The cost and the hassle of maintaining a physical fax machine are likely not worth it for most people. Thankfully, you have an alternative: online fax services. iFax is one such faxing service that features apps for desktop and mobile devices. However, iFax’s pricing plans are not a compelling value and the service charges you substantially more for most plans if you sign up from its mobile apps. It also does not offer built-in two-factor authentication options. HelloFax and Fax.Plus are our Editors’ Choice winners for the category because they offer an excellent set of features at a reasonable price.
How Much Does iFax Cost?
iFax offers three pricing tiers: Plus, Pro, and Enterprise. The $9.99-per-month Plus plan allows you to send 200 faxes per month, but you cannot receive faxes and don’t get a fax number with this tier. Overage fees for this plan are five cents per page.
To get a fax number and to receive faxes, you need to spring for the $19.99-per-month Pro tier. This level allows you to send and receive up to 500 pages per month. Note that this is not a pool of 500 pages, but rather separate 500-page limits for each activity. The overage fee decreases slightly to four cents per page for Pro users.
iFax’s Enterprise tier is the next level up from Pro, but you need to contact the company for a pricing quote. In addition to catering to users who need to send and receive over 1,000 pages each month, this plan can include unlimited fax numbers, sub-teams, and access to the iFax API.
You can save money on the Plus and Pro plans if you pay for them on an annual basis. The Plus and Pro plans cost $99.99 and $199.99 per year, respectively, at these subscription lengths.
If you sign up for iFax from its mobile app—which you shouldn’t do—most of the plans cost substantially more. The Plus plan goes up to $24.99 per month ($149.99 per year) and the Pro plan increases to $27.99 per month. The annual Pro plan is the one exception; its price decreases to $169.99 per year. A representative from the company informed me that this price increase is due to the fees that Apple, Google, and Microsoft take on in-app purchases. Still, this practice feels predatory. iFax should just prevent users from signing up on the mobile app instead of charging increased rates. No other fax service we reviewed offers different prices depending on the platform you use to sign up.
iFax does offer free trials for all its plans, but you need to sign up from the mobile apps to get those offers. If you sign up on the web, the only free trial offer is for the Enterprise plan. These trials renew at the increased mobile prices, however, which makes them a poor option.
Neither iFax’s Plus nor Pro plans are particularly competitive, especially since you cannot receive any faxes with the entry-level plan. By comparison, Fax.Plus starts at $5.99 per month and allows you to send or receive up to 100 faxes each month. SRFax is even cheaper at $3.29 per month, but limits you to a pool of 25 pages.
(Editors’ Note: eFax, MetroFax, MyFax, and SRFax are owned by j2 Global, the parent company of PCMag’s publisher, Ziff Davis.)
Nextiva vFax is a much better value; it allows you to send or receive up to 500 pages each month for $9.99 per month. MetroFax is the fax service to get if you want the best cost-per-page rate. That service offers a $12.95-per-month plan that includes a pool of 1,000 faxes to send or receive each month.
A representative confirmed that the price per page for international faxes depends on the destination. These prices are listed on iFax’s pricing page. I much prefer services, such as HelloFax, that deduct an equivalent number of pages from your monthly allotment. That way subscribers do not need to pay anything above the subscription price.
There’s no need to pay for a fax service at all if you only need to send faxes. FaxZero enables you to send up to five faxes every day (each up to three pages) for no cost. HelloFax and Fax.Plus have free options, but their allotments of fax pages do not automatically replenish. The existence of FaxZero effectively makes iFax’s Plus plan irrelevant and a waste of money. For example, if you send the maximum number of pages per day with FaxZero, that’s a total of 450 pages per month.
Like FaxZero, iFax includes the option to send a fax without subscribing to the service. iFax charges at least $1.99 per fax for this service, the same price as FaxZero’s Almost Free Fax offering. A representative from iFax clarified that the price per fax depends on the number of pages in the fax.
Getting Started With iFax
Signing up for iFax’s Plus tier is simple—you don’t even need to select a number. You just provide an email address and set a password. If you do opt for one of the plans that include a fax number, picking one is not difficult. You first select a country (Canada, UK, or US) and then, for US users, a state. Next, you pick an area code and the rest of the digits in the fax number from three separate drop-down menus. I like that you can choose a number instead of having the fax service pick one for you, but selecting each set of digits after the area code seems tedious. If you contact iFax during the sign-up process, you can get a toll-free or vanity number at no additional cost, as well as port your existing number.
RingCentral Fax also enables you to specify a vanity number, while mFax and Fax.Plus are among those services that offer toll-free fax numbers. iFax offers far fewer international number options than MyFax.
iFax does not offer a native two-factor authentication option. You can log in to iFax via a LinkedIn, Microsoft, or Google account (all of which support two-factor authentication), but I would much rather see a built-in option. Both Fax.Plus and HelloFax offer this security feature.
In addition to using iFax on the web, you can download dedicated apps for Windows (from the Microsoft Store) macOS, Android, and iOS. Most modern faxing services offer mobile apps, but of those we’ve tested, only eFax and RingCentral Fax have dedicated desktop apps. eFax’s desktop app is Windows-only.
iFax on the Web
The iFax web dashboard is straightforward to navigate and looks modern. It’s not quite as elegant as HelloFax or mFax, but its design is still leagues ahead of that of eFax, MetroFax, and MyFax, which resemble antiquated webmail portals.
On the left-hand side of the screen, you can see how many pages you have left on your plan, view your fax number, and access links to the iFax app downloads on each platform. The Settings section allows you to choose notification preferences, set your default cover page for faxes, and change billing and plan details.
To send a fax, click on the New Fax button in the lower-right corner. Then, fill out the recipient’s number, add a subject and any comments, and attach your documents (up to 20MB). You can select from a dizzyingly large drop-down menu of subjects or write in your own.
Once you are ready to send the fax, iFax presents you with an estimated delivery time and some other attachment and notification options. For instance, the SecureFax option adds a QR code to the fax page that a recipient must scan to view any attachments. I’m not exactly sure what this accomplishes from a security standpoint, since you are sending this code in the same way that you would have sent the attachment in the first place.
All faxes, both inbound and outbound, are available to view from the Fax tab, which is the default page on the web. Entries are not sortable, but there is a search bar at the top. iFax includes a contact management component, too. From the main dashboard, select the Contacts tab near the top of the page to see all your saved contacts. The New Contact form includes basic fields such as a person’s fax number, email, company, and phone number. This Contacts page allows you to favorite any of your contacts, which then appear in a separate Starred Contacts section at the top of the Contacts page. To quickly send a fax to a contact, hover over the contact’s name and select the Send Fax button that appears to the right.
iFax does not currently offer any built-in digital signature tools on the web or via its mobile apps. A representative from the company explained that, while iFax previously had such a feature, it was dropped due to being unpopular. You can still upload a signature and add it to the comments section of the cover page, however. The iFax contact also pointed me towards the company’s Fill app which includes signature and annotation tools. The paid Fill app integrates with iFax. Some other services, such as mFax, also separate signature capabilities into other apps.
Biscom 1-2-3, eFax, Fax. Plus, and HelloFax are among those services that offer built-in digital signature capabilities on at least one platform.
Email Integration and Dedicated Apps
iFax integrates with whatever email client you use, but the implementation seems slightly more roundabout than that of other fax services. Instead of addressing the email directly to a fax number and appending it with a service-specific email address (i.e. [Fax number]@faxservice.com), iFax requires you to send an email to send@iFaxapp.com and include the recipient’s 11-digit fax number in the subject line of the email. You can attach any documents as you would with any email, and whatever you type into the body of the email will show up on the cover page. As with other services, you must send this email from the account that you used to sign up for iFax. After you hit send, you get an intermediary email that confirms iFax will send the fax, before it arrives at its destination. In testing, iFax’s email integration worked fine. A representative from the company confirmed that this process is completely automated.
I downloaded the iFax app on a Google Pixel 3 running Android 11 and had no issues signing in to my account. The mobile app closely resembles the web interface in terms of design and functionality, though I was not able to change my billing info from the app’s Settings section. One mobile-specific feature is the ability to take photos of documents and add them as attachments to your faxes. I also downloaded the iFax app from the Microsoft Store on a laptop running Windows 10, and found that the desktop experience is the same as on mobile and the web. Any notifications you get from the app show up in Windows 10’s Action Center, which is a helpful touch.
eFax and RingCentral Fax also offer dedicated faxing apps for desktop platforms. RingCentral’s desktop app is much slicker than iFax’s, but both are far better-designed than eFax’s. The one advantage that eFax’s desktop has is the ability to add signatures to documents, which is significant.
iFax’s Performance
We used to test online fax services by using a physical fax machine, but we no longer have any at our office, and, in any case, we’re all working from home now. Now, we test fax services with another online fax service in the machine’s place. We send two documents (a graphics-heavy one and one that is mostly text) to evaluate how well each service processes them during transmission.
iFax handled the graphics-heavy document without much of an issue. It produced clear text and maintained all the color gradients (in grayscale, of course), though the fine-dot texture of objects and some text was a bit distracting. The second, mostly-text document suffered from that same dot-pattern, which resulted in text that did not appear as solid or clear as competitors’ renderings. Still, if all you need to do is send basic documents with iFax, you shouldn’t run into any serious issues.
Short on Value, Light on Features
iFax is one of the few fax services we’ve reviewed that offers dedicated apps for desktop and mobile platforms in addition to its web interface. It’s mostly straightforward in use, too, but it offers substantially different prices depending on the platform you use to sign up and lacks built-in two-factor authentication options. The inability of Plus users to receive faxes is also a huge drawback. Cheaper options offer this capability, and free, send-only services exist. HelloFax and Fax.Plus are our top picks for the faxing category because they offer the best features and value of all the services we’ve tested.
