While the practice of sending faxes persists, actual fax machines can finally be relegated to museums of technological history, thanks to online fax services such as HelloFax. This excellent service has a slick, modern interface that makes it easy to send and receive faxes from the web or from the comfort of your email client. Its integrated form-filling and digital-signature features mean that you'll never have to go through the hassle of printing and manually sending documents again. Although we are disappointed by its lack of a mobile app, HelloFax is still an Editors' Choice winner. Fax.Plus, our other top pick, also impresses in part because of its excellent mobile app.
How Much Does HelloFax Cost?
HelloFax's free tier lets you send up to five fax pages, but you cannot receive faxes with this plan. The page allocation does not refresh monthly, either. Subsequent faxes (of up to 10 pages each) cost 99 cents, plus 20 cents for every page over that limit. You can earn more pages by tweeting about HelloFax or referring friends. This free account supports integrations and electronic signatures.
If you just need a fax service to occasionally send a document to your doctor or insurance company, HelloFax's free offering is reasonable, especially considering that most fax services do not even offer a free tier. Many competing services even require a credit card on file to sign up for a trial account. Fax.Plus is another service that offers a free (albeit limited) plan. Note that with both those services, your page limit does not reset each month. FaxZero, on the other hand, lets you send up to five faxes (each sent fax can be up to three pages) per day without charging you.
To receive faxes, you need to sign up for HelloFax's entry-level Home Office plan, which costs $9.99 per month. This tier gets you 300 total pages of sent or received faxes per month and supports up to five team members. Additional fax lines for individual team members cost $4.99 per month each. The Home Office plan also allows you to fax via email and specify multiple fax recipients.
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The Professional tier costs $19.99 per month and raises the number of team members to 10 and the number of pages to 500 per month. HelloFax charges $39.99 per month for the next tier up, called Small Business, which provides 1,000 pages a month to a team of up to 20 people. If you need to add more team members or more pages, or if you want access to the HelloFax API, you can contact the company about an Enterprise-level account.
At just under $10 per month, HelloFax is roughly in the middle of the online faxing space, pricing-wise. For comparison, eFax costs $16.95 per month for 150 pages (plus a $10 activation fee), RingCentral Fax costs $22.99 per month for 1,500 pages, and mFax costs $9.99 per month for 250 pages. The most affordable for-pay fax service we tested is SRFax, which costs $3.29 per month for a pool of 25 pages. Going strictly by the price-per-page metric, MetroFax's $12.95-per-month plan that includes a pool of 1,000 pages is the best value.
(Editors' Note: eFax, MetroFax, MyFax, and SRFax are owned by J2 Global, the parent company of PCMag's publisher, Ziff Davis.)
If you exceed your allocated pages for the month, HelloFax charges you 5 cents for each additional page. A nickel per extra page is a pretty good deal among online fax services. MyFax charges an overage fee of 10 cents per page. At the other end of the range are MetroFax and Nextiva vFAX, which each charge a mere 3 cents per page.
Sending faxes to numbers outside the US doesn't cost extra money with HelloFax. Instead, the service deducts a certain number of pages—depending on the destination—from your monthly allotment. A one-page fax to Finland, for example, counts as five pages against your monthly allowance. On the other hand, faxing to some international countries—such as Canada, Italy, or the UK—only deducts a single page from your monthly allotment. Most other services charge between $0.10 and $1.00 extra per page to send a fax internationally.
Fax Numbers and Features
HelloFax only offers numbers in Canada, the UK, and the US. If you absolutely need a fax number from a country besides those three, consider MyFax. You can also convert your existing number to work with HelloFax, if your number is within Canada or the US and you subscribe to at least the Professional-level plan. This conversion can cost up to $60, though. Note that you can't get a toll-free fax number or a vanity fax number with HelloFax, something RingCentral Fax offers for free.
Like Biscom 1-2-3 and mFax, HelloFax lets you manage a team of users. People in your team can send and receive faxes via the HelloFax web portal or through their email client. You can adjust settings to control who receives faxes, and even add additional lines to your account. This is a handy feature for anyone who wants to have direct fax lines for different projects or individuals.
HelloFax does not offer a mobile app, which is disappointing. Many people might want to take a picture of a document with their phone for faxing, rather than worry about finding a scanner. The HelloFax site is not responsive for mobile devices either, so if you intend to fax from your phone, HelloFax is not for you. This omission is even stranger given that HelloSign (HelloFax's secure e-signature sibling service) has a dedicated mobile app. If you want to send a fax with HelloFax from your mobile device, you must use its email integration service with your mobile mail app. Other online fax services, such as Biscom 1-2-3, MetroFax, MyFax, and Fax.Plus, offer mobile apps. RingCentral, eFax, and iFax all offer mobile and desktop apps.
Hands On With HelloFax
Signing up for HelloFax is a snap. We especially like that you can choose your own password or use a Google account to log in. That's an excellent option, particularly because services like eFax and MetroFax email you a weak four-digit passcode in plaintext. As previously mentioned, HelloFax does not require a credit card to sign up. Obtaining a number with HelloFax is a matter of navigating three pull-down menus for Country, State, and Area Code. It's easy enough and far better than Biscom 1-2-3, which assigns you a fax number arbitrarily.
HelloFax impressed us from the moment we logged in. The web interface is attractive, clear, and quick to navigate. Only mFax can rival HelloFax's sophisticated look and feel of all the services we tested. Other fax services—such as eFax, MetroFax, and MyFax—have web interfaces reminiscent of ancient webmail sites and the latter three look nearly identical.
You navigate the interface via HelloFax's left-hand menu items: Send a Fax, Sign Documents, Faxes, Team, and Integrations. In the upper right-hand corner, you can access HelloFax's tutorial and your account settings. The settings section is useful; you can edit profile info, set up integrations, and control billing preferences here. You can also set up two-factor authentication via SMS or Google Authenticator, which is great.
What Is Two-Factor Authentication?
One of our favorite HelloFax features (available right from the Send a Fax area) is that you can attach files from your computer by dragging and dropping them from your desktop, something few other services can do. You can also link your HelloFax account directly to cloud-based storage services including Box, DropBox, Evernote, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive to easily access your files. HelloFax supports files up to 40MB.
After HelloFax processes your file, a button appears below it that lets you edit and sign the files using a simple and effective built-in editor infused with HelloSign's capabilities. Here, you can add your signature or initials to a document, as well as insert boxes and checkmarks. Signature options are robust, with the option for HelloFax to generate one from text input (with the option to change the style), to draw it with your mouse, or upload one from a smartphone capture. eFax and Fax.Plus both offer electronic signature features too.
If the files you are sending need to be in color or are high resolution, don't send them via fax—email and file sharing services exist for a reason. If you absolutely must use a fax service, HelloFax can add a page to your fax with instructions and a passcode to access the full-quality attachment. HelloFax also adds an Edit and Resend option, which is great for back-and-forth corrections on a document or for sending the same document to multiple recipients.
Sending a fax is simply a matter of entering the fax number and pressing send. We like that HelloFax automatically saves fax numbers for future use—a feature oddly missing from many competitors. We would like to see a dedicated contact book, though, which is something mFax offers. If you start creating a fax, HelloFax will save it as a draft, which is also very helpful.
All of your faxes, both sent and received, can be viewed from the aptly named Faxes section. We are happy to see that HelloFax integrates an excellent search tool here. You can search by type (sent, received, or draft), status, date, and content (of the cover letter). This makes finding specific messages easy and is something we would like to see in all online fax services.
If you don't want to use the web interface, HelloFax lets you send and receive faxes via email. To send a fax, simply address your message to [Recipients' Fax Number]@hellofax.com. This worked fine in testing, but note that you must be logged into the email you used to sign up for HelloFax for this feature to work.
Fax Performance
At PCMag, we no longer have a fax machine in our office, and, in any case, we're all working from home—just like so much of the rest of the world. Instead, we test fax services by sending faxes between different online fax services. HelloFax only took a few minutes to send our two test PDF attachments (one is graphics-heavy and the other is mostly text).
HelloFax retained a much of the original document's detail in the graphics-heavy PDF, though some background pixelation was present. The text was clear, but HelloFax darkened the page significantly, which caused some gradients to bleed together. It handled the simpler document without issue; the text looked sharp and had good contrast.
A True Fax Machine Replacement
HelloFax succeeds where other fax services struggle. Its clean, modern interface alone is worth the price of admission. The service is also a good value and integrates powerful signature and editing tools. The company's limited free offering is also serviceable for anyone who needs to send, but not receive, a series of faxes. The only drawbacks of HelloFax are that it only lets you sign up with numbers from three countries and that it lacks a dedicated mobile app. Despite those flaws, HelloFax is still an Editors' Choice winner for online fax services. Fax.Plus, our other top fax service, stands out because of its flexible pricing and excellent mobile apps.
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