FaxBurner Full Review: Great for the Price, Not for Privacy

FaxBurner was launched in 2010 by Networx Online, a tech company headquartered in California. The aim of FaxBurner is to provide low-cost faxing to people who don’t want to get a fax machine.

FaxBurner gives its users the ability to fax on iPhone or Android, on the web portal via their website, or to use email-to-fax to send faxes with their regular email service.

Positioned in the low-cost end of the market, FaxBurner doesn’t provide many of the fancy features or advanced security you’ll see with other online fax services. It is, however, cheaper than those other options, and includes a rare completely free option, which users can use indefinitely to get a temporary fax number and receive a small number of faxes per month.

We’ve been trying and testing FaxBurner, using the app and email functionalities to send faxes and test the features.

The documents sent in our tests, as we do with other apps we review, are the sample invoice, and sample brochure page. These two documents are common items that people might send as faxes, and have a mix of text, lines, shading, color and images – the fundamental parts of a document.

Our review will focus on four key areas:

1. Quality
2. User Experience
3. Price
4. Security & Customer Support

The quality of the fax transmissions we sent was average at best on the fundamentals. FaxBurner operates at an industry-standard 204x196 dpi resolution, but let’s look at how well that came through in our tests.

We can start by looking at the original documents we sent, versus how FaxBurner transmitted them:

The sample invoice is a basic document comprised of mostly text, but with some shading and lines, and a logo. The shading failed to transmit through on the top line of the invoice breakdown – appearing as white in the final fax, however the rest of the document is very clear and readable.

The brochure page test is more advanced, and allows us to judge how well FaxBurner deals with color and images. In this case, this is a slightly below-average fax transmission. The lightness of the images has been preserved well enough to show the image, however the quality has been distorted and lots of detail has been lost, resulting in bad resolution photographs on the final fax.

On top of this, the map image has lost a lot of clarity and detail, and graphical elements such as the person icon have disappeared completely. The shading on the top bar has also transmitted badly, resulting in a two-tone block of color along the top.

For perspective, let’s compare FaxBurner’s fax quality to another fax service – Municorn Fax. The difference is easy to see – Municorn Fax has kept more detail and sharpness in the images, the map is much easier to read, and the color and shading has transmitted much better.

Overall FaxBurner’s quality is good enough to rely on it for basic documents such as letters and invoices, especially considering FaxBurner’s pricing. However, for any documents with images, color, or other graphical elements, FaxBurner’s quality can lose a lot of important detail and make documents look far worse than other services.

Our 3-page fax took around 5 minutes to send, which is neither fast nor slow compared to other services – this is around what you would reasonably expect from an average fax service.

Despite being quite limited functionally, FaxBurner is a very user friendly service considering it’s one of the cheaper options available, offering not only app access but email-to-fax services for all users (even on the free plan).

FaxBurner App

Let’s start with a look at the mobile app, which FaxBurner recommends over email-to-fax as a day-to-day way to use.

The design of the app feels quite ‘dated’ in 2025 – it clearly hasn’t had a refresh for a long time, and there are other more slick and modern faxing apps available. Despite this, it handles the basics very well and works smoothly.

FaxBurner’s app offers a few basic features that you don’t usually see on other online fax services in the budget end of the market, such as the ability to sign documents and customizable cover pages.

Email-to-Fax

FaxBurner also stands out in offering email-to-fax to all users on any plan, even the free users! This is a great way to fax without the app, but does have a few limitations.

The email-to-fax instructions are easy to follow, and in just a few clicks you can attach your documents and send your fax via email. However, it’s unclear how you should handle international fax numbers when sending an email fax, and the instructions don’t cover this.

It’s also hard to fully customize your cover sheet when sending an email-fax. This is because when you send your email, you have to put the recipient’s fax number in the subject line. This means the ‘RE:’ (subject) section of the cover sheet will be blank. There seems to be no way to add a subject label when sending an email-to-fax fax, which is a limitation.

On top of this, the branding of the cover sheet is quite over-the-top, and can look unprofessional with the FaxBurner logo and website written all over the top of the sheet.

Another small thing we noticed is that it messed up the apostrophe in the sender’s name, reading “O’Grady” as “O'Grady” – this means many users will have their name appearing incorrectly when sending a fax with FaxBurner.

One great thing we noticed is that FaxBurner automatically emails you each fax you receive as a pdf, so you don’t even need to have the app handy when you receive a fax in order to view it.

Overall, FaxBurner is easy to use, however the mobile app version is the way we’d prefer to use it regularly.

FaxBurner is a very competitively-priced low-cost online fax service, and a good choice for a range of people looking for a basic fax service on a budget, which will cost far less than a physical fax machine.

Free Fax Service?

FaxBurner prides itself on its “free” version, which allows users a free service to receive faxes up to 25 pages per month, forever. However, this is more of a free trial than a permanent plan – as you can only send 5 total fax pages, and this does not reset each month – you just get 5 pages in total.

You can setup a temporary fax number, which you get to keep for 24 hours, if you want to receive faxes on the free plan. After 24 hours, your disposable fax number will be removed, and you will need to request a new, different temporary number to receive more faxes.

The free package should be seen as a convenient way to receive faxes occasionally in an unsecured and time-restricted way. It is, however, much more than other services offer for free, and so FaxBurner deserves credit for this option.

Paid Plans

FaxBurner’s paid account plans get you more pages to send and receive, with up-front monthly pricing and no other hidden fees.

With the Professional and Premier plans, you can get your own permanent fax number, a toll free fax number with 500 or 2,000 monthly pages respectively.

This represents much more value per page than equivalent plans at services such as Fax.Plus or iFax, which also don’t offer email-to-fax on all their plans, as FaxBurner does. However, you can get even more value from unlimited faxing services, such as the cheaper overall HumbleFax, and the HIPAA compliant Municorn Fax by Municorn, which both have unlimited faxing (Municorn Fax includes international faxes in that plan too), making those services cheaper per page.

Other Pricing Considerations

One frustration with FaxBurner’s pricing is that you can only purchase a monthly subscription – no annual subscription is offered to users. This means if you want a long-term plan or a more permanent toll free number, you could find better value from services which offer heavy discounts for annual plans, such as Municorn Fax.

An advantage to new users is that no credit card or payment details are required in order to set up your free account – you can get started completely free today by just entering your email address and creating a password – you’ll even be able to download apps from FaxBurner and use them for free on your phone.

At the time of writing this, it’s unclear if FaxBurner offers international faxing at all, or at an extra cost. It’s mentioned that the service only works in the US and Canada when you sign up, so we’re assuming you cannot send faxes internationally. That question is also included, but left blank, in their FAQs.

Security

FaxBurner is not a service you should be using if you need a highly secure way to send documents and keep confidential faxes safe – other services can offer more security and regulatory compliance.

Firstly, FaxBurner is not HIPAA compliant. This means that the strict rules enforced by HIPAA regulations to HIPAA compliant fax services do not apply to FaxBurner. These rules, which apply to fax services like Municorn Fax, protect your sensitive information whenever you send documents, making sure you have maximum privacy and security, and imposing strong penalties on services which fail to do this.

Since FaxBurner is not HIPAA compliant under any plan, it is not recommended to use this service to send sensitive information, particularly concerning healthcare or medical information.

There is also very little detail on the security measures FaxBurner does provide. Services like Municorn Fax also provide AES 256-bit end to end encryption – the same level of security used in nuclear technology – but FaxBurner doesn’t claim to use this, instead using basic TLS protocols to protect faxes.

Support

The support provided by the FaxBurner team is minimal, as is to be expected from a lower cost service. There is no live chat or phone line to call, as you’ll get with other services, instead you can raise a ticket for support and the team will get back to you – but you can only do this if you have a paid plan.

There are some FAQs on the web page which cover most scenarios and common questions, which are relatively helpful.

FaxBurner also warns users of the free plan to not interact with the IRS with temporary fax numbers – this is because many people use faxes to complete their taxes, but the disposable fax numbers reset after 24 hours.

FaxBurner also claims to use AI to monitor for fraud and spam – however there’s no elaboration on how this is done, or what this process involves.

Reviews

Customer feedback is positive for FaxBurner.

FaxBurner has a very positive score on the Apple Store, with a 4.9/5 rating. They can frequently be seen responding to good and bad reviews in a unique and engaging way – we even found one bad review which led them to refund a customer’s annual charge because they locked themselves out of their account.

FaxBurner is a good, low-cost fax service for people who might want to do the following:

• Receive faxes occasionally with a temporary number under the free plan.
• Send and receive faxes which are non sensitive or confidential, and therefore do not need the high security or privacy regulations that HIPAA certification provides (no medical or financial information recommended).

FaxBurner’s user-friendliness and basic features, combined with a relatively low price, make it a good option for regular unimportant faxes. However, for sensitive or important faxes, for high-volume faxes, or for people looking for a more advanced and modern service, we would recommend looking elsewhere.

Here are some alternatives to FaxBurner if you want to explore other fax services: