Fax Plus Review - Full Review of Fax.Plus Online Fax Service

Fax.Plus is an online faxing service from Alohi, and works alongside their Sign.Plus and Scan.Plus apps, which are used to sign documents and scan documents, to complete Alohi’s suite of productivity and communication apps.

Fax.Plus can be used on basically any device – it has well-reviewed iPhone and Android phone apps, it can be accessed on the web from any internet-connected device, or you can just fax through your email account with the Fax.Plus email-to-fax feature. Not every online fax service is truly multi-platform in this way, and this comes at no extra cost, so Fax.Plus provides market-leading flexibility.

You can send and receive faxes online with Fax.Plus, since you get your own dedicated fax number under all paid subscriptions. It’s an international fax service too, you can fax to over 180 countries, and get a fax number in 48 different countries – although for many countries you will have to pay extra and provide ID.

The USA and Canada are, of course, included as standard, and you can choose any area code you like for your local fax number – which gives Fax.Plus a huge advantage over a landline phone service.

The cost of Fax.Plus varies depending on what you want, but anyone can get a free plan to send 10 free fax pages without paying anything – just to test it out.

You can then choose from 4 subscriptions – Basic, Premium, Business and Enterprise, which get increasingly expensive and offer users more and better features.

You can pay on a monthly basis, or save around 20% of your money by paying for one year at a time.

We’ve explored all the tools and features of Fax.Plus, using it to send documents to our own fax number and test it out.

We’ve faxed the following documents using Fax.Plus – a sample invoice, and a sample brochure page. These two fax-ready documents are typical examples of things that might be faxed, and have a good mixture of images, colors, graphics, lines and text, which we can use to compare the quality and speed of transmission to other online fax services.

We’ve given Fax.Plus a score out of 5 in each of these four key categories:

1. Quality
2. Usability
3. Price
4. Security & Support

These are the biggest things people care about with faxing – are the faxes a good quality, is the service easy to use, is it good value, and is it secure. Let’s break down each category in more detail and talk about how well Fax.Plus does…

Transmission Quality

The fax quality of Fax.Plus is pretty good. We can look at the results of the brochure page we sent above to see how well various graphics and images come through – the map picture has all the detail, the contact image has been well preserved, and the photos of the apartment look good, all with the text being clear and readable. It’s a good fax.

Fax.Plus can reliably handle faxing documents to a good enough quality. However, whilst it is good, the quality isn’t amazing. Let’s take a quick comparison to the same fax sent using Municorn’s Municorn Fax, another multi-platform online fax service. These are both high quality faxes, but in the Municorn fax you’ll see more light and detail in the photos (e.g. the back of the sofa in the large photo), the map looks slightly clearer, and other key differences which make it easier to look at.

Overall we’re happy with the faxing quality of Fax.Plus – it’s as good as any traditional fax machine, despite not being quite as clear and detailed as some other online fax services.

Faxing Speed

The speed is also not bad – most faxing involves important information, whether it’s business-related, or dealing sensitive information like healthcare or financial data. When we send faxes, we want it done fast – Fax.Plus does this, taking only 4 minutes to send a two-page fax (and a cover page), which we sent multiple times, and we got a push notification and delivery report a few seconds later.

This isn’t the fastest speed you’ll find in online faxing, but it’s pretty good. Incoming faxes also arrive in your inbox seconds after being confirmed as delivered.

Fax Features

While we’re talking about quality – let’s talk about features. Fax.Plus has some pretty neat advertised features that other faxing services don’t have – including scheduled fax. You can schedule emails on almost every email service these days, but a lot of faxing services still don’t have this option, so it’s great to see it included.

Fax.Plus also has good integration to common cloud storage services, like Google Drive, and Slack for more advanced business users.

However, there are some features missing depending on what device you’re using, and using them can be quite difficult, which we’ll get into in the usability section. One example of this is how the electronic signature feature is only available on mobile devices – which is strange considering one of Alohi’s main products is an electronic signature app. We’d have liked to see this option available when using a PC or Mac.

Then there are other features which just don’t seem necessary. One example of this is the option to optimise a fax transmission for either image or text quality. On the surface, this sounds like a great feature, however when we tried it, we saw absolutely no difference between the two faxes – take a look below.

As far as we can see, these two faxes look exactly the same! So it’s unclear if this feature is necessary, or even works at all – instead of getting things like this, other features would be preferable to be included in lower-tier subscriptions instead, like HIPAA compliance for example.

Overall, we can’t complain too much about the quality of Fax.Plus, the faxes arrive fast and are readable, and it has some great features that can enhance the quality of your faxing. However, some of the features are missing across platforms, and others feel like a waste of time.

Fax.Plus is certainly one of the better online fax services for usability and user-friendliness, but there are several reasons why it doesn’t quite get the top score.

Design

You can’t fault the design of the website, or the apps – Fax.Plus is designed to look good and feel good to use, with simplicity at the heart of everything. It’s certainly much nicer to use than other more popular faxing services, such as eFax.

It’s easy to sign up and start faxing online in a matter of minutes, with very clear subscription choices and a user menu which just about anybody could figure out.

There are also some nice little touches that show attention to detail – for example, with eFax, just like with Fax.Plus, you can choose your own area code, however Fax.Plus does better, letting you search by the name of the city or region and gives you the area code – with eFax, you’d have to look that up online first.

Much like the quality, however, the design and experience is good, but not great. This is subjective to some extent, but overall Fax.Plus feels like a 4/5, when other services feel like a solid 5/5.

Take EveryFax as an example, another leading web faxing service which also offers email-to-fax. EveryFax’s design just looks a little cleaner, more polished, and simple to use, with nice little touches like a flag emoji to show the country your new fax has come from.

We also disliked how Fax.Plus shows your own fax number taking up a large amount of the screen, and generally seems to use too many different color shades and lines for what could be a simpler menu.

Also, see that little blue speech box in the bottom right of the EveryFax menu? That’s a live chat feature – you can get instant support by speaking to an assistant, something Fax.Plus doesn’t offer. The phone app is a similar story – it’s better than most others, but not quite 5/5 when you look at other top apps.

User Experience

As mentioned, the user experience is generally very good. The apps are intuitive and easy to use, and you get a nice welcome fax from Alohi which acts as an instruction guide for how to use the service – a nice touch.

However, there’s one big problem we had with using some Fax.Plus features. To use all of the mobile features of Fax.Plus, you need to download three different apps. This is because Alohi also makes Sign.Plus, and Scan.Plus, which they also want you to download.

Now, most faxing apps will allow users to scan documents with the mobile camera and edit / annotate them, all inside the same app. However, if you want to scan documents with your phone to send with Fax.Plus, you need to download the Scan.Plus app, open it, scan your documents, and then go back to Fax.Plus. Then, if you want to annotate or sign documents before faxing them, you then need to install and open Sign.Plus, make your changes, and then go back to Fax.Plus.

There is absolutely no reason anyone would prefer using three different apps to do what many other online faxing services do in a single app – like Municorn Fax does.

It feels frustrating and unnecessary to switch between three apps just to prepare a fax, and Alohi should offer more scanning and signing features in the Fax.Plus app.

Unfortunately, price and value are where Fax.Plus begins to fall short compared to other services. Let’s focus on the good first, and then get into the problems we encountered.

Free Trial

Fax.Plus does offer one of the best free trials out there – you get 10 free pages to send, all without providing any payment details. If you want to test it out with your first fax, this is a great way to see if it works for you – not many other paid faxing services do this.

Disappearing Fax Pages

One problem we noticed almost immediately was that we were being charged more pages than we had sent. A basic plan includes 200 pages per month, and we sent two faxes at first – each with two pages.

However, firstly – it turns out that you also get charged one fax page for a cover page. This isn’t made clear when you’re signing up, and a lot of other online fax services don’t charge you for cover pages. But secondly, and an even bigger problem, is that we were charged for 8 pages. Even if we include cover pages, our faxes were 3 pages each, so 6 pages in total. But we were charged for 2 more pages!

When you read the fine print of Fax.Plus (and it’s hard to find), they tell you that if your fax transmission takes longer than one minute for a single page to send, you get charged for two pages. The fact that this happened on both faxes we sent must mean that it’s quite common, so when Fax.Plus promises you 200 pages, in reality you are probably getting far less than this. This feels dishonest and unfair to the customer, who cannot control how long a fax page takes to send.

We also tried to send a 5-page fax multiple times, which all failed – the explanation given was “no fax detected”, and we also noticed we’d been charged another fax page for this. With multiple failed faxes to a valid fax number, and the fact that each failure is charged a page, we came away feeling like we weren’t getting great value from the service.

HIPAA Compliance

Beyond the fax pages issue, there are other serious problems with the overall pricing – one obvious one being that HIPAA compliance is only available on the top-tier Enterprise plan, which at $100 per month is one of the most expensive online fax subscriptions we’ve ever seen just to get a HIPAA compliant service.

For comparison – eFax’s Protect service is half the price of this, and comes with HIPAA compliance and support to adhere to regulations. Or to go even further – Municorn Fax is HIPAA compliant on the most basic plan available.

Lots of people use faxing as a way to send sensitive and important information, and if you’re ever faxing healthcare information, it’s crucial to be HIPAA compliant to make sure you’re protected. It’s a shame you have to pay $100 per month to get that with Fax.Plus.

Pricing Structure

The biggest issue, however, is with the actual pricing model of Fax.Plus. There’s a lot that doesn’t make much sense, and it feels like Fax.Plus makes a concerted effort to push customers onto more expensive plans by withholding important features – like HIPAA.

Take a look at the table above – the latest plan information we could find on their website. The first thing that really stands out to us – $100 per month for HIPAA compliance. But beyond that, we noticed a few other issues:

• The Business plan isn’t the best deal for small businesses. There’s no HIPAA compliance, no Zapier/API integration (although you do get Slack), and so many other big features missing that a small business would want – like advanced security controls or priority support. To not be prioritised over Basic subscriptions by the customer support team doesn’t feel like a Business deal.
• The Enterprise deal has a huge jump in a lot of other categories, like Team Size, Monthly Pages, and Concurrent Fax Transmissions. It feels like there could be more of this included in the Business plan. Other features you can only get with enterprise include shared contacts, enforced fax cover sheet, masking fax number in header, use of analytics, and multiple admins – all pretty basic things a regular Business customer would want.
• There are other things that are too consistent across the different plans – why would a Basic customer paying $9 need unlimited storage, or the same 30MB file size as an Enterprise customer paying $100 per month? Why would a Basic customer need the same inbound concurrent fax amount as a Business customer? Many regular Basic customers might want to lose some of that and get things like HIPAA compliance instead.
• The price per page is generally above average compared to other big faxing apps, and there are better choices for high volume faxing.
• The cover sheet gallery, where you can choose from a range of basic cover pages for your fax, is locked under the Basic plan.

Other Alohi Apps

As we’ve already mentioned, Alohi forces you to use Sign.Plus and Scan.Plus in order to get the full Fax.Plus experience for mobile. This is fine for scanning, because Scan.Plus is free and is a good scanning app, with great automatic document detection. Sign.Plus, however, requires a paid subscription to use fully, and even if you get an expensive subscription for Fax.Plus, you still have to pay for an extra subscription to use Sign.Plus.

You can’t help but feel that Alohi could offer better value by including Sign.Plus access for paying Fax.Plus customers, even if it was only for the higher paying Business or Enterprise customers.

Fax.Plus is capable of providing amazing security features that rival the best online fax services, and for that it deserves praise. However, many of the best security features are locked behind the most expensive paywall and falls short of cheaper corporate faxing solutions. Fax.Plus also doesn’t offer enough to lower-tier customers, which is why we can’t give it a score of 5 in this category.

Security

Fax.Plus provides a very secure network and ecosystem through which to send faxes. Every customer gets unlimited storage via a fully encrypted archive of all their faxes, and advanced data protection features like GDPR compliance, since Alohi is based in Switzerland.

When you sign up to Fax.Plus, you receive a welcome fax promising security features such as ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, data encryption in transit and at rest, 2FA, advanced security controls, access logging, you name it… but here’s the thing – a lot of these are only available if you’re paying $100 per month.

However, to be fair, if you are paying the $100, you’re getting advanced services that most other faxing solutions don’t provide – we especially like the data residency feature on the Enterprise plan, and with data sites across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, this is a great security feature which will attract a lot of business customers.

Despite some great features, however, there are other online fax services which have top-tier corporate packages that are cheaper and give you more than Fax.Plus‘ Enterprise plan – eFax’s Protect package for example is half the price, gives users full HIPAA compliance, regulatory advice and business associate agreement support, advanced security controls, and other things that cost double with Fax.Plus.

Overall it’s a mixed bag for Fax.Plus – it has a good level of overall security, but too many good features are locked behind the expensive monthly Enterprise subscription.

Customer Support

The customer support provided by Fax.Plus includes some great features that other fax services don’t do – like their status page, where you can check all the network systems that Fax.Plus relies on to send your faxes, to see if anything will slow down the service. The entire website in general is very helpful, with lots of sections that explain all the technical details that help you fax online.

There’s not many ways to get in touch with Alohi for support – whilst services like EveryFax and Municorn Fax have live-chat on the website or apps, Fax.Plus only lets you fill out a form.

The customer feedback surrounding Fax.Plus is generally positive, with an Apple Store app that has a 4.7 rating with over 8,000 reviews. This is a great score, although still behind apps like Municorn’s Municorn Fax, which has a higher score of 4.8 on 350,000 reviews.

Fax.Plus is above average compared to most online faxing services – it has some very smart features, and a good user experience across any device you want to fax on. It’s easy to pick up and use, and you feel like you’re in safe hands with Alohi.

However, it’s not quite the best at anything it does – and this wouldn’t be very important if it weren’t for Fax.Plus being one of the more expensive options available for a lot of important features, especially if it’s often charging you multiple times for one fax page, like it did with us.

On top of this, sometimes it feels like it’s trying to be too smart, at the expense of more cheap basic features that most customers might want – we don’t want an image / text optimisation faxing option that looks exactly the same, we’d rather have HIPAA compliance for less than $100 a month!

Let’s talk through a few alternative online faxing services you could also try: