Best Registered Agent Services in Georgia

Today, launching a small business is an easy task for nearly anyone. Once you have some cool business idea in your head, you just need to establish a legal entity to start bringing your endeavors and cravings to life.

Legalizing your venture is as simple as filing a company with the state. The only thing to remember here is that each state has certain rules for business formation you should observe to stick to the letter of the law.

If you plan to open an LLC or incorporate in Georgia, before you submit your formation documents to the Corporations Division of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office, you should appoint a registered agent for an LLC in Georgia.

A registered, statutory, or resident agent works as a sort of “mailbox” for your corporate correspondence. It’s a person or entity in charge of receiving letters and packs on behalf of your company and making them available to you in an opportune manner, files Georgia articles of organization and does other things your business needs.

The main requirement for a mailing representative in Georgia is the state residence. In other words, you should appoint either an adult individual or a legal entity with a GA registered address capable of being permanently present under that address during business hours on weekdays.

When it comes to the Georgia registered agent search, you can either do it on your own or let someone do it for you. We’ve already done a great bit of job and offer you to consider our Georgia registered agent reviews below. With multiple options checked and sorted out, we’ve made a list of alternatives we deem the best for this area.

Registered Agent for an LLC in Georgia: Our Local Suggestions

Who can be your registered agent? In general, you can either perform this role by yourself or entrust it to a third party. Delegating the task to a third party is a better choice for many reasons that we’ll describe a bit later. Yet, instead of randomly picking a family member or friend, we recommend that you turn your eyes to professional services.

The modern registered agent market abounds in smaller and bigger companies providing agent services at local and national levels. While national operators offer nationwide presence and brand power, local companies have a better command of state and local laws, which is a big plus when seeking an assignee for a certain area.

If you prefer appointing a mailing rep locally, you can either ask for the Georgia Secretary of State's registered agent's advice or review our local suggestions below.

Registered Agent in Roswell, GA

A Georgia Registered Agent LLC is a local company sitting in Roswell and dedicated to providing legal services in Georgia. If you’ve decided to move to the south and are new to this state, with Georgia Registered Agent on your side, things will get much easier and faster.

The company can provide professional assistance in forming your legal entity in this state, as well as serve as your representative agent here. It has enough experience and knows all the ins and outs of Georgia law. So, you can rest assured your business formalities will be in safe hands.

As far as the registered agent service in Georgia is concerned, you’ll be given just what you need and even more. All your documents will be scanned right after receipt and made available to you remotely to avert any missed dates and missed actions. The company will use its own registered address for filing purposes to keep your personal data secret. Keeping an eye on your compliance status, your agent will send you prompt reminders so that you can catch up with crucial reporting and filing requirements.

What you’ll like the most about Georgia Registered Agent is that the top-of-the-line service they deliver is offered at a ridiculously low price. An annual subscription comes at $25, with no hidden charges or extras to it. That’s a real deal we must admit.

Registered Agent in Atlanta, GA

Though Atlanta is the biggest city in the state, finding a registered agent here might turn out quite a challenge. While you can always refer to one of the national companies, you won’t find a dedicated operator in this area.

However, if you are about to start your LLC in Georgia and need solid professional support, hiring an expert is the best way out. Many people steer away from hiring attorneys for that purpose since the prices are unreasonably high. Yet, it won’t be the case with  Funderburg Law. It’s a smaller legal firm run by a professional lawyer. Instead of relying on billable hour rates, they offer flat rates for all their services, thus, ensuring, there will be no unpleasant surprises on your way.

By hiring a lawyer to be your mailing rep in Georgia, you benefit from many aspects. Not only will an expert fill in and file your registered agent consent form in Georgia and personally handle your business correspondence and service of process but also you can get professional support on many other business-related issues if necessary.

Thus, having once started as a solopreneur and eventually shifted to an LLC, the Finderburg Law Firm founder knows all the tricks and peculiarities of running an LLC in Georgia. Besides, the company is specialized in copyright and trademarking law. So, should you ever need assistance in that field, you’ll already have a helper.

Best Registered Agent Services in Georgia: National Operators

When doing a Georgia business registered agent search, you’ll spot a whole number of companies providing their services across the US. Most often than not, those are not only representative agent services but also formation assistance and a whole range of other options meant to match your post-formation needs.

If you tend to trust bigger names and wonder how to pick a national provider that will best suit your business needs in Georgia, check our best Georgia registered agent reviews to consider the best alternatives.

Northwest Registered Agent Service

Northwest pops up in all best service ratings, and we’ve made this provider a number one in our Georgia registered agent service ranking for a number of reasons. Starting as an agent service company, Northwest has quickly expanded its activity to business formation assistance. Thus, the company has become a one-stop shop for multiple business needs. And it still holds leading positions today.

Northwest Pluses

Northwest is a top-ranked professional service backed by a strong track record and customer loyalty. The company is distinguished by high service quality and solid positions in many aspects. Let’s take a closer look at the Northwest fortes:

• Premium registered agent service: Since representative service used to be Northwest's bread and butter, the company has an extended agent network across the US. They never outsource their services. Hence, you'll be assigned a dedicated rep in any state you plan to establish an enterprise in. All your documents will be received and handled internally by the company’s specialists. The same is true for the document filings that are done exclusively by the Northwest in-house managers;
• Reasonable pricing: Northwest fees might be not the cheapest out there, yet they stand in line with average market rates and are overall lower than those offered by other top-tier services. The best thing is that the price of an annual agent subscription (at $125) is fully justified by the service quality covering same-day document scanning and compliance alerts;
• Privacy protection: With Northwest, you can rest assured your data won’t be disclosed to any third parties other than the company representative in charge of your business mail. Likewise, the service uses advanced protection protocols to prevent identity theft and make your account on their online platform a safe place;
• One-of-a-kind customer support: Along with an in-house agent network, Northwest has an internal team of support professionals that will provide detailed and knowledgeable answers to all your questions. You can contact them via phone, email, or online chat. They permanently stay in touch during business hours and even beyond. Yet, what brings the Northwest client service to another level is their unique Corporate Guides. The company employs a whole group of former attorneys, tax consultants, accountants, and entrepreneurs from different business spheres who will readily share their experiences with you and answer your questions related to a specific business area.

Northwest Minuses

Too much is sometimes just too much. It might sound a bit strange but the Northwest's biggest plus is its minus at the same time. We mean customer support. It’s organized in a way that provides you with the best solution for your issue. For that purpose, Northwest help reps are trained to ask clarifying questions that help reveal any hidden problems and minor details and help you find the best way out.

However, the above approach is a bit offputting at times, especially when you just need a quick and simple response instead of being led deeper into other problems.

Roundup

Northwest is a customer-focused provider that stands perfectly in between premium and affordable services. In our opinion, it’s the best Georgia registered agent service you can find so far. Its up-to-par service quality and advanced features speak for themselves.

InCorp Registered Agent

InCorp is yet another dedicated statutory agent service company on our list. The main reason why it’s a runner-up to Northwest is that it lags behind in popularity and formation service quality. Similar to Northwest, InCorp has its own agents in every US state and is a reliable national operator. To better understand where InCorp falls short as compared to the top-liner, let’s take a closer look at its strong and weak points.

InCorp Pluses

When it comes to representative service, in addition to standard features, InCorp has a few premium perks that make it stand out:

• Data security: The company applies a branded Entity Watch Technology that helps protect customer personal info and business data from unauthorized disclosure or theft. What’s more, this technology will trace your business compliance status by scrutinizing the public databases;
• More efficient management: Via the Entity Management software incorporated into your personal online dashboard, you’ll be able to set up compliance reminders and catch up with your compliance requirements, as well as store your business docs well-organized;
• Smart billing: If you appoint InCorp as your mailing rep in several states, you will receive a consolidated account for all those services that will save you the hassle of multiple payments and make accounting for those expenses easier overall;
• Personalized customer service: InCorp customer support is rightfully its biggest pride. As a company client, you’ll be assigned a personal help rep that you can contact each time you have any questions. This person will be aware of your business situation and will come up with more efficient solutions for your issues;
• Bulk discounts: At $129 per annual agent subscription, InCorp stands in line with Northwest for agent service pricing in Georgia. However, the company has a great discount system in place. Each next year will come at a discounted price. Thus, subject to a 5-year order, the price will be only $87 per annum.

InCorp Minuses

The biggest InCorp drawback is that the company’s focus is rather shifted to the agent service, thus, leaving formation assistance a bit behind. While the provider offers a flexible pricing approach, its baseline formation pack is pretty expensive (at $99) and scarce. To make it complete, you’ll have to bump the final price up to $200 or even more.

Roundup

One of the best statutory agent services in Georgia, InCorp is not the best formation service. As such, it’s a better alternative for those who already have a formed business and seek a reliable representative service for it.

ZenBusiness

ZenBusiness is an extremely popular name in the business formation market today. Operating since 2015, the company is a relative newcomer as compared to the industry's old-timers. However, it has managed to build an impressive customer portfolio and gain a solid reputation many other market players still don’t have.

ZenBusiness Pluses

There are two aspects that make ZenBusiness stand out among its rivals straight away:

• Affordable pricing: ZenBusiness is one of the companies that offer really affordable pricing. Its basic formation pack at $49 hits the tops of multiple ratings and for a good reason. At an entry-level price, it covers full-scale formation since it embraces an annual registered agent subscription and custom company bylaws. Agent service alone comes at $99. It’s a highly competitive fee that is below the market average;
• Feature-rich representative agent service: ZenBusiness will ensure professional mail handling and provide immediate access to the scans of your letters via an online dashboard. Add to this solid online protection, functional and responsive customer support, and a compliance calendar to maintain your good standing with the state.

ZenBusiness Minuses

As popular as it is, ZenBusiness is not perfect. Thus, the representative service price is not clear and you won’t find it on the front page. Though it’s the same for each state, to figure it out, you’ll have to complete an online questionnaire which is a bit annoying.

Besides, while answering the questions, you’ll find out that a compliance calendar is not covered by the basic agent’s rate of $99. You’ll have to pay $50 more for it.

Roundup

ZenBusiness smartly combines agent and formation services in an affordable and efficient bundle that will be a great deal for anyone who seeks to start a new business in Georgia and want to save on pricey services.

LegalZoom

If you rely on brand power and a hard-to-beat reputation, you can’t go wrong with LegalZoom. It’s an industry giant that operates in a premium sector and offers a whole variety of legal services to individuals along with formation and registered agent services.

LegalZoom Pluses

Outstanding brand power supported by a long track record and immense customer loyalty is the most valuable company asset. LegalZoom boasts high professionalism and service quality that is hard to match.

By choosing this company as your agent for service of process in Georgia, you can expect that your mail will be handled and organized in the best manner possible, your sensitive data will be securely protected, and you’ll receive regular compliance reminders to observe your compliance requirements in time. Besides, LegalZoom provides its customers with unlimited cloud storage to create an online depot of all your essential business documents.

A stellar feature of LegalZoom mail-handling service is its exclusive $1,000,000 identity theft protection guarantee. Not only does it ensure the highest data protection level but also shows the company’s dedication to its customers.

LegalZoom Minuses

The biggest LegalZoom con is expensive pricing. With formation rates starting at $79 (with no representative service included) and a registered agent service fee of $299 per year, this provider is by far the most expensive out there.

More than that, the agent service is renewable and will be automatically prolonged if you don’t cancel. Besides, once the fee is charged, it’s non-refundable.

Roundup

LegalZoom is a choice for those who value professionalism and solid reputation and are ready to pay some extra for brand power.

Georgia Registered Agent Reviews: Quick Conclusions

When choosing between national registered agent services in Georgia, we suggest turning your eyes to Northwest and InCorp that come up with the best offerings. While Northwest excels in agent and formation services alike, InCorp comes up with an exclusive discount Georgia registered agent service other providers fail to match.

Benefits of Using a Georgia Registered Agent Service

As we’ve already stated above, you can serve as a statutory agent for your own LLC or corporation in the state of formation if you have a registered address in that state. Or you can appoint any third party to this role, including one of the dedicated services.

Before we explain why entrusting this function to professionals is the best choice, let’s dig into what this function is. It’s more than a formal position required by law. Handling your business mail and service of process and ensuring your company’s smooth communications with the state, a representative agent actually stands on guard of your business compliance status. It reduces the risk of missed reporting dates, lawsuits, and filing deadlines to the minimum. And, as a result, it maintains a good business reputation for your entity.

If you still doubt that hiring a professional service is better than fulfilling an agent’s function on your own or choosing a random person to be your resident agent in Georgia, here are a few more reasons to persuade you:

• Privacy screen: State law requires that agent rep data should be made a part of public record along with the company info. Should you serve your own registered agent, your personal data will appear in all public and state registries. With a dedicated service, on the other hand, your individual info will stay confidential. Likewise, your sensitive documents will be given more protection via organized storage and handling;
• Perfect document control: Your business mail will contain not only crucial letters, public notifications, and vital papers. There will be a lot of scams and junk mail too. In piles of useless advertisements and promotional leaflets, it’s easy to miss simple envelopes that are important. Meanwhile, your personal mailing agent will diligently check all your mail, sort out all meaningful letters, and ensure that you’ll get them asap;
• Easy time-planning: As a beginner businessman, you’ll have a lot of tasks on your plate, and time will become one of your most precious assets. Since a representative agent function requires permanent presence under the registered address, it will greatly limit your time planning capabilities. Yet, by delegating this job to an agent service, you’ll get much more flexibility in planning your work and leisure as you deem necessary. Your work will be more efficient, and you’ll have more time for your personal affairs;
• Nationwide availability: When starting a business in Georgia, you need a representative agent there. However, at some point, you might want to move or expand your business to another state and will have to look for a mail-handling assistant in that state as well. Most agent service companies offer national availability and can cover your business needs in all US states, saving you the trouble to search high and low in each new state you have in your business plans.

Best Georgia Registered Agent: How We Choose

It’s hard to take someone’s opinion or recommendations for granted if you are not sure you can trust them. Below, we’ll describe our methodology in more detail and explain why you can trust our reviews and the conclusions we’ve made.

Why You Can Rely on Our Choice

When you are about to use some new product or service, how do you choose the one among multiple offerings? We bet you’ll do your own search to find the most popular providers and check customer reviews, of course. But have you ever noticed how much time you’ve spent on that search? It could take from a few hours to whole days and still leave you wondering.

We use a very similar scheme when choosing the agent service providers in Georgia and do all the legwork for you to take every strain out of this process and save you a lot of time. We do read hundreds of customer reviews to pinpoint the real strong and weak sides of each service provider. We also scrutinize detailed best service guides from other professionals to understand if those services look good enough to experts. Finally, we talk to the companies’ sales teams about what they sell customers on and see if what they offer aligns with what they deliver in practice.

Thus, when doing research, we know exactly what to look for and what a good agent service should look like. In other words, we have more experience and already have an eye for details.

Best Registered Agent Service in Georgia: Selection Criteria

You’ll find quite a number of registered agent services in Georgia. How to pick the one that will suit you among dozens of options? To cut down our list to a few alternatives, we estimate providers using the following criteria:

• Choice of features: While the basic representative agent’s role is to receive your corporate mail and transfer it to you, companies add other useful services to their agent offerings to get customers hooked and stand out from the competition. The more add-ons they bring, the more value you’ll get. Any associated services such as business formation and maintenance assistance will be a big plus as well;
• Pricing approach: Some companies offer their services at higher rates while others strive to be affordable. While expensive is not always about premium features, cheap doesn’t necessarily mean poor quality. However, the biggest benefit for a customer is when a provider tries to stay in line with average market rates and offer the maximum to its users. In other words, we look at the price-to-value ratio when estimating the agent services in Georgia;
• Ease of use: Some companies have been operating for decades and manage to keep up with modern realia while other old-timers still stick to processes that are outdated and inconvenient. The easy and straightforward signup process and simple online access to your docs are two must-have aspects of any online service today. It’s never worth sacrificing your own comfort and convenience for clunky systems that need optimization;
• Customer support: Poor customer service immediately pulls down the service rating. All reputed providers should have an efficient and helpful client support center in place and provide customers with more than one contact method. While being accessible, help reps should be friendly, polite, knowledgeable, and eager to help.

These are the criteria we use when making up our Georgia registered agent services list. And our top-liners match all of them while other companies might lag behind in some aspects.

FAQ

There are a few most common questions nearly all customers ask when they consider appointing a representative agent for their business in Georgia. And we respond to them.