Nextiva vFax Review: Decent Price, Lackluster Interface

Our Verdict

Nextiva vFax offers a reasonably priced arroyo to managing inbound and outbound faxes, but its interface is in need of a facelift.

For

• Like shooting fish in a barrel fax tracking
• Bones fax management
• Good control over notifications

Against

• Poor Spider web-portal design
• Mobile app doesn't support faxing

Tom'south Guide Verdict

Nextiva vFax offers a reasonably priced arroyo to managing inbound and outbound faxes, but its interface is in need of a facelift.

Pros

• +

  Piece of cake fax tracking

• +

  Basic fax management

• +

  Good control over notifications

Cons

• -

  Poor Web-portal design

• -

  Mobile app doesn't back up faxing

Nextiva offers a diverseness of unified communications services and packages for vocalism, video and more. Only the company also breaks out its faxing service into a carve up, dedicated venture dubbed Nextiva vFax — so-called because it is a "virtual faxing" organization. The service supports fax by email, every bit well equally via your existing fax machine.

Nextiva vFax is i of the more attractively priced options among the best online fax services, simply we found its interface to be hard to navigate. There are simpler services to use if you want no-fuss faxing.

Nextiva vFax review: Pricing

Nextiva has iii tiers, with pricing starting at 500 pages for $4.95 per month on annual basis, or $8.95 if billed monthly. That $iv.95 price is the lowest of whatsoever annual monthly charge we've seen for a fax service. In fact, all of Nextiva'south annual prices are pretty generous, so if you're not afraid of a 12-month commitment, this service is definitely a contender.

Gratis Trial: Nextiva lets you attempt out its service for 30 days. For the 500-page trial, you select either a monthly or annual option: the choice affects whether Nextiva volition charge you on a monthly or almanac footing when the trial ends.

Nextiva vFax review: Setup

Signing upwardly for Nextiva is simple, and you can be up and running with your account in minutes. Y'all tin pick a telephone number in your area code or transfer a number. But for the latter, you'll need to call the company. You'll next pick your username for the Web portal, and a offset-time login countersign will be emailed to you.

Nextiva vFax review: File format support

The online portal for Nextiva serves as a fax clearinghouse. You can view faxes sent and received, and you lot can verify transmission. Y'all tin likewise send faxes straight via the portal, by attaching files. Nextiva supports faxing a variety of file types, including: PDF, TXT, RTF, Microsoft Office (DOC, XLS, PPT), paradigm files (TIFF, GIF, PNG, JPEG), and printer formats (PCL, EPS, PS).

Nextiva vFax review: User interface

The vFax service runs on what Nextiva calls its NextOS communications platform, the same platform that drives the company'south unified communications services. While the service provides good flexibility, the Web portal lacks blueprint panache. For starters, you must log in using fax.nextiva.com; using the main Nextiva.com site just gets you to the billing direction console. Once into the service, your Nextiva Dashboard layout is clear enough to come across, with large icons along the meridian for searching faxes, sending a fax, adjusting fax settings, updating your contour and checking billing.

But those icons are the just graphical, visually pleasing element of the service. The rest of the Adobe Wink-based Web app is very text and grid heavy, and lacks the visual blueprint that makes for a pleasing, friendly interface on MetroFax or HelloFax. The Dashboard page takes upwardly space with an account summary, and a list of faxes sent and received, info non necessarily needed front and eye when you first log in.

Nextiva vFax review: Sending and receiving faxes

To send a fax with Nextiva, you but deliver an email, with a supported document attached, to the outbound fax number at the Nextiva portal'south domain, simply you lot need to add a "i" before the number. So, if your number is 800-555-1212800-555-1212, you'd send the email to 18005551212@nextivafax.com. In our testing, faxes were sent with no apparent delay.

Whenever you lot get an incoming fax, you lot'll get a PDF sent to your email. Nextiva provides a fair amount of control over your faxing. The service lets you choose how yous want to receive this information, though. You tin also choose to non receive the PDF, and even to skip a notification of an incoming fax, in the settings. You can select upwards to five email address to receive notifications of inbound faxes.

I did appreciate the degree of control y'all take over fax notifications and settings, and how you can select a given fax and view it, download it, print it, forrad it, delete it and practise basic edits like rotate. I liked that yous could manage faxes by assigning them to folders (if yous didn't already practice so at the time of faxing), and either searching them or sorting by recipient, appointment or condition. You can create organizational rules for archiving — for instance, creating folders and rules for contracts or personal faxes — but these are non logically accessible from any of the fax search and display screens. Instead, this feature is buried under profiles, where it's less helpful. Ultimately, the poor interface design detracts from the overall presentation.

Nextiva vFax review: Verdict

Depending upon your faxing book and needs, Nextiva vFax service tin can be a reasonably priced way to send and track your fax communications. If you sign upwardly for the twelvemonth in accelerate, Nextiva's monthly plan is the least expensive of whatsoever of the services we tested when y'all sign up for an almanac program.

Nextiva's interface lacks visual styling of competing services like HelloFax and MetroFax, simply it'due south functional and at to the lowest degree has some fax direction, a critical feature competitors HelloFax and RingCentral Fax both lack. Nosotros prefer the interface and tagging capabilities of our peak pick, MetroFax.

However, Nextiva vFax volition get the task washed if yous need to relieve a few dollars over the course of a yr, and it can be a powerful choice for larger faxing needs.

Melissa Perenson spent more than a decade at PC Globe and TechHive, and she has freelanced for numerous publications including Computer Shopper, Tom'due south Guide, TechRadar and Consumers Digest.

Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/nextiva-vfax-online-fax,review-5082.html

Posted by: cliffordlase1988.blogspot.com

Share this post