The Best Online Fax Services for 2025

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You don't need a fax machine to send a fax. Online fax services are a convenient and easier-to-operate alternative that can handle both your occasional and frequent faxing needs. Free options allow you to send a document from time to time, while paid services provide much more generous page allowances for sending and receiving faxes. The best part is that you don't even need hard copies of the pages you want to send or a traditional scanner. Faxing is still less convenient than purely digital communication methods, but these apps at least help modernize the experience. PCMag has been covering fax services for more than a decade, and the entries we highlight in this list are cost-effective and reliable. Check out our top picks below, followed by a guide on how to send and receive faxes without a fax machine.

What Is Online Faxing?

Online fax services let you send and receive faxes without a fax machine. To send a fax, you typically need to combine the pages you want to send into a single digital document. Next, you upload the file (usually a DOC, JPG, PDF, or PNG) to the fax service. You fill out additional information, such as the recipient's name and fax number, and optionally add a cover page. The online fax service takes care of the rest. The recipient receives the documents just the same as if you had fed them through a fax machine. Sometimes, you can send a fax through email, which we cover a bit later.

To receive faxes through an online fax service, you have to have a paid account with an associated fax number. In most cases, you either log into a web portal to retrieve digital versions of faxes you receive or access them via email.

If you plan to use an online fax service regularly, say, more than one or two times per month, you likely need to pay for a subscription. Otherwise, you can get by using a free service, such as FaxZero, or you can pay per fax with others, such as Dropbox Fax (formerly HelloFax).

How to Send a Fax Online

All the fax services here offer a web interface, but the interfaces vary in usability and features. The best inspire user confidence, while archaic services can just as easily undermine it. Of the services we tested, Dropbox Fax offers the clearest design.

When you send a fax from a web portal, the service transmits all your attachments (that is, the fax pages) as images. All the fax services we tested support a generous range of file types, though the file size limit varies. The majority of the services let you preview attachments before you send them. Dropbox Fax also includes tools for creating and applying digital signatures.

How Much Does Sending Online Faxes Cost?

Most online fax services want you to sign up for a subscription and pay a monthly fee. Each subscription typically includes an allotment of pages that you can send each month. Some companies distinguish between how many pages you can send and receive. Others offer a pool of pages, which is a more flexible approach.

Pooled-page plans also make it easier to avoid paying overage fees, per-page fees you incur when you exceed your monthly allocation. These fees are typically around 10 cents per page. Dropbox Fax charges just 5 cents per page for overage.

Depending on your service, your plan might not include international faxing, though faxes from the US to Canada and the UK sometimes don't cost extra. Some paid plans include international coverage. It's not unusual for an online fax company to charge an additional fee to send an international fax, sometimes on a graduated scale, depending on the recipient's location, and usually per page.

What Is the Best Free Online Fax Service?

If you rarely send faxes, consider a free faxing service, such as FaxZero. It lets you send five faxes per day for free, and each fax can include three pages plus a cover. FaxZero's business model runs on advertisements.

There's simply no reason to opt for a paid service if you only send faxes occasionally. If receiving faxes is a requirement, then you need a paid plan.

How to Fax From Your Phone or Tablet

The majority of online fax services offer Android and iOS apps. With a mobile faxing app, you can just take a picture of a document and send it on its way. Of the services on this list, Fax.Plus and RingCentral offer mobile apps.

We prefer online fax services with dedicated mobile apps, but they should at least have a mobile website. FaxZero and SRFax have sites that are very usable via mobile browsers. Dropbox Fax lets you send a fax from your mobile device, but you have to go through your email account to do it.

How Can You Receive a Fax to Your Email (and Vice Versa)?

Modern businesses and workers are familiar with email workflows, and most of the fax services included here offer similar fax-to-email capabilities. In practical terms, fax services convert faxes you receive into email attachments and, conversely, turn email fields and attachments into their fax equivalents. As you can send and receive email from anywhere, this approach makes a fax service more universally available.

The process of sending a fax via email is fairly straightforward and doesn't vary much from service to service. You type the fax number—including country and area code—into the address line, followed by an email domain specific to the fax service (for example, [email protected]). The subject line and body text appear on the fax cover page, while any attachments appear as separate pages. Your fax number appears as the sender, so there's no confusion about where the message originated.

How to Choose a Fax Number

Most services let you select an area code and either assign you an available phone number for receiving and sending faxes or let you choose from a list of available numbers. Most also let you port over an existing fax number if you have one.

If you don't want people to have to pay to fax you, consider getting a toll-free fax number, which is usually free of charge once you have a paid plan. RingCentral offers vanity numbers for your fax number, though we only recommend RingCentral for medium to large businesses that send or receive a high number of faxes every month.

Alternatives to Fax Services

Some industries still rely on faxing for various reasons, and knowing where to turn online when you need to send a fax to one of them is much easier than running out, pages in hand, to find a business that offers faxing services in-house.

But faxing isn't the only way to deliver documents, so be sure to check out the numerous secure methods for file sharing and sending encrypted emails.