← All comparisons
Uplapse vs MxToolbox
An MxToolbox alternative for SPF, DKIM and DMARC that keeps watching
MxToolbox is where many people first look up an MX record or a blacklist. This page sets out, from its public pricing and blacklist pages, where it is the better choice and where Uplapse is.
At a glance
| Compared | MxToolbox | Uplapse |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 1 domain, weekly blacklist monitoring | 5 monitors, checks every 3 minutes; SPF, DKIM and DMARC monitors count as monitors like any other |
| Paid plans | Delivery Center $129/month (5 domains); Delivery Center Plus $399/month (5 domains) | Starter $29/month: 25 monitors, 30-second checks. Growth $119/month: 200 monitors, 15-second checks |
| One-off checks without an account | MX, blacklist and many other lookups; the blacklist check tests over 100 DNS blacklists | Free SPF, DKIM and DMARC checkers, and one that checks all three together |
| Email authentication monitoring | Part of its monitoring plans | SPF and DMARC rechecked on a schedule, with a minimum DMARC policy you choose; DKIM when you give the selector |
| Deliverability | Inbox placement analyses (30 a month on Delivery Center, 100 on Plus), DMARC delivery performance reports, SPF flattening on Plus | Not offered: no inbox placement tests, DMARC aggregate reports or SPF flattening |
| Uptime and the rest | Not the focus of these plans | Website, API, heartbeat, certificate and domain expiry monitoring in the same account |
MxToolbox details are from its public pricing page, read on . Prices change; check MxToolbox pricing, MxToolbox blacklist check for current terms. Something missing from a pricing page is not proof the product lacks it.
Where MxToolbox is the better choice
- Deliverability work. If the question is “why is our mail landing in spam”, its inbox placement analyses, DMARC delivery reports and SPF flattening go much further. Uplapse checks the records and the servers; it does not measure where your mail lands.
- Blacklists. Its blacklist check tests over 100 lists. Uplapse does not check blacklists.
- Every lookup you can think of. It has been the reference for one-off DNS and mail lookups for many years.
Where Uplapse is the better choice
- The checks keep running. A one-off lookup tells you the records are right today. An Uplapse email authentication monitor rechecks them and alerts you when SPF disappears after a provider change, or when the DMARC policy drops below the level you set.
- A small business price. SPF, DKIM and DMARC monitoring is on the free plan, and the paid plans start at $29/month.
- Mail next to everything else. The same account watches the website, the API, certificates and the domain registration, so the expiry of the domain your mail depends on is caught too.
Try it without an account: the SPF, DKIM and DMARC checker looks at all three records in one go, and the SPF, DKIM and DMARC checkers at one record each. SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained covers what each record does.
What Uplapse does differently
- The failures that come before an outage. Certificate expiry and changes, domain registration expiry read from the registry over RDAP, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, and Certificate Transparency monitoring for certificates issued in your name. They are on every plan, not held back for higher tiers.
- Evidence, not just up or down. Content and response assertions, multi-step HTTP journeys that pass values between requests, and heartbeat monitors for cron jobs and backups. A check that could not run is reported as unknown, never as a pass.
- Incident response in the same place. Alert routing to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Google Chat, Mattermost, PagerDuty, Splunk, Zapier or webhooks; escalation that stops when someone acknowledges; maintenance windows; status pages; and SLOs with error budgets.
- SSL, domain and DMARC checks on the free plan. The free plan has the same check types as the paid plans, including SPF, DKIM, DMARC and Certificate Transparency; it is limited by monitor count and frequency only.
Try it on the sites you already run
Start with the free plan: SSL, domain and DMARC checks are included.