In the era of emails, multimedia, instant messaging, and scanning, faxing may seem a bit outdated. However, even though the traditional faxing itself is no longer in use, there’s a new way of sending a fax that matches with the day’s technology and innovation: online fax.
There are numerous online fax services available, but not all are the same. Some like eFax services are quite prominent and considered the most popular across the globe.
But some consider eFax to be relatively expensive with 10 cents per fax average fee, high setup fees, and costly plans. Also, there’s a limit of 150 to 200 faxes per month which many businesses may consider too low.
So, if you are contemplating online fax, look at these worthy alternatives of eFax considering features, pricing, ease of use, and mobile compatibility.
1 MetroFax
MetroFax services offer excellent value with low-cost monthly plans that start from USD$8, and it’s a good option for individual and business faxing. It comes with a toll-free and a dedicated local number, the ability to fax to multiple recipients at once, automatic retries, and instant confirmations.
It’s also considered to have the best mobile app. There’s no activation fee like many other online faxes. There are three plans that offer 500, 1,000, and 2,500 pages a month. On the downside, the user interface on the web version isn’t too friendly. If you can, stick to the mobile app that offers an incredible user experience.
2 MyFax
This is another excellent option for sending fax online through mobile devices. However, the overall best quality of this online faxing service is its setup and simplicity of use. It provides a suitable solution for low-volume faxing. For those who need to send occasional faxes, MyFax brings in an entry plan explicitly for that category of users.
All plans have unlimited storage for as long as the subscription stays active and can share the service with up to five email addresses. This makes it ideal for sharing with your business partners or in a team at no extra charge. On the downside, the pages per month are limited, ranging from 100, 200, and 400. Extra pages are charged at USD $0.10 per page, making it unsuitable for high volume faxing.
3 Fax.Plus
As for Fax.Plus, it’s known to be a budget-friendly fax service with a free plan for low volume or occasional users. The subscription rates begin from as low as USD$5 for the basic plan and USD$59.99 for the enterprise plan. The user interface is simple for the web version but also has an excellent mobile app as well. This is one of the unique facts about Fax.Plus, since most fax services seem to only excel in one version or the other.
The free plan allows users to fax up to 10 pages with any additional page incurring a USD$0.20 charge. The other plans offer 100, 300, 800, and 3,000 pages. This fax service seems to cover each user category well while still offering great features and fax functions.
4 HelloFax
This faxing service offers users a seamless and excellent user interface. Its best features are team and cloud storage integration options. Instead of separately counting send and receive faxes, HelloFax combines them into making its pricing structure better. Other faxing services, such as eFax, count the services separately.
Users get a free plan, although it’s quite limited with n team features and a maximum of five send-only pages. The other plans are for 300 pages to be used by up to five team members, 500 for 10 team members, and 1,000 for 20 members.
All paid subscription plans have a 30-day free trial period offer, with the lowest plan being USD$9.99 per month. However, this fax service has a downside that’s quite difficult to ignore. It doesn’t have a dedicated mobile app.
Finding The Best Online Faxing Service
Your choice of online faxing service needs to meet your specific needs. Here are a few things you need to consider before you make your selection.
- Document Archives: An excellent online fax service has easy access and retrieval of sent and received faxes. Ensure the fax service can let you go back and trace older messages. Some services offer a limited archive feature, mostly a year making it vital for you to know how far back your fax service can get your faxes.
- Cloud storage integration: Apart from the archives feature, check if the fax service offers a cloud storage integration feature that allows you to move your faxes to your preferred cloud storage.
- Page limits: depending on your faxing volume, your fax should have a plan that caters to users within your capacity.
- Access on different platforms: this is the ability for you to send faxes from any platform. This could be android or iOS devices, a computer, tablet, etc.
Conclusion
As with other gadgets and devices, technology has transformed faxing from using bulky, labor-intensive immobile fax machines to seamless faxing by online faxing. There are numerous varieties available and what’s discussed here is not conclusive by any means. An excellent alternative to eFax should be a fax service that gives you the best features at a preferably lower cost.
