Three Stars | ★★★☆☆
GotFreeFax is as good as a free fax service can get, but still very limited compared to other online fax services.
GotFreeFax is a completely free online fax service, allowing any user to send or receive a limited number of faxes via the GotFreeFax website, without spending a penny or creating an account. As far as free fax services go, GotFreeFax is as good as it gets, but free online fax services are still very limited, poor quality and insecure. We’ve tested everything about GotFreeFax to let you know if it’s right for you, and what the best alternatives are.
GotFreeFax – Everything You Need To Know
GotFreeFax offers anybody the chance to send two free faxes per day, with three pages per fax – but only to fax numbers the USA and Canada. It’s a completely free service supported by ads, which appear on the website and in the email updates users receive. You can also receive faxes directly to the GotFreeFax website – they’ll provide a fax number, and all received faxes are available to view on this page – you’ll need to know the sender’s fax number in order to view them.
GotFreeFax also offers a premium paid fax service, which lets users pay for more faxes and a higher page limit in those faxes. This paid service comes in two options:
- GotFreeFax provides a one-off fax service which allows users to send a fax of up to 10, 20 or 30 pages.
- Alternatively there is a prepaid fax service which represents better value, allowing users to purchase page credits of 100, 250 or 800 pages.
GotFreeFax is extremely easy to use, there’s no installation, account or setup required – just visit the web page here and you’ll land straight on the ‘send a fax’ page. Enter the sender and recipient details, upload your fax pages, and there is also a custom cover page option also included. Once you’re ready, hit send – you should then receive an email from GotFreeFax. You’ll need to click on the link in this email, and once you’ve done that your fax will send.
It’s that easy! You can also receive faxes via GotFreeFax by asking your sender to fax their message to the GotGreeFax fax number – +1 (888)293-3691. Once GotFreeFax receives the fax, they will show it on their site page here, you’ll need to enter the sender’s fax number to view the fax.
GotFreeFax is one of the biggest free fax services in the USA and Canada, with FaxZero being the other largest free fax provider, which many people also use. We’ve compared GotFreeFax to FaxZero in features, free fax limits, and paid faxes, to see how they compare below – GotFreeFax wins on more categories than FaxZero does!
| Feature | GotFreeFax | FaxZero | Winner? |
|---|---|---|---|
| One-Time Fax | 10 Pages – $1.2520 Pages – $1.9830 Pages – $2.98 | 25 Pages – $2.09 | 🟩 GotFreeFax |
| Prepaid Pages | 100 Pages – $9.95250 Pages – $19.95800 Pages – $49.95 | No option | 🟩 GotFreeFax |
| Receive Faxes | Yes | No | 🟩 GotFreeFax |
| Free Faxes | 2 per day (3 pages max) | 5 per day (3 pages max) | 🟦 FaxZero |
| Cover Page | Unbranded | FaxZero branded | 🟩 GotFreeFax |
| File Formats | PDF, DOC, DOCX, JPG, JPEG, RTF | PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, PNG, JPG, XLS, XLSX, TXT, HTML, TIFF, GIF, PPT… | 🟦 FaxZero |
| International Fax | From $3.15 | From $3.63 | 🟩 GotFreeFax |
The Good…
- It’s free!
- Simple and easy website, which works well on mobile
- Lots of choice if you want to pay for more pages
- You can receive faxes too
- You can create you own custom cover page with no branding
- Cheaper than FaxZero to send an international fax
- Quality of fax is better than other free services
The Bad…
- Quality is not good enough for paid faxes compared to other online faxing services
- All received faxes are public and not secure
- Limited file formats supported
- You get ads even when you’ve paid for the premium service
GotFreeFax – Detailed Review
A great way to test a fax service is to fax documents that many people send every day – and that’s exactly what we’ve done. We’ve sent a few pages over fax via GotFreeFax, using both the free and the premium service – sending a sample invoice, and a sample brochure page. These documents have a good variety of text, pictures and graphics, and are a good way to judge a good fax from a bad fax.
We’ll go into detail on what it’s like to use GotFreeFax, covering four key factors which are important when sending a fax:
- Quality
- User-friendliness
- Price
- Security
Quality
The quality of the faxes we sent was surprisingly good for a free service, and puts GotFreeFax at the top of the ‘free fax’ options available on the internet. The sample invoice we sent came through clearly in the text, although some graphics and shades were lost in transmission – overall the quality was slightly below average. However, we were more impressed with the brochure page we sent – which kept a lot of the detail from the photos and the map, despite losing some other detail on other graphics – see below for the original document and the faxed document.
It’s important to compare the quality of a free fax to the quality of another free fax service – so let’s look at how GotFreeFax looks compared to the same fax sent using FaxZero, another free fax provider.
As we can see, much more detail has survived in the GotFreeFax fax – the photos look much better, more of the graphical elements and shapes are visible, and overall it looks much clearer.
Obviously, the quality is still not on the same level as the quality you’ll get from paid faxes, and so if you’re sending important faxes which you want to be transmitted very clearly, it’s highly recommended to use a paid fax service. See the image below for what a paid fax service looks like – this time we’ve used Municorn’s Fax App to send the same brochure page. As you can see, the detail is miles better, every graphic has been perfectly transmitted, and the map image has all the detail as the original document.
This is a good example of the ‘ceiling’ of quality that a free fax service has. Faxing to a high standard is an expensive process, so there will always be a limit of how good a free fax can be, and paid faxing services will always be much, much better. With that in mind, GotFreeFax is probably as good as you can get without spending any money.
GotFreeFax is slightly let down on the speed of transmission, however. Our 2-page fax (and a cover page) took 5 minutes to send – this is longer than FaxZero, and much longer than Municorn’s Fax App, which takes less than 2 minutes. If speed is important to you, you should consider a paid faxing service.
User-Friendliness
GotFreeFax makes it quick and easy to start faxing, and the one-page ‘send a fax’ menu is very simple for customers to navigate. When you send faxes, you can upload each document on the menu, or alternatively use the rich text option to compose a fax from scratch – this is a nice feature.
Some other reviews have criticised the lack of a mobile app. It’s true that a fax app such as Municorn’s does let you fully utilise the technology of your phone, allowing users to send, receive and view faxes incredibly easily, so this is a downside. However, the GotFreeFax site adapts very well to mobile devices, and is incredibly easy to use from your phone or tablet.
One other thing we really liked about GotFreeFax compared to FaxZero, is the email you receive to confirm to send a fax – FaxZero’s had lots of other links in theirs, including advertisement links. GotFreeFax’s email is clear and makes it obvious which link you need to select in order to send your fax, and doesn’t show ads in this email – only putting ads in the subsequent status/confirmation emails. This gives GotFreeFax another advantage over FaxZero.
Similar to FaxZero, GotFreeFax also includes a long and helpful FAQs page which cover all sorts of scenarios that customers may have questions about. There is even a YouTube tutorial video, and also a link to send a message directly to the team, in case you have any other questions.
Another great option for users is the cover page – GotFreeFax doesn’t include any branding on the cover page, and allows you to customise it. This means you can send faxes and still appear professional to the recipient – it looks as though the fax was just sent from a regular fax machine.
Overall, despite only being limited to a website with a few pages, and no mobile app, GotFreeFax is very easy to use for all types of customers.
Price
It’s hard to criticise a price when it’s free! But GotFreeFax also offers a paid service – so let’s talk about the value of that compared to other paid online faxing services.
Firstly, GotFreeFax offers a range of flexible different ways to pay for faxes. It’s great that customers can either pay for a fax at a time, or prepay for a bulk supply of fax pages. The faxes you prepay for never expire too – so one purchase could give you enough pages for years!
The pricing per page is better than most other online fax services – certainly better than fax services like eFax and Fax.Plus, which charge a monthly subscription and limit your fax pages. However, the value isn’t as good as other services, like Municorn’s Fax App, which also includes a flexible number of subscriptions that all include unlimited fax pages.
The international fax option is also cheap compared to most other fax services. Again, Municorn’s app charges no extra fees for international faxes, so it offers considerably better value than GotFreeFax, but GotFreeFax still beats other one-off fax services like FaxZero, FaxSalad and FaxFresh for price.
There is, however, a big problem with GotFreeFax’s paid service – the quality of the fax is still the same as when you send a free fax. As we can see in the Quality section of this article, there is a huge difference between the quality of a fully paid online fax service, and a free fax service. When you are paying any money to send a fax, you should expect a much better quality than what GotFreeFax can offer.
If GotFreeFax’s paid service included better quality, then it would be one of the best value services in online faxing. However, the huge drop in quality compared to other fax services means it simply isn’t worth paying for – you would find a much better fax with a fully paid service, with better security measures too. Speaking of which…
Security
We feel it’s important to be very clear on this – GotFreeFax is not considered a secure service to send any important or sensitive information with. All payments are made through PayPal, so don’t worry about security here – PayPal is an industry leader in protecting credit card information – but the security of the actual fax transmission is not up to industry standards.
GotFreeFax gives little detail on how your personal data or the contents of your faxes are secured, besides saying “our servers are managed by certified engineers”, and that they have an anti-virus system. This isn’t very reassuring. GotFreeFax does use basic encryption when sending faxes – which is the bare minimum you should expect.
Beyond that, there is no HIPAA compliance, or any other technological safeguards mentioned on their website – so GotFreeFax is lacking the top-level security and regulatory adherence that services like Municorn or eFax provides. GotFreeFax does at least delete all fax information after 5 days – so it’s reassuring to know that they aren’t storing the contents of your fax for longer than necessary.
Another obvious problem with security, however, is when you’re using GotFreeFax to receive faxes. All received faxes are available to view on this page, and the website only blocks 4 of the numbers from the sender’s fax number. If you can enter those 4 numbers successfully, then you get to view the fax. This feels like a very insecure way to receive a fax, and to their credit, GotFreeFax does specify very clearly that you should not use this option to receive faxes with personal or sensitive information.
There is also a lack of two-factor authentication when you have prepaid for fax pages – meaning that your account is vulnerable to certain breaches of data, and any breach could result in you losing all the pages you have paid for.
Overall, GotFreeFax is a free service, so it would be rather unfair to expect top of the line security. However, it is very important to stress that it should not be considered secure, and should not be used to send any sensitive information – which faxing usually involves.
GotFreeFax Alternatives
If you insist on never paying a penny for your faxing service, then you will always be limited by a free service like GotFreeFax – this means poor quality, a complete lack of industry-standard security and privacy, and no protection of your data if you are a business user faxing to another company, which they would not be happy about!
However, as a free option, GotFreeFax is the best one available – whilst you can’t send as many faxes per day as you can with FaxZero, it’s better than FaxZero in almost every other way. You might be satisfied with this free service if you’re someone sending or receiving the occasional fax containing very basic, text documents, with no important or sensitive data, and if you’re happy with having no advanced security or data privacy. It’s worth noting, however, that many businesses will not want to fax any documents to someone via GotFreeFax – as they will consider it too unsafe.
Other alternatives you should look into if you want a secure, high quality faxing service include Municorn’s Fax App, Fax.Plus, eFax, HelloFax, and CocoFax.
Municorn’s Fax App provides the highest level of security and regulatory compliance for sending personal information, but it also gives you:
- Your own fax number to send and receive faxes
- An unlimited number of faxes and pages (not many online fax services do this)
- A mobile app, web app and email-to-fax, so you can fax any way you like
- Live chat support in-app and a technical service help feature
- The most popular fax app on the Apple store
- A flexible annual, monthly or weekly subscription
- International faxes included at no extra cost
