Like DVD players, landline telephones, and pay phones , fax machines are an ancient technology but are not yet obsolete, thanks in large part to the medical field and other regulated industries that are keeping them alive. These days, though, fax machines have largely gone digital: You can send or receive faxes from your computer or phone in a process that’s much like sending an email. After testing seven online fax services—faxing ourselves more than 40 times and sending and receiving over 200 pages in total—we recommend HelloFax for occasionally sending a free or inexpensive fax. It’s easy to use and reliable, and it offers convenient features, such as fax signing and faxing files from an online storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive.
If you have advanced, professional faxing needs—like sending HIPAA-compliant faxes or customizing a fax cover page with a logo—SRFax is the best online fax service we tested for frequent business use.
If you need to send a fax only once in a blue moon—to request a copy of your medical records, for example, or to send a signed loan agreement to a bank that requires faxes—we think you should use HelloFax. The service starts you out with five free outbound pages, and you can earn additional free pages for doing things like tweeting about HelloFax or inviting someone to sign up. After that, it’s just 99¢ to fax up to 10 pages and then 20¢ per additional page. In our tests, HelloFax sent clear, easy-to-read faxes, and it reliably received all the test faxes we sent to our account, when we paid for the receiving option. Its simple, easy-to-use interface makes the occasional chore of sending a fax quick and painless, too.
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If you need to digitally send and receive faxes on a regular basis, we’d recommend subscribing to SRFax. In addition to its competitive pricing and solid fax quality, SRFax offers HIPAA compliance for health care organizations, as well as advanced security and privacy features, like spam-fax blocking and the option to specify how long you want the service to store your sent and received faxes. SRFax can’t send a fax from your cloud-storage app, but otherwise it provides excellent value for a home office or small business, whether you send and receive 25 pages a month or 2,500.
