Overview

• Plan Reviewed: Single User
• Free Trial Period: 30-day free trial for Single User plan only.
• Monthly Fees: $8.95 billed monthly or $4.95 per month if billed annually.
• Page Counts: 500 pages sent and received each month.
• Users: Can add more to a shared account for the cost of the plan.
• Overage Charges: 3¢ per page sent or received over limit.
• Mobile App: Yes, kinda.

Choose Nextiva vFAX if:

• You’re looking for a budget online fax service.
• You intend to send and/or receive large volumes of faxes.
• You need a multi-use communications platform.

Don’t choose Nextiva vFAX if:

• Your browser doesn’t support Flash.
• You need international or toll-free numbers.

Nextiva vFAX is another one of those fax services that is generally meant to be part of a larger, unified communications package. As such, it can feel a little bare-bones and disjointed when used in isolation.

Check out our roundup of the Best Online Fax Services

Nextiva vFAX pricing

As far as prices go, Nextiva’s vFAX takes the cake. Assuming you choose to be billed annually, the price can be as low as five bucks a month! And you get 500 pages a month out of it? That’s far and away the best page to price ratio of any online fax service on the market.

It’s worth noting that VFAX’s upper tiers scale fairly well, although they don’t quite match the rockstar status of the first tier plan.

At level two, the Small Business Plan, your page count doubles to 1000 and the price increases to $17.95 a month (or a paltry $12.95 per month if billed annually).

The final tier, the Business Pro Plan, offers a whopping 3000 pages per month for only $34.95 per month (or $29.95 a month billed annually). That’s a significant increase in value. Keep in mind that none of the plan upgrades really include any other benefits beyond additional pages.

Rock-bottom prices come with a few drawbacks, of course. For one, there’s no multi-user capability. We asked their support about it and they gave us two options: create a generic account and give the login information to all users or add another user to the same account at the same price as the first, while also doubling the page count.

So… basically just make two accounts.

The overage charge fee is pretty generous, however. At just 3¢, it’s among the lowest of any fax service out there.

In keeping with the lowest-cost theme, there is no activation charge or set-up fee for starting with Nextiva vFAX.

Nextiva vFAX features

Let’s start with the biggest problem that Nextiva vFAX has. The dashboard runs in your browser using Adobe Flash.

That is bad.

Flash is an antiquated framework; so antiquated, in fact, that Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Mozilla Firefox ended native support for Flash in 2017. It’s still possible to use Flash on these browsers, but it requires a manual installation that it didn’t before (and vFAX will walk you through that process if necessary).

Unless you’re already using Flash for some other purpose, we strongly encourage you not to install it for vFAX alone. Flash, while still supported by Adobe, has had difficulty in modernization. Most importantly, it has a number of well-known critical security flaws that can be easily exploited.

Furthermore, the fax system itself has security issues. When creating an account, you only choose a username. It emails you a password afterwards… in plain text, rather than an encrypted format. That’s not only poor taste – it’s dangerous.

Add that to the fact that Nextiva vFAX has the baseline 128-bit security encryption on its faxes and you end up with a product that isn’t very secure at all.

The set-up process is a bit convoluted if you’re angling to do anything beyond getting a new fax number with your area code. They don’t support toll-free or international numbers. If you’d like to port over your old fax number, you have to call and speak to a representative to initiate the process.

Once you actually get into the dashboard you are met with an interface that is clean, if complicated. For example, sending faxes requires navigation through several pages when the same thing could probably be accomplished with one button on the homepage. The search button doesn’t really ‘search’, but it does bring up their half-decent organization system for faxes.

Those are only stored for 6 months, by the way. If you want to keep them longer, you’ll have to pull them from the platform and store them elsewhere.

Lastly, there’s a particularly annoying quirk of the system – faxes can’t be viewed outside of the Nextiva interface. When you receive a fax, an email is sent to alert you. Instead of including the fax as an attachment, like most online fax services, it simply includes a link to view it on their dashboard.

If there is one good thing to say about their platform, it’s that is isn’t overburdened with references to their other communication products like RingCentral is.