You published a DMARC record because Google or your cyber-insurance carrier told you to. It has p=none in it. The reports go to a mailbox that now holds a few thousand zipped XML files, and you have not opened one since spring.

That is the most common DMARC setup in small-business IT, and it is fixable without a budget meeting. There are good options at every price from free to a few hundred dollars a month. Here is how they compare, and how to pick one without turning it into a project.

A disclosure first: I build MonitorDMARC, so I am in this list. I have tried to treat everyone fairly, and I will say where another tool is the better fit. All prices below were read from each vendor’s public pricing page on October 27, 2026. Pricing pages change, so check before you buy.

What you actually need from a DMARC tool

A DMARC tool does one job: it receives the aggregate (RUA) reports that Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo and others send, parses the XML, and shows you who is sending mail as your domain and whether it passes SPF, DKIM and DMARC. If you have ever tried to do that by hand, you know why people pay for it. We walk through the manual version in How to Read DMARC Reports, and it is a good way to appreciate a dashboard.

For a small shop, I would judge the options on five things:

  1. Domains. Most small businesses have one or two, plus a parked or legacy domain someone forgot about.
  2. Volume. Reports are counted by the messages they cover. A monthly newsletter can eat a small allowance quickly.
  3. History. One month is enough to fix this week’s problem. It is not enough to answer “were we enforcing DMARC last year?”
  4. Alerts. You have 49 other things to do. A tool that tells you when something breaks beats one you have to remember to log in to.
  5. Price you can approve on a company card. Under about $50 a month, most small shops do not need a purchase order.

The free options

Free tools are real and worth using if your needs are modest.

Postmark DMARC Digests (free tier). Postmark’s free monitoring emails you a weekly summary. It shows your top 10 mail sources with 5 IPs each, keeps 7 days of history, and has no web dashboard. Their paid DMARC Digests tier is $14 per domain per month and adds a dashboard, 60 days of history and all sources. For a single domain where you just want a Monday-morning look at who is sending, this is hard to beat on price.

dmarcian Personal. $0, up to 2 domains, 1 month of history, and 1,250 DMARC-capable messages a month. That volume cap is the catch. It is fine for a low-volume domain and gets tight quickly if you send any real mail.

DMARC Report Core. Free, 1 domain, 10,000 messages a month, 30 days of history.

The pattern with free tiers is that they cap volume, history, or both, which makes them good for getting started and awkward for proving anything to an auditor six months later.

The paid options, side by side

Tool and plan Price Domains History Volume
dmarcian Basic $24/mo, or $19.99/mo billed yearly 2 3 months 100,000 msgs/mo
DMARC Report Guard $25/mo or $275/yr 5 (see note) 6 months 250,000 msgs/mo
EasyDMARC DMARC Plus $44.99/mo, or $35.99/mo billed yearly 2 3 months 100,000 to 1,000,000 emails/mo depending on option
MonitorDMARC Starter $19.99/mo or $199.90/yr 2 1 year 500,000 emails/mo
MonitorDMARC Professional $49.99/mo 5 2 years 2,000,000 emails/mo

A note on DMARC Report: its pricing page lists a 5-domain limit on Guard in the plan table but says in the FAQ that all paid plans support unlimited domains. Ask them which is true before you count on it.

Two things stand out. First, the entry-level plans from the specialist vendors cluster around $20 to $45 a month for two domains, so you are choosing on history, volume and features, not on a huge price gap. Second, history varies a lot: from 3 months to 1 year at roughly the same entry price.

Where each one fits

Pick Postmark’s free digest if you have one domain, you want a weekly summary, and you do not need a dashboard or long history.

Pick dmarcian if you want a long-established vendor with a free tier to try. Their paid tiers also scale up to 15 domains and unlimited history on the Enterprise plan, though that plan is $499 to $600 a month, which is well outside most small-business budgets.

Pick EasyDMARC if you want a broader platform. Their higher tiers bundle deliverability testing and threat intelligence, and they publish a large integrations list. You pay more for that breadth, and the entry plan carries 3 months of history.

Pick MonitorDMARC if you mainly want to see who is sending as your domain, get emailed when something changes, and keep a year of history on the cheapest plan. We monitor your SPF, DKIM, DMARC and BIMI records and alert you when they change, which catches the “someone edited DNS and broke SPF” problem before it turns into a week of spam-foldered invoices. MonitorDMARC alerts are by email only, so if you need Slack or a ticketing integration, look elsewhere. The 14-day trial needs no credit card and includes 2 domains.

If you are comparing us directly with EasyDMARC, we put the two side by side in MonitorDMARC vs EasyDMARC.

A quick way to decide

Start with what you are trying to prove and to whom. If the answer is “nobody asks, I just want to know,” a free digest is plenty. If you need to show a cyber-insurance carrier or an auditor that you were monitoring over the last year, you need at least 12 months of history, and that narrows the field. If management is asking whether the spend is worth it, the ROI of DMARC has the numbers to bring to that conversation.

Whatever you choose, the setup is about the same: you add one rua= address to your DMARC record. For MonitorDMARC that looks like this:

_dmarc.example.com. IN TXT "v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:[email protected]"

Our setup guide covers the rest, including the DNS record that verifies you own the domain.

Try it on your own mail

A comparison table cannot tell you what your mail flow looks like. Your own reports can. Start the 14-day MonitorDMARC trial (no credit card), point your rua= tag at us, and see who is really sending as your domain. Plan details are on the pricing page.

References