I was asked to replace every fax machine in the company with a cloud based fax provider. I learned a lot in this project worthy of sharing. So in this edition, we will review the benefits for replacing those fax machines while we will cover my experience with several Fax Service Providers currently operating in the cloud.

Reducing Costs with Cloud Faxing

The cloud typically only charges business for what is actually used, so this is like renting a fax machine when one is needed, rather than actually owning one. Fax machines are not very popular anymore, so the usage rates are often very low. This makes fax machines a perfect candidate for replacement by cloud services. Money is saved on paper, toner, phone lines, fax machines, and fax machine maintenance. Each Fax Service Provider maintains hundreds if not thousands of fax machines in the cloud so we never get a busy signal and never need to worry about machine maintenance.

At my company, we operate on a very old computer system that cannot print, it is only capable of faxing documents. So several folks at my company are faxing documents to themselves 30 times per day or more to act as a printer. Additionally, the document they faxed to themselves must be scanned and then sent by email to a customer!

These strange, seemingly redundant processes make it very clear to management, that we could see a rather large, yearly reduction in costs by moving all fax operations to the cloud!

Different Fax Methods for Different Reasons

There are two primary methods for faxing using the cloud. Faxes can be sent very easily by Email or through an API call in a much more advanced fashion.

Method 1 - Simple Faxing Using Email

Cloud Based Faxing can work entirely through the email. Each of the companies reviewed here will setup any email address to support the ability to send and receive fax documents. They will associate a fax telephone number with the email address so that any fax sent to that number, will get routed to the email inbox as an attachment. Faxes can be sent, by attaching files to the email and then sending to a special email address according to the particular service in use. This is the most common form of cloud based faxing. It is a quick, cheap, easy and reliable way to replace typical, desktop fax machines inside the company.

Method 2 - Advanced Faxing Using an API

Several Fax Service Providers in the Cloud also offer an API (Application Programming Interface). The Fax API allows computer programmers to integrate cloud based faxing into their software. This usually involves some sort of REST or SOAP based web service for developers to take advantage of. This part is far more tricky than sending faxes with emails but in some cases, it is going to be needed.

Looking at Cloud Fax Provider Options

The company I work for was out to use both methods of Cloud Based Faxing. (1) They wanted fax support over the Email for several employees at their desktop and (2) they wanted the system to send out automated faxes each night to certain customers using an API call. So I set out to find solutions.

There is no shortage of Cloud Based Fax Service Providers out there. I was able to quickly find this daunting list of providers...

eFax, MetroFax, InterFax, Nextiva, MyFax, Ring Central, RapidFax, Fax.com, TrustFax, SRFax, SmartFax, FaxAway, ClickFax, Send2Fax, SFax, Fax87, PopFax, FaxBetter, HelloFax, and FaxItFast

These were just the ones I found and looked at briefly. There are probably even more to choose from if you keep looking.

So how is one to know which of these companies is worth doing business with?

It would be nice if someone were reviewing these services against one another but finding any worthy, honest info about each service was difficult if not impossible. So this is the main reason for choosing this topic today. It is my hope that this post will get indexed by Google and someday help another other poor soul out there who is being asked to replace all fax machines in the company with a Cloud Based Fax Service Provider. If that is you, you are in luck. Keep reading for some real world experience of what it is like to live and work with these companies!

Welcome To The Cloud Fax Provider Review List

SRFax - Best API

SRFax has the best API support I have seen yet for Cloud Faxing. They are not the cheapest alternative but they are not the most expensive either. SRFax allows developers to submit fax jobs to a queue. Then as the system has time, it works on converting the document to a fax and sends it out several minutes later. This allows the developer's software to continue moving forward without waiting for anything to come back from SRFax. Just fire off that fax and forget about it.

If the fax can not get through, SR Fax tries again until it either sends, or reaches the decision that it cannot be sent. SRFax is really good about notifications too. An email address can be tied to any fax for status reporting. If the fax fails to send for any reason, an email alert goes out to the sender explaining why and it even includes a nice preview of the fax embedded into the error email.

API calls are conducted over a REST based service and the company offers all sorts of examples on how to interact with the service in a variety of programming languages including C#, VB, Ruby, Python, and PHP.

SRFax customer support is quick, knowledgeable, and very easy to deal with. I did run into a few hangups as I was getting to know their system but they helped me through every step, even when I had questions about programming and goofy error messages I was getting back from their system. System integration is not easy, so you are going to need willing and capable people on both ends in order to make this work. SRFax Customer Support was there for me every time.

For these reasons, I recommend you start at SRFax. Especially if you need API support to send faxes.

Nextiva vFax - Cheapest Email Faxing and Fax Line Porting

Nextiva is a very interesting company that specializes in supplying cloud services to meet the needs of a typical office. They will get a business running with phone lines, fax lines, Internet lines, analytics, online storage, and even cloud based call-center services.

Nextiva, also offers their email based fax services at the very best rates we could find. I firmly believe that Nextiva is going to beat any price your company may be paying for these services. So this may be the sort of company you look into if you wish to reduce the costs of communications at your company in any way, not just faxing.

However it is important to note that Nextiva does not provide any sort of API fax support, which is a bit disappointing if you are looking to get everything done in one place.

Fax Porting

I chose Nextiva for Porting all of our existing fax lines. Our company has already published their fax numbers and sent them out in marketing material to customers, so we really wanted to keep those old fax numbers functional.

Nextiva made it very easy to port our fax numbers to them from our existing carrier. We gave Nextiva permission and proof that they are our fax lines, then Nextiva started a process to have the lines moved.

eFax - Most Popular and Most Expensive

eFax seems to be the most popular service by far. They have an aggressive sales force and it shows because eFax is also the most expensive solution we found costing nearly triple what Nextiva wanted for Email based faxing and fax line porting. If the business is only sending a few faxes per month, the cost difference in nominal but when large numbers of faxes are getting sent, things start to add up.

Fax Phone Number Greed

eFax is also a bit greedy with their phone numbers. They will not allow a customer to port eFax numbers to another provider. So if the customer makes that number public and wishes to keep that number, they will have to stay with eFax forever, bound by contract. eFax was the only company doing this, every other option I reviewed allowed you to take their numbers elsewhere if so desired.

Poor API Support

The eFax API support was rather weak in my opinion, but my understanding is that it works fine. I never did give it a try because I was looking for a SOAP or REST based web service. eFax has created their own web service using XML and Java Servlets on IIS. The service does not appear to comply with the SOAP spec or REST. Their MS.Net examples has the developer download a .dll file used to wrap up the custom calls to their web service. I don't really like installing .dlls from other places into my projects, although we all have to do it. I would just rather not, especially when there are perfectly acceptable remote access technologies available like SOAP and REST, that don't require me to use another persons compiled code.

If your demand for faxing is low and you don't need API support, then eFax should work really good for you.

If you have a serious demand for faxing, it will save money to look elsewhere.

InterFax - The Very Worst Cloud Based Fax Provider

InterFax offers a SOAP based API which is perfect for use in the C#.Net app at my Company and they also support Email based faxing with fax number porting.

I setup a test account with InterFax and took about 6 weeks to integrate our system with theirs, so we could send automated faxes out to customers each night through the API.

Coding and testing went fine, so I converted the free trial account to a production level account with a corporate credit card. Then we started to run the service in production and we thought the project was done.

That is when faxes started to fail to send.

Faxes Failed To Send Through the API

The InterFax API was essentially disconnecting my session before ever sending a response. The error message I encountered said that we needed to look at the logs on the server to understand why my session was disconnected and why my fax failed to send.

So I started up another support call and politely asked if they could help me by looking through the logs to see why their system had disconnected mine causing my faxes to fail.

4 days go by and I hear nothing from them. So I call back and ask again, very nicely. After all, this is production level code now running the business. I had to be nice, I needed these guys to do their job and I did not want to piss them off.

Again, more days go by. I call again, and again. No matter what I did, they refused to work with me and they refused to look up any sort of logs for me. After 2 weeks of waiting for logs to show up, I had no choice but to rip out the core components of my code that connected to the InterFax API and replace it with calls to the SRFax API instead.

What a nightmare.

InterFax Lacks a Fax Queue in Their API

InterFax has no queue like SRFax does for API support. So my code was blocked, doing nothing but waiting while the fax was sent to InterFax... Then my code waited some more through the fax conversion process... It waited even longer for InterFax to dial the number, and even longer to see if there was any sort of success or failure result at sending the fax. Users noticed this and commented that faxing took much longer than it used to.

This differs greatly from how SRFax operates. The SRFax queue allows my software to fire off faxes and forget about it right away. My software doesn't sit around blocked, waiting for things to convert, dial, and send. This makes the SRFax API much faster and more reliable.

Worst Fax Line Porting Service

In addition to the InterFax API service failing and their total lack of support when that happened, I also tried to port our existing desktop fax lines to InterFax at the same time.

InterFax was not willing to do their job when it comes to fax line porting. They wanted me to contact my existing carrier to get several pages of technical information on how to conduct the transfer to InterFax.

I am not a phone company, I simply can not do this sort of work. I called the losing carrier and told them that I was leaving, so I needed them to fill out several pages of technical information in order to move. They never got back to me with any such info. Why would they?

The other fax providers reviewed here follow a process that other carriers can not deny. At Nextiva for example, all I had to do was prove that my company owned the lines, then Nextiva filed paperwork with the losing carrier, NOT ME!

InterFax Was a Total Bust

I invested months of time into attempting to work with InterFax and they let me down every single time, in every single way I can think of. It is for these reasons, I highly recommend you stay as far away from InterFax as you can on your next Cloud Based Fax project.

I Hope This Helps

I certainly did not review every Fax Provider out there but I have been through some bad ones, which is how I found some good ones.

Hopefully, this post will help someone in the future who is replacing fax machines like me.

Until next time folks...

Thanks for Reading