Learn · Choosing a tool

Canny Pigeons vs. the alternatives

The DMARC monitoring market has excellent products at very different price points. Here's how we compare with the four names you'll run into most — DMARCLY, EasyDMARC, dmarcian and PowerDMARC — using each vendor's own published pricing, checked on 16 July 2026. If anything here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.

Free tiers compared

If you want a free tier you can genuinely run a business domain on, the honest shortlist is us and nobody: DMARCLY has no free plan, dmarcian's and PowerDMARC's free tiers are restricted to personal use, and EasyDMARC's 1,000 messages and 14 days of history are sized as a demo. Ours is 10,000 compliant messages (spoofed traffic never counts), 30 days of history, unlimited users, and hosted DMARC included — permanently.

Entry-level paid plans compared

At the entry tier, $19 buys you 5× the volume of any competitor's entry plan, more domains than all but PowerDMARC, and the only unlimited-seats policy in the table — your whole team can read reports without seat math. Volume counting matters too: like PowerDMARC (and unlike most), we count only DMARC-compliant mail, so a spoofing wave never eats your quota.

Change detection and IP intelligence

Two things decide whether enforcement stays working after you reach p=reject: noticing when someone edits a DNS record, and knowing who the unfamiliar sending IPs actually are. Most vendors offer some form of both — the differences are in tier, coverage and whether it pushes to you or waits to be looked at.

We're not claiming to have invented either. DMARCLY will email you on a record change from its cheapest paid plan, and PowerDMARC's threat intelligence is deeper than ours wherever you can get it. What's different here is where they sit: both are on the free tier, our drift check covers MX and DKIM as well as SPF and DMARC, and it arrives as a daily diff in your inbox rather than a history view you have to remember to open. If you want commercial-grade IP risk scoring specifically, PowerDMARC's add-on is the better buy.

Where the others shine

An honest comparison cuts both ways. Where each competitor is genuinely strong:

• PowerDMARC is the price-performance standout at the low end after us — $12/mo annual with hosted DMARC, a full year of history (beating our 6 months), and a wide add-on catalog: hosted MTA-STS, TLS-RPT, and BIMI. Its Threat Intelligence engine — Cisco Talos, Fortinet and SecLytics feeds across 200+ blocklists, with a 0–100 risk score per IP — is more thorough than our enrichment, though it sits on Enterprise/MSP plans or a paid add-on. If you need those adjacent standards managed for you today, it's a strong pick.
• dmarcian was founded by one of DMARC's co-authors and its educational depth is unmatched. Larger businesses with compliance requirements get a very mature platform — at a price that reflects it (the tier above Basic jumps to $240/mo).
• EasyDMARC has a polished UI and strong guided workflows, with managed DMARC and a dedicated engineer at the higher tiers — a good fit if you want more hand-holding and are happy paying $90+/mo for it.
• DMARCLY is a straightforward, no-frills tool with per-tier limits that scale predictably into the enterprise range (up to 200 domains). It's also the only competitor here that puts DNS-change email alerts and IP reputation monitoring on its entry paid plan rather than reserving them for higher tiers.

Where we're deliberately different

• Hosted DMARC on every plan, including Free. You publish one CNAME; policy changes (none → quarantine → reject, and back) are dashboard buttons. Elsewhere this is a premium feature or not offered at all.
• Unlimited users, always. Seats are never a line item. Competitors' entry tiers are all single-seat.
• Only compliant mail counts. Your quota measures your real sending, not your attackers' enthusiasm.
• IP intelligence on every plan, including Free. Each source IP is enriched with geolocation, network owner (ASN) and threat flags — Tor exit nodes, known attackers, abusers — right in the report view. Others offer this too, but usually further up the price list, and PowerDMARC's richer version is an Enterprise plan or a paid add-on. How to read the flags →
• Daily DNS drift alerts, included. We re-check every domain's DMARC, SPF, MX and DKIM records daily and email you a before/after diff when anything changes — a quietly edited record is how spoofing returns after enforcement, and how legitimate mail starts bouncing. DMARCLY alerts on DMARC/SPF/DKIM changes from its cheapest paid plan; ours adds MX and runs on the free tier. Why records drift →
• Soft caps. Hitting your volume limit shows a banner; it never stops ingestion or hides data.
• Simple plans, no matrix. Free and Pro ($19) cover almost everyone; agencies managing more than 5 domains get one custom Agency plan — no add-on pricing to decode either way. The trade-off is real: we don't (yet) offer hosted MTA-STS/BIMI, forensic-report handling, or enterprise SSO — if you need those today, look at the vendors above.

Competitor pricing and limits from each vendor's public pricing page as of 16 July 2026; feature availability read from public pricing and feature pages on 26 July 2026. "Not listed" means we couldn't find the capability published, not that the vendor can't do it. Plans, prices and features change — verify with the vendor before purchasing. All trademarks belong to their owners; no endorsement implied.