After testing seven online fax services—faxing ourselves more than 40 times and sending and receiving over 200 pages in total—we recommend Dropbox Fax for people who need to send a fax only occasionally. It’s reliable and easy to use, and it offers convenient features like fax signing and faxing files from Dropbox or Google Drive.
But if you need to send HIPAA-compliant faxes, mFax is your best bet.
Our pick
Dropbox Fax
This service lets you send high-quality faxes for free or a low flat rate. No monthly subscription is required, unless you also want to receive faxes.
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—use Dropbox Fax.
The service starts you out with five free outbound pages, and you can earn additional free pages for doing things like tweeting about Dropbox Fax or inviting someone to sign up. After that, it’s just 99¢ to fax up to 10 pages and then 20¢ per additional page.
Dropbox Fax sends clear, easy-to-read faxes, and when we paid for the receiving option, it reliably received all the test faxes we sent to our own account. Its simple, easy-to-use interface makes faxing quick and painless, too.
Also great
mFax
This service meets high-security legal requirements, including those of HIPAA. It offers robust features, and it had the best fax quality in our testing. But it’s more expensive than our top pick.
If you send and receive sensitive faxes—especially medical documents—on a regular basis, we recommend subscribing to mFax.
In addition to its solid fax quality and great features, mFax offers HIPAA compliance for health-care organizations, as well as lots of other desirable features such as custom cover pages, cloud storage integration, and the ability to convert files to PDF.
mFax’s cheapest plan costs more than our top pick’s, and you get fewer pages for the money, but it still provides excellent value for a home office or small business that requires HIPAA compliance, whether you send and receive 25 pages a month or 2,500.
