recommendations in this guide.
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The competition
This is not a comprehensive list of every fax service we’ve tested. We’ve removed services that no longer exist.
Fax.Plus looks like a terrific fax service on paper, and we tested it again after the company told us they updated their platform. You can send 10 free pages before you have to sign up for a paid account, and it has a low, $7-per-month subscription plan for sending or receiving 200 pages, if you subscribe to an annual plan (the price is $9 if you pay per month). It’s also HIPAA-compliant and has mobile apps. Although the company has added a cover page feature and we didn’t experience any lost-in-transmission issues, one of the faxes we sent was terribly rendered, and the quality of the rest were still not as good as our picks.
SRFax used to be our pick for high-volume users and those who routinely fax sensitive documents. It has excellent features, including HIPAA compliance, and it used to offer the best subscription pricing around. However, mFax provides better fax quality plus integration with cloud storage.
FaxZero was our previous pick for sending free online faxes. It’s completely free, and you don’t need to set up an account to send a fax. Better still, you can send up to five free faxes per day, each with up to three pages plus a cover letter. However, we ran into a few issues that prevented us from recommending it: Scan image quality was poor, and sometimes pages didn’t go through (or sometimes they went through twice).
FaxBurner was our previous pick for mobile faxing. It offers 25 receiving pages per month for free and up to five sending pages for the life of your account; monthly plans are available for those who need to send more. But the service is extremely limited. You can send only PDF or TIFF files, you can fax only from your computer over email, the fax quality is poor, and the service doesn’t offer two-factor authentication and isn’t HIPAA compliant. On top of all that, the company never responded to our three customer-support email requests.
PamFax offers a dead-simple flat-rate fax sending plan: It costs just 10¢ per page to send a fax, and you can send up to three pages for free to start out. The lowest cost to both send and receive a fax is $7 per month, and though you can send only 20 pages before you have to pay for more, you can receive as many pages as you want. But the quality of the faxes we sent through PamFax was the worst of the services we tested, and the user experience was poor, with way too much clicking around and blank help pages.
GotFreeFax transmitted low-quality test faxes.
We dismissed services from our testing that had high or confusing pricing. That includes: Biscom 123, Faxage, RingCentral, eFax, MyFax, and MetroFax.
This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.
