A Valimail alternative: Patchkit compared

Valimail details are taken from Valimail's own pages as published on October 10, 2026. Prices are shown exactly as listed there, with their currency and billing period, and they change often. A — means the official pages did not state it.

Who each product is for

Valimail sells three products that you can combine. Monitor is a free DMARC monitoring service. Enforce is the paid product that automates the work of reaching and keeping DMARC enforcement, in Starter, Premium and Enterprise plans. Amplify is an add-on for BIMI, the standard that shows your brand logo in supported inboxes. Valimail says it has offered automated DMARC since 2015, and its site addresses enterprise, midmarket and small business buyers and industries such as government, healthcare and higher education. Enforce is SOC 2, PCI and GDPR compliant, and the Enterprise plan has a FedRAMP deployment option.

Patchkit is a self-serve tool for the people who manage a handful of domains themselves: a business owner, a developer or a small IT team. It explains what is wrong with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, gives the record to publish, and reads your DMARC reports to guide you to p=reject.

Price and plan limits

Monitor is free; Valimail's sign-up page says no credit card is required and that it is free and always will be, and the plan table lists up to five users. For Enforce, every plan on the Valimail pricing page says to contact Valimail for custom pricing, and the page does not state domain limits for any plan, which is why the table shows a dash there. Starter and higher plans include unlimited users, onboarding assistance and a dedicated account manager.

The two free plans are close in spirit; the paid side is where they part. Valimail sells Enforce through a conversation, with onboarding help and an account manager included. Patchkit sells through a price list and a checkout: $9/mo for 3 domains, $29/mo for 15 and $79/mo for 75, or 10 months' worth for a year, upgraded from the billing page. The free plan covers 1 domain with 14 days of history. You get no account manager and support by email, with team seats for up to 10 people on the Agency plan.

Free tools without an account

Valimail's site links a Domain Checker, a DKIM Checker, an SPF Record Validator, a DMARC Report Analyzer, a BIMI Logo Validator and a Domain Lookalike Finder. Patchkit's BIMI checker also validates the logo file, but Patchkit has no lookalike-domain tool. Monitor itself also includes a check of whether your sending is ready for the Google, Microsoft and Yahoo sender requirements and a BIMI preview of your logo.

Patchkit offers the domain health check, the DMARC checker, the SPF checker, the DKIM checker, the MX lookup, the SPF generator, the DKIM generator, the DMARC generator, the DMARC report analyzer, the email header analyzer, the BIMI checker, the MTA-STS checker, the MTA-STS generator, the TLS-RPT report analyzer, the blacklist checker and the PTR checker; the health check combines the DMARC, SPF, DKIM and MX checks into one score. All of them are one-off checks that need no account. Monitoring is narrower: the scheduled health measurement scores DMARC, SPF, DKIM and MX, and record alerts watch your DMARC and SPF records. Common findings link to a generator or a guide that explains the fix, and the setup guides cover common senders and DNS hosts. Unlike Valimail's set, there is no lookalike-domain tool.

Report monitoring and alerts

You point your DMARC record at Valimail Monitor and it shows the traffic sent on your behalf, with services identified by name, which domains pass and fail DMARC, aligned SPF and DKIM, and a weekly DMARC report by email. Enforce adds downloadable and executive reports from Starter and subdomain reports from Premium. For failure data, the Enterprise plan lists a new privacy-safe RUF+ feature. Every plan, Free included, has a notification center for events such as suspicious senders and DMARC policy changes; smart alerts start at Premium and configurable alerts are on Enterprise.

Valimail spreads alerting across its plan ladder, with the configurable kind reserved for Enterprise. Patchkit has one fixed set of alerts on every plan, chosen for a small team rather than a security operations desk: a removed or changed record, SPF over its lookup limit, a new unknown sender, a drop in alignment, and reports that stop arriving. You cannot write your own rules. Free shows them in the dashboard, Starter and up also email them, and every plan gets a weekly summary, much like Monitor's weekly report. Reports are aggregate only; Patchkit has no counterpart to RUF+.

The path to p=reject

This is where the two differ most. Valimail Enforce is built around automation: services are authorized with one click, Instant SPF removes the SPF lookup limit, DKIM keys can be managed in the application, and the pricing page says Enforce reaches DMARC enforcement in 60 days or less. On the free plan, automated DMARC is listed as limited and SPF stays at 10 lookups.

That automation rests on delegation. Valimail's DNS setup guide for Enforce has you point _dmarc (and _domainkey) at Valimail with NS records and replace your SPF record with its Instant SPF macro, so Valimail answers those queries and can move your policy for you. Patchkit asks for none of that. Your records stay ordinary TXT entries in your zone, and the path-to-p=reject roadmap tells you when your reports show you are ready and what the next record should say. Each policy step is a change you make yourself, which is slower than automation but keeps your DNS independent of any vendor.

Where Valimail is the better fit

For a large organization that wants enforcement handled for it, with compliance paperwork to match, Valimail covers ground Patchkit does not:

• DMARC enforcement handled by automation, with one-click sender authorization, without complex DNS work.
• Hosted SPF through Instant SPF, which lifts the 10-lookup limit, and DKIM key management in the application.
• BIMI on every plan and the Amplify add-on to get your logo into inboxes.
• Enterprise controls: SAML single sign-on, enforced MFA, role-based access, a FedRAMP deployment option and API access.
• A multi-tenant MSP platform with team-based alerting, and, in its DMARC Pro tier, BIMI management, MTA-STS and continuous protection reporting.
• A free monitoring plan for up to five users, where Patchkit has a single login.

Patchkit's free BIMI checker and MTA-STS checker are one-off checks; it doesn't manage or monitor BIMI or MTA-STS for you.

Patchkit suits the opposite situation: a small business or a developer who wants to read the price before signing up, prefers not to hand DNS names to a vendor, and is happy to make a few record changes by hand. Its SPF checker shows which includes use up your lookups, and the SPF generator rebuilds a record you keep.

How to switch, or try both

The steps depend on which Valimail product you use. According to Valimail's guide to pointing DMARC to Valimail, Monitor users add a Valimail address to the rua tag of their own TXT record, while Enforce delegates _dmarc to Valimail with an NS record (or a CNAME where the DNS host cannot do NS) and removes the TXT record.

On Monitor, the move is a one-tag change:

1. Register the domain in Patchkit; its setup screen generates your existing record with a second report address in it.
2. Swap that in for the TXT record, let Monitor's weekly report and Patchkit's dashboard run in parallel, then delete Valimail's address.

On Enforce, you are taking the DNS names back, so plan it as a small migration:

1. Write down the policy and report settings Valimail currently serves for the domain, and the DKIM keys of every sender.
2. Publish those DKIM keys as records in your own zone and remove the NS delegation of _domainkey, so signatures keep verifying.
3. Replace the Instant SPF macro with an SPF record that lists your senders; the SPF checker warns if it needs more than 10 lookups.
4. Remove the _dmarc NS or CNAME record and publish a TXT record with your current policy and the Patchkit address, built with the DMARC generator.

Do each step while the old setup still works, and check the result with the domain health check before you end the Valimail contract.

Sources and what they leave out

Valimail's products and plan features come from its pricing, Monitor, Enforce and MSP pages; the setup details come from two articles in its help center. All were read on the date at the top. Valimail does not publish prices or domain limits, so the table cannot compare them and shows a dash or "Contact sales" instead. If Valimail's pages change, please tell us at support@patchkit.app.