RingCentral

• Prices
• User-friendly
• Power users
• High integration
• Toll-free, local, and vanity numbers
• Downloadable integrations for Microsoft Outlook

We felt pretty positive about the services that RingCentral offers for small- and medium-sized businesses. However, we felt the need to focus on their faxing services for the scope of this review. In addition to low prices, they also offer great mobile apps, making it easy to work from a computer or a mobile device.

Prices

Overall, we felt that RingCentral offered customers a lot of "bang" for their buck. You get a large number of pages for free per month before you have to pay a per page fee. We felt that this made it easy for businesses to not worry about additional cost for sending faxes per month. Here are the page number allotments that you get with each service level:

• Fax 500: 500 pages
• Fax 1000: 1000 pages
• Fax 2500: 2500 pages
• Fax Unlimited: Unlimited pages.

User-Friendly

With RingCentral, we found that custom cover sheets are a possibility, without the need to include the cover sheet as an attachment. The user-friendly interface lets you preview your faxes if you don't want to print them. Also, it is possible to edit, annotate, and sign your documents, all from within the sleek and powerful user platform.

Power Users

Boom! With RingCentral, there are some powerful features for advanced users. With a little bit of help from RingCentral, you can easily change your file preference from PDF to TIFF, decreasing the size of the file that you will have to download. You can also create powerful broadcast groups for regular fax broadcasting. Another great feature of RingCentral is that you are able to block users, such as advertisers who might "spam" your fax number with unsolicited advertising.

High Integration

One of the downfalls of RingCentral is that the storage space they allot you only lets you keep faxes for 90 days. BUT, you can easily integrate your RingCentral fax service with services such as Dropbox and others. Here are the integration features that we liked with RingCentral:

• Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive integrations.
• Cloud-based storage providers let you send faxes from your cloud storage service, via desktop or mobile device.
• High-integration options with Microsoft Outlook (a "Send Fax" button, in addition to your other standard email functions).

Toll-Free, Local, and Vanity Numbers

Do you want a local, toll-free, or vanity number? RingCentral gives you the option of securing these for your business, so that fax senders to your business don't have to pay more. The vanity number is a great feature because it lets you send and receive documents from a number that wholly brands your business.

Downloadable Integrations for Microsoft Outlook

We also liked the added functionality with the free Microsoft Outlook integration. Is your business running on Windows XP still? Don't worry, as the Microsoft integration is still supported with Windows XP. Also, enjoy the benefits of Microsoft Outlook integration with a Mac, available for Mac OS X users, 10.6 and higher.

• Lack of an internal fax viewer
• Storage confusion

We had a few questions about the services that RingCentral offered. We got conflicting information from their website and during our live chat experience. We also wanted a better internal viewing option with RingCentral.

Lack of an Internal Fax Viewer

You don't have to worry about this feature if you are sending and receiving your faxes via your Outlook app or your company email. The problem that we ran into was with the lack of an internal viewing option on the RingCentral softphone. You have to individually download the fax so that you can see its contents. This means that you might be spending a little bit of time waiting for large files to open on your PDF or digital image viewer.

Storage Confusion

We were confused about the storage options offered through RingCentral. On their website, they say that you have unlimited storage option for viewing your faxes, up to 200 faxes. Faxes are only stored for up to 90 days before they are deleted. We believe that the best way to circumvent this problem is to store your faxes in a cloud storage service, such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

Ultimately, we recommend RingCentral as a provider of Internet faxing services. We liked the ability to purchase cloud communications to further bolster the cloud communication paradigm, but we also really liked the ability to get RingCentral for faxing only. All the subscription levels let you send a high number of faxes per month, in comparison to some other companies we reviewed. We would like to see more information on their website in the terms of tutorials that better demonstrate the product.