Kick out the old fax machine with some of the best alternatives for sending and receiving documents in 2025. Take advantage of powerful, fast, and convenient digital alternatives that are low cost or free to use. The best part? No fax machine or phone line is required!
5 Faxing Alternatives
This is our list of 5 alternatives to using a fax machine. Remember that faxing is used to send and receive documents, images, and other items that can be scanned and sent across large distances. Faxing is faster than sending documents in the mail, but traditional faxing uses a hefty fax machine, which requires a lot of setup.
If the receiver requires you to specifically fax your document, we have some excellent alternatives that are still technically considered faxing. The recipient won’t notice anything different about the document that you send them.
Online fax machine alternatives
Online fax services like Fax.Live let you fax documents through a digital portal without having to use a bulky fax machine. Faxing digitally works without software. When you fax over the internet, the web-based interface connects you with a fax machine that handles sending your fax. Online faxing is:
- Convenient
- Secure
- Intuitive to use
- Lower cost than a physical fax machine
If you require the reliability of faxing, Fax.Live acts as a convenient substitute for a fax machine. Simply drag and drop a PDF of the document you want to fax into our interface, and our technology handles the faxing process. PDFs can be more reliable than emailing a document, and some businesses require faxes over email. Fax.Live even lets you receive faxes!
You can try out Fax.Live’s online fax services for free today and see how easy it is to fax online.
Scan and email
If convenience is the priority, scanning and emailing your documents can be the easiest option.
Emails let you attach files up to a certain file size (every email provider differs). For PDFs and other document formats, you’ll rarely hit this file size unless you’re attaching a document that has a lot of pictures in it, or a PDF with hundreds of pages. To send the document, all you need is the recipient’s email address.
If you have a physical document, you have to scan it to send it as an attachment. Some fax machines have a built-in scanner. The best, and most convenient, alternative to this is a document scanner app for your phone. These apps use your phone’s camera to scan a document and convert it to a PDF. You can then save this PDF version and send and receive it just as you would any other document.
Alternatively, you can also use a scanner (these are sometimes built into printers) to obtain a higher-quality scan of the document.
(If you have a Word document, you don’t need to print and scan it. Simply convert the Word doc to a PDF.)
File transfer protocol
File transfer protocol, or FTP, is a way to transfer data from a computer to a server. It’s usually used internally by businesses, especially when dealing with large file sizes and multiple files at once.
Most of the time, you won’t need to use a file-transfer protocol for personal use. If you’re concerned about transferring Word documents and PDFs, you probably won’t need to use file transfer protocol.
Still, if your workplace is transferring a lot of files via email or fax internally, it could be more secure and faster to use FTP. Capterra is a good place to start to compare FTP apps and learn about options. For better security, look for a service that features Secure FTP (SFTP), or FTP Secure (FTPS) to encrypt file transfers in transit.
Cloud-based file sharing
An efficient alternative that allows you not only to send but also store documents on the web is a cloud-based file-sharing app. Some of these apps are:
With these apps, you get a certain amount of digital storage that you can upload documents and other files to. Once you’ve created an account, you can log into the cloud-based service with any device and access the files you stored.
Most digital files will also have sharable links (typically the URL, or the “address” of the file online) that you can send to other people so they can directly download the files. Depending on the platform, they may not need an account to do this.
The advantage of a cloud-based service is that it works with any number of file types, including PDFs. The main limit to cloud-based file sharing is the caps on how much data you can store in the cloud. Once you reach a certain limit, you may need to pay the service to store more files.
File-sharing services
If you just need to share files over the web, consider searching for some file-sharing services that handle the transfer of documents and other files to users across the web. Some file-sharing services include:
These services are similar to cloud-based storage without having to manage storage. They’re explicitly meant for sending and sharing files (usually of a larger size). The benefit is that the recipient doesn’t have to do very much work when they receive the file. It’s usually a direct download link that they have to click — no account is needed!
When you use a file-sharing service, make sure it’s reputable and well-known before uploading sensitive files (read user reviews from multiple sites). Make sure the file-sharing service isn’t storing your files anywhere you haven’t authorized (through your own dashboard).
What Are the Best Alternatives to Faxing?
The alternative to faxing that’s the most like faxing is an online fax service. If the recipient requires you to fax your document, an online fax service treats file transfer the same as faxing — without having to use a fax machine. If you need to fax a document and don’t have access to a fax machine or phone line, online faxing is your best alternative. And, when you use Fax.Live you get unlimited storage for all of your sent and received faxes.
Otherwise, if you want to transfer files online, we highly recommend trying out a cloud-based file-sharing service. This solution not only handles transferring and downloading your files, but also storing them online so that you can access them from any of your devices. This is the best alternative to sending documents via fax if you’re not required to fax them!
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