Nextiva Fax Review

COMPLETE REVIEW

It’s not a commonplace to have a premium service provider as one of the lowest priced. Nextiva vFax is known for its low rates and high reliability, though some features commonly present elsewhere are limited or simply nonexistent. Basic fax users will probably not need these omitted possibilities, and perhaps through removing these, this provider succeeded in making highly reliable faxing affordable to most people.

Nextiva guarantees permanent uptime of its faxing service, along with free lines. That means, if two or more senders try to fax you at the same time, none of them will get a busy signal and everything will go through.

New users begin their subscription with a 30-day free trial where they are introduced in the service by a step-by-step wizard. It is a great way to learn all the possibilities, but also the limitations of vFax. At the end of your free trial, Nextiva will automatically propose the best plans for your needs and budget, though you can choose any other.

Another advantage of this service is that users don’t need to have a PC turned on and maintaining a session with a vFax service in the browser. Whenever a fax arrives, it will be received by the server and saved on your dedicated remote storage for download at a later time. You can also postpone sending, just upload a document and it will be delivered to the recipient at a user-defined time in the future.

NUMBER OPTIONS

New or existing fax numbers can be added to a  Nextiva vFax account. The number porting procedure is straightforward and begins by mailing any of your existing fax numbers to the provider. Toll-free numbers are available, as well as local numbers for the entire US and Canada. Unfortunately, there are no international fax numbers available.

PORTABILITY AND INTEGRATIONS

As integrations are not the very first thing most online fax users will ask for, Nextiva has put them on hold for some other times. However, there is a possibility to send faxes using just email, which can turn any device into a real faxing machine. The documents are sent as attachments to email formatted as [email protected] where the xxxxxxxxx is the recipient’s number.

The file size limit is 5 MB, but it's better to have your faxes smaller than 2 MB, otherwise it would take more time to send larger files over. The best way to shrink large fax messages so they can fit into 2 MB is by using some high compression file formats. This is where Nextiva is strong. You will be able to turn all Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files into fax messages. Text files supported other than MS Word are RTF, TXT, Web files supported are HTM, HTML, XML and XSL. PDF, PCL, EPS and PDF printer files can be turned into faxes too, as well as these image files:TIFF, GIF, JPEG and PNG.

There is no mobile app for faxing, possibly because the email-to-fax feature can suffice for the lack of it. Though it can be overall seen as a disadvantage, those with entry-level phones would benefit as there is no need to install one more app which takes more resources.

The other two ways of sending faxes in Nextiva vFax are through a Web application and using an actual fax machine. If you or your staff still prefer using a classic fax machine for any reason, Nextiva can ship you a digital fax adapter that lets you use a fax machine with your vFax account, though it costs $150. The amount can pay back through much lower usage costs compared to the standard landline-based faxing.

SECURITY AND ARCHIVES

There is a two-level security protection to maintain the privacy of your online faxing. First, accessing the vFax Web portal is restricted only to authorized persons. Second, all the traffic is encrypted through a 256-bit SSL encryption format. 

The archive capabilities of this provider are unlimited. It can be used to store any incoming faxes that should be automatically responded to and wait for you. You may be busy, but your online fax would never be.

BOTTOM LINE

When it comes to faxing, all that many businesses care about is reliability and good price. This is exactly what Nextiva vFax will offer. There aren't too many features, integrations and other gimmicks, just the essential faxing at its best.

As an all-round business telecommunications provider, Nextiva offers unlimited faxing as a feature across all its VoIP plans without surcharges.