7 ZeroBounce Alternatives: Email Verification for Your Specific Needs

ZeroBounce is a popular email verification platform, offering an array of email verification and deliverability tools to minimize bounce rates and improve inbox placements. Its comprehensive feature set is most suitable for large, experienced marketing teams in enterprises looking to enhance email campaign performance with an extended range of deliverability tools.

However, ZeroBounce’s steep learning curve and expensive plans may not suit B2B and high-volume B2C businesses, specific business functions, and small-to-medium businesses.

That’s where this guide comes into play — we’ll look at dedicated solutions that cover the needs of businesses looking to:

1. Automate the email verification process at the point of contact
2. Verify large email databases quickly without compromising quality
3. Protect sender reputation for established domains
4. Offer accurate data enrichment to improve lead quality
5. Streamline sales prospecting tasks to improve sales team efficiency
6. Verify email addresses in a cost-effective manner
7. Guide email verification newbies to get the most out of the platform

Let’s dive in and find the perfect email verification platform for your business!

What is ZeroBounce?“All the tools to prevent bounces” 🚫📤

ZeroBounce is a comprehensive email verification platform designed to reduce bounce rates and enhance inbox placement. It combines core email verification capabilities with advanced deliverability tools to ensure emails reach their intended recipients.

Its key features include:

• Bulk and single email verification with detailed validation reports
• Native and third-party integrations with major email service provider (ESP) platforms
• The ZeroBounce API for real-time email verification at the point of entry
• Advanced deliverability tools like Email Warmup, Inbox Placement Testing, and Email Server Testing
• Blacklist Monitoring that checks domain and IP reputation in 200+ blacklists
• AI-powered scoring system to rate the quality of catch-all emails

ZeroBounce analyzes email addresses against various deliverability metrics, assigns status codes to define their quality, and provides detailed validation reports on your email list health. Files can be uploaded via multiple methods, including direct upload, cloud storage connections, and ESP integrations.

It’s perfect for large and experienced marketing teams in enterprises that need granular insights into email hygiene and advanced deliverability tools to improve their email campaign performance. However, businesses and teams whose needs are outside this niche may not benefit as much from ZeroBounce’s comprehensive verification toolset.

For example, its limited automation and customization options aren’t ideal for businesses looking for granular control over email verification settings. And its low API rate limit may not be suitable for verifying large email databases quickly.

That’s why I’ve focused on platforms that cater specifically to use cases where ZeroBounce’s comprehensiveness falls short.

Looking for a powerful and flexible email verification platform for your e-commerce business? Set up your automated custom email verification workflow with mailfloss—sign up for a 7-day free trial and check out our email validation services yourself.

How We Curated Our List of ZeroBounce Alternatives

While testing ZeroBounce and learning about the email verification market, I found that ZeroBounce’s comprehensive approach to email verification may not work for all business models and sizes, specifically:

• B2C businesses with large emailing lists looking for a highly automated email verification platform
• Small-to-medium businesses looking for a cost-effective email verification solution
• B2B businesses that depend on cold emailing prospects to grow their business
• Businesses looking for fast and accurate bulk verification capabilities
• Businesses looking to maintain their sender reputation
• B2B businesses that want to enrich lead data to personalize email communications
• New business owners looking for an email verification platform with a low learning curve

I focused on platforms that address email verification demands for these specific use cases. This list is a comprehensive guide but, keep in mind that the right platform for you will depend entirely on how you plan to use email verification in your business.

1. mailfloss — Best for Automated Email Verification

mailfloss is a simple, powerful, no-fuss email verification platform for high-volume B2C businesses looking for seamless, effective, and automated email cleaning. Its key features include:

• Real-time Verification: Automates real-time verification by integrating with your preferred ESP solution.
• Custom Verification Settings: Offers a variety of verification frequency and aggressiveness options to customize list cleaning aggressiveness to your risk tolerance.
• Automated Workflows: Customize post-verification actions to update your email database based on the latest verification results.

mailfloss’ set-and-forget approach makes it ideal for B2C and e-commerce businesses looking to automate the entire email verification process at the collection point, such as landing pages and sign-up forms, as well as at the database level. Unlike ZeroBounce, which focuses on email cleaning and deliverability to improve email campaign performance, mailfloss streamlines verification from the start.

Why Choose mailfloss Over ZeroBounce for Automated Email Verification

mailfloss’ automation options — like its ESP integrations, verification frequency options, and aggressiveness customizations — provide a truly set-and-forget email verification approach.

Email Integrations: Share email verification data directly with ESPs.

mailfloss automates email verification by connecting your ESP via native integrations or using the mailfloss API — but the right approach depends on your requirements.

mailfloss’ API offers more flexibility, especially when it comes to real-time verification. You can validate emails at the point of entry, such as a landing page, sign-up form, or pop-up window, before storing them in your email database.

NOTE: Both ZeroBounce and mailfloss APIs require some technical skill and time to set up properly. We recommend testing both APIs yourself to see if the benefits justify the learning curve. Sign up for a 7-day free trial to see the mailfloss API in action.

If you lack the technical skills, you can choose from mailfloss’ 38+ native ESP integrations—including MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, and HubSpot—and set up your integration in seconds. Each integration comes with customizable verification frequencies, workflow automation options, and a manual review tool — more on these below.

Verification Frequency & Aggressiveness: Customize email verification to your email workflows and risk tolerance.

mailfloss offers three verification intervals:

• Instafloss for verifying new emails in real-time directly in your ESP.
• Autofloss for verifying new emails added to your ESP every day.
• Decay Protection for verifying your email database every month or on a custom schedule to keep your email list fresh.

You can run all three verification automations simultaneously, ensuring your email list is up to date at all times. However, due to ESP limitations, some integrations may not support all the available frequency options.

Additionally, mailfoss supports three verification (or aggressiveness) options to define exactly what valid emails looks like for your organization:

• Normal: It checks for nonexistent, available, banned, deactivated, inbox_full, and disposable email addresses. mailfloss recommends this setting for most use cases.
• Aggressive: It removes addresses showing any potential issues to maximize email deliverability. It’s best for cleaning outdated email lists, getting off of blacklists, and if your account was recently warned by your ESP. mailfloss only recommends this setting for older email lists and maximum deliverability since the intensive list cleaning may generate false positives, particularly with newer email lists.
• Custom: It gives you more control over your email verification by prioritizing the checks that matter to you. You can create the perfect email verification parameters to filter out emails that can harm your domain reputation.

Auto-action Options: Automate post-verification workflows.

mailfloss can automate post-verification actions for a hands-off email verification workflow. For example, you can set a condition to auto-unsubscribe or auto-delete invalid emails from your ESP after verification.

The available auto-actions can vary depending on your ESP integration. For example, you won’t find the “Auto-delete invalid emails” action for the native Klaviyo integration.

In such cases, you can recreate the auto-action using Zapier connections.

Additionally, you can activate mailfloss’s automated typo correction option — the only platform on the list that offers this feature.

It identifies and fixes commonly misspelled domain names like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail, helping you retain valuable leads that could otherwise get lost to typos. This can accumulate substantially over time, particularly for larger B2C advertising campaigns where these domains are common.

However, the auto typo fixer doesn’t fix the local part (before the “@” symbol) of the email address to maintain data integrity. To ensure you have a valid email address, fixed emails are verified again for authenticity.

mailfloss Pricing

mailfloss’ pricing starts with a seven-day free trial period that includes automated daily email verification and cleanup. After that, it switches to the subscription plan you were trialing.

You can choose from three subscription plans: Lite, Business, and Pro.

The Lite Plan charges $29 per month for 10,000 credits. It supports basic verification features like automatic daily cleanup, decay protection, and API access. However, it doesn’t offer real-time verification—a key use case for email verification.

For that, you’ll need to opt for the Business Plan, costing $59 per month for 25,000 credits. It comes with an auto typo fixer, real-time verification, and up to 10 ESP integrations. It is more cost-effective than the Pro Plan, which adds auto-update custom fields feature, unlimited integrations, and discounted prepaid credits for $209 per month.

mailfloss offers a 30-day money-back guarantee if you don’t see any improvement in email deliverability within that period.

Additionally, mailfloss offers one-time prepaid credits purchase to buy credits in bulk for one-time verification. It starts at $8 for 1000 credits, less than the ZeroBounce minimum of 2,000 credits. You can set it up so credits are automatically refilled when your balance falls below a particular threshold.

Use mailfloss if:

• You prefer a set-and-forget email verification solution so you can focus on other important tasks
• You want easy-to-setup, native ESP integrations that offer unmatched customization options
• You need automated, real-time verification with flexible cleaning settings that run in the background without disrupting your existing workflows

Sounds like you? Set up your automated custom email verification workflow with mailfloss — sign up for a 7-day free trial and check out our email validation services yourself.

2. NeverBounce — Best for Faster Bulk Email Verification

NeverBounce is an email verification platform with high API rate limits, a 20+ step verification process, and a blend of automation and human quality assurance. It’s perfect for B2B companies that require fast and precise bulk email verification to quickly clean email lists.

Like NeverBounce, ZeroBounce offers in-depth email verification but, unlike NeverBounce, sacrifices speed in the process because of its lower API limits.

Why Choose NeverBounce Over ZeroBounce for Bulk Email Verification

NeverBounce sets itself apart from ZeroBounce in bulk email verification without compromising on quality with the following features:

1. Faster Verification Process

NeverBounce takes around 2-10 minutes to verify 10,000 emails, potentially making it much faster than ZeroBounce, which averages 45 minutes to verify 100,000 emails. You can speed up verification on ZeroBounce using its API, but that won’t guarantee better performance with larger email databases—that’s defined by API rate limits.

2. Higher Rate Limits

NeverBounce offers much higher API rate limits (one million requests per hour) compared to all platforms on the list, including ZeroBounce (50,000 requests per hour). It’s best for processing large databases quickly without any service interruptions. However, exceeding the rate limits in both can result in a temporary ban [1] [2].

NOTE: NeverBounce has the highest rate limit of all the platforms on the list, making it the best option for faster bulk email verification overall.

3. Manual Error Reviews

NeverBounce ensures high accuracy during bulk verifications by automatically triggering a manual review when there’s an unusually high number of unknown emails. The reviews are carried out by NeverBounce’s team and ensure that verification results are more precise. However, it can take anywhere between 10 minutes to two hours to complete a review.

NeverBounce Pricing

Like ZeroBounce, NeverBounce pricing follows a credit-based system where one credit equals one email verification. You can choose from two payment options: pay-as-you-go and bulk credit purchases.

Both options start at $8 for 1,000 credits. Prices reduce as you purchase more credits, going down to $0.003 per credit for up to two million emails.

However, NeverBounce follows a separate pricing for its Auto-Clean feature, making it more expensive for continuous email verification.

Use NeverBounce if:

• You’re looking for an email verification platform offering fast and precise bulk email verification.
• You need an email verification API that can verify a large number of requests simultaneously without interruptions.
• You need a solution that balances manual and automatic verification to improve verification quality.

Want to learn more about NeverBounce? Check out our detailed comparison between NeverBounce vs ZerBounce vs mailfloss to find the best email verifier for your requirements!

3. Bouncer — Best for Protecting Sender Reputation

Bouncer is an email verification platform designed to maintain sender reputation with inbox testing, blocklist monitoring, and toxicity checking. It’s perfect for teams running newsletters or regular email marketing campaigns to ensure uninterrupted communication between businesses and customers.

Like Bouncer, ZeroBounce supports a comprehensive set of email deliverability tools. But unlike Bouncer, which focuses on maintaining sender reputation, ZeroBounce focuses on building sender reputation with its email warmup solution—ideal for preparing a new domain or email ID for email campaigns.

Why Choose Bouncer Over ZeroBounce to Protect Sender Reputation

Bouncer maintains sender reputation with a “Deliverability Kit” with the following features:

1. Custom Inbox Placement Tests

Bouncer offers inbox placement tests to check bounce probability, spam filter issues, and IP-specific blocking. You can customize test preferences by selecting the target email providers and number of email boxes.

Each test comes with a detailed report on email delivery rates and key email setup metrics like Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Sender ID, Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM), & Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance (DMARC).

2. Blocklist Monitoring

Bouncer also supports a Blocklist Monitoring feature to monitor if your IP and Domains are on a blocklist. If your IP or domain is added to a blocklist, the platform will alert you immediately so you can take the necessary steps to remove yourself from the blacklist.

3. Toxicity Checker

Bouncer’s Toxicity Checker identifies potentially problematic email addresses to protect email deliverability rates and sender scores. It assigns a toxicity score between 1 and 5 to define their “harmfulness” by checking if they are widely circulated, breached, belong to litigators, or are spam traps.

It performs all these checks from a single project, making it useful for testing email provider inboxes before launching a new email campaign.

Bouncer Pricing

Bouncer starts with a freemium plan with 100 verification credits. You can purchase more verification credits using the pay-as-you-go model or via a slightly discounted monthly subscription model. But you’ve to make a minimum purchase of 1,000 credits.

Like ZeroBounce, Bouncer packages its Deliverability Kit as a separate offering. It has four paid plans:

• Starter plan at $25/month with 250 test emails and 10 IPs / domains monitored.
• Standard plan at $125/month with 1,000 test emails and 25 IPs / domains monitored.
• Pro plan at $250/month with 2,500 test emails and 50 IPs / domains monitored.

Use Bouncer if:

• You’re looking to maintain your sender reputation to reach your subscribers.
• You want to customize email deliverability tests to focus on specific email providers.
• You’re looking for an email verification platform offering email deliverability tools.

4. Debounce — Best for Accurate Lead Data Enrichment

Debounce is an email verification platform with data enrichment features to collect more information on your recipient. It’s perfect for B2B businesses looking to add information to their email database to convert it into a comprehensive lead database for their sales teams.

On the other hand, ZeroBounce, unlike Debounce’s data enrichment tools that focus on enriching lead data for sales teams, focuses on enriching email activity data for better email targeting.

Why Choose Debounce Over ZeroBounce for Lead Data Enrichment

Debounce’s key features include:

1. Useful Lead Data

Debounce enhances your lead profile using various Data Append and Enrichment tools. It finds and adds the name and avatars associated with an email ID by scouring information from social media and Google.

The platform taps into over 10 public and private sources, verified for accuracy through strict quality assurance processes, to append customer data. The feature also works with the API, updating a website visitor’s name and avatar in real time once they provide the email address.

2. Lead Finder

Debounce’s Lead Finder tool helps you find the emails associated with a specific domain by testing permutations of the first name, last name, and company address. It tests over 35 different permutations to find the right one.

However, you’re charged for every permutation check. For example, if it goes through 27 permutations to find the right one, you will be charged 27 credits. Though not useful for large datasets, it’s great for getting started with contact info for cold emailing.

3. Real-time Data Enrichment

Debounce enriches data using the latest available data from its sources or gathering the information in real time. It is more reliable than ZeroBounce because email activity isn’t refreshed regularly on ZeroBounce.

Debounce Pricing

Debounce has a simple credit-based pricing system, starting at $5 for 1,000 verifications and going up to $1,500 for 5 million verifications. You can access all features as long as you have the required credits:

• Lead Finder needs one credit per email ID permutation.
• Data Enrichment needs two credits per successful attempt.
• List-Monitoring needs twice the email list size (200 emails = 400 credits).

Use Debounce if:

• You’re looking for an email verification platform to improve your cold email delivery rate.
• You’re looking to enhance your lead data for better personalization and customer experiences.
• You’re looking for real-time data enrichment to ensure you have access to the latest lead data.

Want to learn more about Debounce? Check out our detailed Debounce vs mailfloss comparison to understand how it approaches email verification!

5. Clearout — Best for B2B Sales Prospecting

Clearout is an email verification platform designed to streamline sales prospecting tasks with a LinkedIn Prospecting extension, phone number validation, and a built-in CRM. It’s ideal for B2B sales teams looking to improve cold email open rates.

Unlike Clearout, which focuses on improving your cold email outreach, ZeroBounce aims to improve email campaign performance by improving sender reputation, removing bad emails, and personalizing targeting.

Why Choose Clearout Over ZeroBounce for LinkedIn Prospecting

Clearout stands out with these prospecting tools:

1. Sales Prospecting Chrome Extension

Clearout offers a LinkedIn Chrome extension to discover information on B2B prospects, like customer emails, job titles, phone numbers, and locations. It extracts data from various sources on LinkedIn, including the LinkedIn Profile, Search Page, Sales Navigator, and Connection Page. You also get access to funding and investor details from Wellfound (aka Angellist).

2. Phone Number Validation

Clearout supports a different product called ClearoutPhone to validate and format phone numbers. Additionally, it can update additional information like time zone, line type (mobile/landline), and geolocation to customize your SMS campaigns and cold calling to your prospect’s timezone and location.

3. In-built CRM

You can also create and enrich customer profiles directly on the Clearout platform — it works like a mini-CRM with email verification and validation capabilities so you can reach out to B2B prospects without fear of email bounces.

Clearout Pricing

Clearout offers two pricing models: Subscription-based and Pay-As-You-Go.

The Pay-As-You-Go model starts at $7 for 1,000 credits. You need to purchase more credits as and when you need them.

The Subscription-based model offers four pricing plans:

• The Freemium plan is free and comes with 100 credits, bulk email verification, bulk email finder, and 20 unique prospect searches per month.
• The Starter plan charges $21 per month for 3,000 credits, unlimited CRM integrations, Google Sheets add-on, and a higher API rate limit.
• The Pro plan has several subcategories, starting at $58 per month for 10,000 credits (Pro 10K) and going up to $4,500 per month for 5 million credits (Pro 5M). All its plans come with more parallel email verifications, higher rate limits, and a million unique prospect searches per month.
• The Enterprise plan is Clearout’s custom plan with a dedicated account manager, on-premise deployment, and whitelabeling.

Use Clearout if:

• You’re looking for an email verification platform with sales prospecting capabilities.
• You want to validate and verify phone numbers as well.
• You want to maintain your enhanced lead database directly in your email verification platform.

Want to learn more about Clearout? Check out our detailed Clearout vs mailfloss comparison to find the best email verifier for your requirements!

6. Bouncify — Best for Affordable Bulk Email Verification

Bouncify’s simple email verification platform offers all the basic bulk email validation and verification tools at an affordable price — perfect for small-to-medium businesses looking to validate a large email database with a limited budget.

Unlike Bouncify, with its affordable, fluff-free email verification solution, ZeroBounce offers additional tools to improve email deliverability, test inbox placement, and conduct risk tolerance analysis at a much higher price point.

Why Choose Bouncify Over ZeroBounce for Cost-effective Email Verification

Bouncify offers a no-frills attached platform with all the key email verification features:

1. Real-time Validation

Bouncify’s Email Validation API lets you validate emails directly at the collection point. It’s very easy to install, requiring just a few lines of code to set up the validation workflow and collect real emails directly at the point of contact.

2. Extensive Platform Integrations

Bouncify offers 27 native integrations to popular email marketing solutions, including Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and AWeber. It also integrates with popular CRM, cloud storage, and SaaS platforms. If you can’t find your platform among native integrations, you can also opt to use Zapier integrations.

3. Advanced List Cleaning

Bouncify conducts all advanced verification checks to ensure email addresses are valid. Like others on the list, it includes checks like Deduplication, Syntax, Disposable, Catch-all, MX, DNS, and SMTP. The platform can scan your email addresses for free before verification to gauge your email list quality.

Bouncify Pricing

Bouncify’s pricing follows a credit-based system where a credit is consumed for each verification. Credits don’t expire, so you can access all features as long as you have credits.

You can buy credits in bulk, starting at $19 for 10,000 credits and going up to $279 for 500,000 credits—significantly less compared to others on the list, including ZeroBounce ($80-$1,800). To purchase more than 500,000 credits, you’ll need to contact the sales team.

Use Bouncify if:

• You’re looking for an affordable email verification platform that focuses only on email verification.
• You’re a small-to-medium business looking to validate a large email database within a limited budget.

7. Kickbox — Best for Email Verification Beginners

Kickbox is a simple email verification platform designed to streamline email verification workflows with an easy-to-use interface, a simple reporting feature, and in-house deliverability consultants. It’s perfect for businesses without the time or resources to manage complex email verification or for new users looking to get the most out of their platform.

While Kickbox removes all the bells and whistles, ZeroBounce offers a comprehensive email verification platform with an extensive toolset, automatically increasing the learning curve compared to Kickbox.

Why Choose Kickbox Over ZeroBounce for Ease of Use

Kickbox simplifies email verification with the following features:

1. Key Email Verification Features

Kickbox has a very user-friendly interface, focusing only on key email verification tools like bulk verification, single verification, and an API. You can add emails manually or import them via native ESP integrations.

2. Email List Segmentation

Kickbox offers custom email cleaning categories to isolate and remove invalid, fake, or risky emails. You can use it to segment emails based on risk tolerance. For example, if you’re warming up a new domain, you can create a separate list to target valid emails that can grow sender reputation.

3. Deliverability Consultants

Kickbox has an in-house team of dedicated deliverability experts to analyze and recommend changes to improve email deliverability. They audit your email campaigns, sender history, and system details and come back to you with personalized recommendations to get your email program back on track. They’ll stay on for another 12 weeks after offering recommendations to help you successfully implement any changes.

Kickbox Pricing

Kickbox has a freemium plan, offering access to 100 email verification credits. Its paid plans follow a very simple, pay-as-you-go pricing model, starting at $5 for up to 500 credits. For more than 1 million credits, you’ll need to contact the sales team as it qualifies for Enterprise pricing.

Use Kickbox if:

• You’re looking for an easy-to-use email verification platform with a low learning curve.
• You’re looking for key email verification features to start your email verification journey.
• You need the help of email deliverability experts to refine your email campaign effectiveness.

Want to learn more about Kickbox? Check out our detailed Kickbox vs mailfloss comparison to identify which email verification platform meets your requirements!

The Final Verdict

While ZeroBounce is perfect for improving email deliverability for large enterprises that need to keep communication open at all times, other business models and sizes have different requirements that need an alternate solution.

I recommend testing the platforms yourself to see which one meets your specific business requirements.

Based on our research, here’s our selection of the best ZeroBounce alternatives:

• mailfloss for high-volume B2C and D2C businesses that need set-and-forget, automatic email verification that integrates with their email provider and allows custom cleaning methods
• NeverBounce for B2B businesses looking for faster email bulk verification
• Bouncer for B2B businesses that need to protect their domain’s sender reputation
• Debounce for B2B sales teams looking for accurate lead data
• Clearout for B2B sales teams looking to improve sales prospecting workflows
• Bouncify for small-to-medium businesses that need a cost-effective solution for bulk email verification
• Kickbox for new users looking for a simple platform with a low learning curve

Looking for a powerful and flexible email verification platform for your e-commerce business? Set up your automated custom email verification workflow with mailfloss—sign up for a 7-day free trial and check out our email validation services yourself.