MetroFax Review: The Best Choice for Online Faxing

Our Verdict

Capable mobile apps and a solid interface brand MetroFax the best choice for managing your inbound and outbound faxes. It remains our pick every bit the best online fax service.

For

Clean Web portal pattern
Useful mobile apps
Wide file-format back up

Against

Lacks fine control over fax notifications
Tin can't customize cover sheet

Tom's Guide Verdict

Capable mobile apps and a solid interface make MetroFax the best selection for managing your inbound and outbound faxes. Information technology remains our pick as the all-time online fax service.

Pros

+
Make clean Web portal blueprint
+
Useful mobile apps
+
Broad file-format support

Cons

-
Lacks fine control over fax notifications
-
Tin't customize cover sail

Editors' Note: Every bit part of our periodic retesting of fax services, we've updated our MetroFax review to reflect the latest changes to the service'due south pricing.

MetroFax has a dedicated faxing service that makes it piece of cake to ship and receive your faxes electronically — and so much and so that we consider it the all-time online fax service.

MetroFax tin handle the faxing needs of individual users likewise as businesses, and you'll discover many congenital-in options to facilitate faxing via e-mail, the Spider web or mobile (using gratis iOS and Android companion apps). MetroFax is owned past J2 Global, which also owns Sfax and Efax.

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MetroFax Review: Pricing

Pricing for MetroFax now starts at $ix.95 per month billed monthly, a $two increment over what the service used to accuse for its 500-page tier. Sign up for an annual contract, and y'all lower your monthly rate to $viii.30, saving you lot around $xx over the course of a year. Another pricing selection lets you lot concord to a three-month program at a reduced $8.33-a-month rate.

MetroFax besides offers 1,000- and 2,500-page tiers, priced at $12.95 and $39.95 per month, respectively.

Gratuitous Trial: MetroFax offers a 14-day free trial — it used to be 30 days. Afterward your trial ends, a monthly subscription kicks in. From there, yous can also upgrade to the service's annual plan (which lowers your calendar month rate) or cancel your service without penalisation.

MetroFax Review: Setup

Getting started with MetroFax is simple. Select your state and surface area lawmaking, and choose a program. (Even though there's a 30-twenty-four hours free trial, yous'll still walk through these steps.)

Once y'all enter your billing data, you'll go your fax number and Pin (your randomly assigned password) for immediate use, and links for downloading the mobile iOS and Android apps. Yous tin can transfer a fax number equally well, but that requires contacting the company during signup.

Similar Nextiva, MetroFax bills itself as having 99.nine-percent reliability and redundancy. But unlike Nextiva, MetroFax only does faxing.

MetroFax Review: User interface

MetroFax'due south web portal is pleasantly and visually designed, and easy to utilise. (In fact, the interface is identical to that of Efax, which is owned by the same corporate entity, J2.)When you log in, your number shows clearly at the upper right, and if yous take more than one number, you can select amid them here, a handy feature for high-volume faxers. The portal itself has four buttons on the main screen; these options are duplicated in a nav bar up acme, as well. The options are straightforward: Yous can view faxes, send faxes, update your business relationship or search for help.

I liked the organisation of the Web interface. It was visual, friendly, and easy to read.

From within the Spider web console, y'all can add tags to organize your faxes, which makes it easier to search them later. I liked the organisation of the Spider web interface; it's visual and friendly, and tangentially modeled after Windows Explorer's pane views, making it like shooting fish in a barrel to read. You become fewer controls over your faxes than on, say, Nextiva, only the overall presentation for sending and receiving faxes is superior.

MetroFax review: Sending and receiving faxes

For sending a fax, you'll go a well-divers pop-up screen dubbed "Websend" that makes information technology simple to send faxes directly from a Web browser. You tin can enter information manually or pick from your contacts listing (import as CSV file from Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Comcast); you tin can choose the country the fax is going to, add upward to 50 fax recipients, choose to include a bones cover page, add together upward to ten document attachments to send, and choose the quality of the fax. The comprehend folio is a weakness here: Y'all accept no choices for the embrace page's design, and it's not even clear what is on the cover folio beyond the message you lot enter into the box on the Websend grade.

The service provides Web-based access to all of your inbound and outbound faxes. You lot tin organize, impress and save faxes. However, you're equally as likely to use email to send faxes. With MetroFax, merely send a fax to the 10-digit phone number (as with Nextiva, don't include a "1" first), followed by @metrofax.com. Add a subject and email message to create a cover page, attach your file to fax and striking send. I saw no noticeable delays in sending or receiving faxes.

Inbound faxes get in as PDF or TIFF files in your email inbox, but you don't have control over notifications, or limiting their arrival into your inbox. You tin enable up to five electronic mail addresses for use with one business relationship, the same as on Efax.

MetroFax Review: File format back up

The service supports a slew of file formats — more than 50, including the usual suspects like Microsoft Part files, Adobe PDF and JPEG graphics, and ones not seen on other services, such equally cabalistic formats from Corel, WordPerfect, Lotus and Star Office. Fifty-fifty Adobe Photoshop .PSD files are supported.

MetroFax review: Mobile apps

MetroFax offers full-featured, dedicated iOS and Android apps. The apps send you lot notifications when you've received a fax, an pick that could arrive easier to spot an inbound fax, even though it ways you'll become notified twice, by your e-mail and by the app itself. The app also lets you access your faxes as stored on the Web, view faxes and folders, encounter your contacts, and tag and search faxes. You lot can send faxes, also, by attaching files on your mobile. We liked this app the all-time of all the mobile apps; it's easy and logical to utilise, and it's packed with functionality that makes information technology easy to read, send and share faxes.You lot also can transport faxes past attaching files stored on phone, or in the deject via the likes of Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box.

More than: MetroFax vs. Efax: Which Fax Service Is Tops?

The design of MetroFax's mobile offerings now matches that of Efax. As with Efax, you can now add a signature to a fax by using your finger to scrawl a signature, resizing information technology and appending it to a document. Like the Efax version, the MetroFax mobile app glitched on one device and worked perfectly on another. It remains i of the near useful apps we've seen for faxing on-the-go.

MetroFax review: Verdict

The smart interface and mobile component of MetroFax brand information technology a bully choice for those on the go, even though in that location are cheaper services. MetroFax's broad range of file formats supported arrive optimal for offices with a variety of needs. About importantly, its focus on faxing, and its power to tag and search faxes sets MetroFax apart from the oversupply.

That likewise makes MetroFax our pick for all-time fax service, over SRFax, which tin can't match its fax searching capabilities, and the more than expensive business-focused Sfax. We besides prefer MetroFax over the similar looking Efax, which has a few extra features merely costs significantly more than than its close sibling.

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Melissa Perenson spent more than a decade at PC World and TechHive, and she has freelanced for numerous publications including Figurer Shopper, Tom's Guide, TechRadar and Consumers Digest.