Kickbox Review

Email validation tools play a crucial role in keeping your marketing lists clean, reducing bounce rates, and improving deliverability. With so many options available, choosing the right service can get confusing.

Kickbox is one of the popular players in the email validation market, and this review will explore its features, strengths, and areas for improvement. While Kickbox offers comprehensive email verification features, you should explore all aspects before committing.

What is Kickbox?

Kickbox is an email validation tool that aims to ensure your email marketing efforts aren't wasted on invalid or non-existent addresses.

Founded in 2014, the company provides email verification services that help marketers identify which email contacts are valid, disposable, role-based, or potentially dangerous. This allows businesses to maintain high-quality email lists.

Through API integrations and a user-friendly interface, Kickbox seeks to streamline the email validation process. It also offers multiple features and online customer support.

But is Kickbox right for you? In this review, we zoom in on its accuracy, features, pricing, and all other relevant aspects.

Kickbox features

If you think it helps, create an image here illustrating the general concept of email validation – like a guy at his computer cleaning his list or getting bounces.

Kickbox touts itself as an email verification and deliverability platform. Let’s examine its main products so you can see if they’re a good fit for your business.

Bulk email verification service

With Kickbox's bulk email verifier, you can upload an existing email list and have it checked. Kickbox verifies whether an email address is deliverable and flags any potential issues like typos or role-based addresses. This feature is essential for list maintenance and reducing bounces, but ZeroBounce offers additional data enrichment options like email activity data and email scoring.

Real-time email validation tool

Real-time email validation allows you to check email contacts in real time, at the point of entry. Thus, you’re preventing bad emails from entering your list or CRM system in the first place. Kickbox provides you with a real-time email validation API that you can install on all your lead-gathering forms.

Email deliverability insights

Kickbox provides insights into your email deliverability, allowing you to see how your campaigns are likely to perform. These insights give an overall picture of your list's status before a campaign launch. Kickbox’s email spam score checker has a free and paid version that pinpoints potential deliverability issues.

API integrations

The Kickbox platform integrates with various marketing tools and CRMs through a real-time email validation API, simplifying your list cleaning process. The number of integrations is robust – you can integrate Kickbox with AWeber, Mailchimp, and many other email marketing platforms.

Kickbox accuracy for email validation

Kickbox does not disclose the accuracy of its email validation tool but offers a 95% email deliverability rate guarantee. However, user reviews often indicate that the platform sometimes misidentifies safe emails as undeliverable.

ZeroBounce, on the other hand, is renowned for its high accuracy (99%), incorporating additional layers of analysis that Kickbox lacks. ZeroBounce’s accuracy has a money-back guarantee.

Kickbox speed and email validation performance

Kickbox is relatively fast, with most users noting that their lists are processed in a timely manner. Real-time validation speed is satisfactory for web forms, although bulk verification might slow down with massive data sets.

Here, ZeroBounce performs slightly better, handling large volumes more efficiently. On average, ZeroBounce’s email checker takes 45 minutes to go through 100,000 email contacts.

Kickbox pricing

Kickbox's pricing structure is based on the number of email addresses you verify, starting at $5 for 500 addresses and scaling up from there. This pricing is competitive at very low volumes but lacks the flexibility of ZeroBounce's credit system, where unused credits are rolled over.

At most volumes, Kickbox is drastically more expensive than ZeroBounce. At larger volumes, the higher cost of Kickbox becomes even more noticeable. Kickbox is $1,750 more at the million credit level— an approximate 78% markup.

Another critical aspect you should consider is that Kickbox’s email verification credits expire after one year. If you purchase a higher number of credits during a promotional period, you need to use them during this limited time frame. At ZeroBounce, your credits never expire – and you receive 100 free verification credits every month.

Kickbox customer support

Kickbox provides customer support through email, chat, and documentation. By their own admission, “Kickbox typically replies within a few hours.” While the response time can be quicker than that, the quality of support varies depending on the complexity of the issue.

In the past, Kickbox offered phone support. However, as of at least May 2024, phone support was suspended. A support representative explained, “Unfortunately, we no longer have the ability to do phone support,” citing an abundance of “spam calls.”

Kickbox customer reviews

Customer reviews of Kickbox are generally positive, with the platform earning high marks on G2 for its user-friendliness and accuracy. Customers also enjoy the flexible pricing, as the pay-as-you-go option allows them to get as many credits as they need.

However, some users report that the pricing can be high for small businesses. They also complain that the software can mark some valid email addresses as invalid, thus leading to potential revenue losses.

Finally, certain users have remarked on G2 that customer support response times “may not meet the high expectations of some users, especially in times of urgent need.”

Kickbox alternatives and competitors

Kickbox faces competition from ZeroBounce, NeverBounce, BriteVerify, and others. Compared to these platforms, Kickbox generally excels in ease of use but tends to lag behind in accuracy and data enrichment options. Its pricing is competitive for very low-volume customers but may not provide the same value as ZeroBounce's credit system. A significant downside is that Kickbox email validation credits expire in 12 months.

ZeroBounce features

While Kickbox has strong features, ZeroBounce’s offerings address many more email deliverability challenges. From blacklist monitoring to email finding, ZeroBounce offers a more comprehensive toolkit.

Here is a brief exploration of how ZeroBounce helps your email marketing.

99% accurate email validation

ZeroBounce checks email addresses both in bulk and in real time to help you maintain healthy email databases and ensure they don’t acquire low-quality contacts. The email validation tool – a recipient of the Inc. Power Partner Award – allows you to keep your bounces under 2%, preserve your sender reputation, and get your email campaigns in the inbox.

Verify+ from ZeroBounce

Disabled Yahoo email addresses cause issues for many marketers. Although still valid, Yahoo could delete these email accounts at any time, resulting in bounces. ZeroBounce is the first platform to offer a 99% accurate email verification method for Yahoo-related contacts (Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon). Verify+ from ZeroBounce gives marketers and business owners more confidence when reaching out to these types of recipients. Moreover, Verify+ is free for all customers who use ZeroBounce’s email validation tool.

Email scoring system

Pioneering an additional method for catch-all email verification, ZeroBounce introduced an email scoring system that assigns a confidence score from 0 to 10 to each contact. It gives you a better understanding of the potential validity of catch-all emails, which are notoriously difficult to verify using standard approaches.

Subscriber activity tracking

Ideal for marketers and sales professionals, the Activity Data feature offers insights into the recent email activities of your contacts. Using one credit for each contact, this tool reveals the last time a subscriber engaged with their inbox over the past year. Activity Data is an excellent addition to any email marketer’s toolkit, allowing for better targeting and higher engagement rates.

Email deliverability testing

ZeroBounce offers an entire suite of email deliverability tools consisting of an email server tester, an inbox placement tester, and an email blacklist monitor. You get comprehensive support to help your emails go to the inbox.

ZeroBounce’s suite includes tools that ensure email server configuration and test email inbox placement. Its server testing tool identifies any setup errors to guarantee that your server is correctly configured, while the inbox placement tester helps predict whether your emails will successfully reach recipients’ inboxes. Additionally, the blacklist monitoring service notifies you immediately if your IP or domain gets blacklisted, so you can take quick action.

Email authentication tools

Following 2024 requirements from Google and Yahoo, which mandate email authentication for entities sending over 5,000 emails daily, ZeroBounce offers tools like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC generators. These tools facilitate domain authentication, while the DMARC monitoring feature alerts you to any potential spoofing or hacking attempts in real time. Not only will you protect your domain with these security measures, but your emails will also be able to get past Yahoo and Google spam filters.

Email finder

In addition to its email deliverability tools, ZeroBounce introduced an email finder tool in 2023. This tool finds email addresses in real time and uses ZeroBounce’s highly accurate email validator to verify each contact. The email finding tool is quick, accurate, and useful for any professional looking to build connections.

ZeroBounce integrations

Whatever platform you use for your digital marketing and sales initiatives, you can quickly connect the ZeroBounce email validation API and start improving your email hygiene. The API detects risky email addresses almost instantly and rejects them before they can get on your email list. Some of the major platforms ZeroBounce integrates with include ConstantContact, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Shopify, and ChatGPT.

Bonus

ZeroBounce also provides you with a bulk email validation API so you can automate your email list cleaning and save time.

ZeroBounce customer support

ZeroBounce has garnered a strong reputation for its nearly instant and high-quality customer service. ZeroBounce customer support agents are available 24/7, all year round. Whether you reach out via our live chat box or give us a call, one of our experts will answer within seconds.

ZeroBounce customer reviews

ZeroBounce maintains high ratings on review platforms and is consistently praised for its superior accuracy and customer support. ZeroBounce has over 400 reviews on G2, while Kickbox has well under 200. Kickbox has zero reviews on Trustpilot, whereas ZeroBounce has just under 1,100, with a rating score of 4.7 out of 5.

Data security at Kickbox and ZeroBounce

Both Kickbox and ZeroBounce prioritize data security, using encryption to protect customer data. Their systems are designed to block unauthorized access and protect sensitive information. Both companies comply with major data protection laws like the GDPR and the CCPA, and both have adjusted to the new Data Privacy Framework, which replaced the Privacy Shield.

However, ZeroBounce is a leader in data protection mechanisms in the email validation space. The company practices stringent security measures, including data encryption and access controls.

While Kickbox stores customer data in its systems for 90 days, ZeroBounce deletes this data after 30 days for security purposes. ZeroBounce also performs regular third-party security audits and risk assessments to proactively address any vulnerabilities.

Among the most prominent certifications ZeroBounce has obtained are SOC II Type II and ISO 27001. Read more about how ZeroBounce protects your data.