Kount alternatives and competitors in 2026

Why look for a Kount alternative in 2026?

Kount is not short of features. Since Equifax bought it for $640 million in 2021 it has grown from order scoring into a platform: Account Protection for sign-ups, logins and account changes, Identity Proofing since September 2025 and, since 23 September 2026, the Signal Score for Device and Signal Score for Email APIs, which Equifax says can “pierce advanced VPNs, residential proxies, and network anonymizers” and “separate human traffic from automated bots”. Teams that look elsewhere usually have one of four reasons.

You want someone else to carry the chargeback. Kount does not. It sells itself as the “Chargeback Guarantee Alternative” and says it stops chargebacks “at 1/3 the cost” of a guarantee, which is Kount’s claim rather than a measurement. If a guarantee is the point, the shortlist is Signifyd, Riskified, ClearSale, Forter or, for a small Shopify store, Wyllo.

You want a price before a sales call. Kount’s old pricing URL now redirects to an Equifax page with no prices on it, and the Kount product pages end in a demo request or a sales contact. The one self-serve route, the Kount app on Shopify, says “Free to install. Additional charges may apply.” and stops there.

You have to migrate anyway. The Kount brand moved into Equifax in February 2026. The legacy Command product is being sunset, Midigator users are moving to Chargeback Management inside Kount 360, and every API integration must switch to a new sign-in token endpoint by 15 February 2027. Work you cannot avoid is a fair moment to compare.

Your losses start before the order. If the damage is fake sign-ups, bonus abuse or scripted logins rather than stolen cards, you may want a narrower tool with a public price. Kount now covers that ground too, so this is a question of packaging and cost, not of a missing feature.

What to settle before you shortlist

• Who pays when an approved order turns into a chargeback: the vendor, or you
• If there is a guarantee, which chargebacks it covers: fraud only, or item-not-received and not-as-described too
• How you are billed: a share of approved order value, a fee per check, or a quote
• Which moments are covered: checkout only, or sign-up, login and promotions as well
• Whether each decision comes with reasons your support team can read back to a customer
• Whether you can run it on your own traffic before signing: a trial, a sandbox or a free tier

Kount competitors: who guarantees, who publishes a price

The rows below were re-checked against each vendor’s own pricing page, filing or documentation in September 2026. Prices move, so confirm them before you budget.

Kount pricing, and how its competitors bill

Kount does not publish prices anywhere we could find. The Payments Fraud and chargeback product pages end in “Request a Demo”, the Signal Score and Identity Proofing pages say “Connect with our sales team”, and the Kount app on Shopify lists no figures beyond “Free to install”.

Its competitors bill in a way that tells you who carries what. Signifyd and Riskified take a percentage of the order value they approve, ClearSale charges per approved order and Wyllo takes a share of revenue: their price is tied to the orders they stand behind. MaxMind charges per query and SEON sells bundles of checks, 2,500 a month on Starter. Accertify, Forter and Sift quote through sales, as Kount does; for Sift the only public guide is Vendr’s buyer data, a median of $150,000 a year across 50 purchases, from $29,600 to $600,000 (February 2026). Maskbreak sells monthly allowances of visitor checks and prints them on /pricing: a Free plan of 10,000 a month with no card to sign up, then Starter at €29 a month for 50,000, Growth at €99 for 250,000, Scale at €299 for 1,000,000 and Enterprise from €990, prices excluding VAT.

Nine Kount alternatives, and when each one fits

Kount vs Signifyd: who carries the chargeback

With Signifyd, the vendor can. With Kount, you do. Signifyd approves or declines each order and backs the approvals with a guarantee that can run from fraud-only cover to a full liability shift; you pay a percentage of the order total on the orders it approves and nothing on the ones it declines for fraud (Signifyd’s pricing FAQ). Kount gives each card-not-present order an Omniscore from 0.1 to 99.9, your policies accept, block or challenge it, and when a chargeback still lands, its Ethoca and Verifi alerts, Visa Rapid Dispute Resolution and representment tools help you stop or contest it.

That changes more than the invoice. A guarantee vendor makes the approve-or-decline call on the orders it covers, because its money is on them. Without one, the approval rate and the chargeback budget stay yours to manage. Neither vendor publishes a rate, so the only fair comparison is two quotes on the same order history.

ClearSale vs Kount: reviewers and a published price

Both now belong to a credit bureau: Kount to Equifax since February 2021, ClearSale to Experian since 1 April 2025. The products still differ in two ways. ClearSale will put people on the decision, with tiers from AI-only screening up to full human review, and its Growth plans include a chargeback guarantee on the orders it approves. And ClearSale prints a starting price: $250 a month for Growth, based on monthly transaction volume, charged only on approved orders, with no upfront fees. Kount prints none.

Pick ClearSale if you want someone else to look at borderline orders and carry the loss on the ones they pass, and you want to see the entry price before a call. Its Enterprise tier, for 50,000+ orders a month, is quoted like Kount. Stay with Kount if your team wants to write and test its own policies and work its own disputes, or wants identity proofing and account protection from the same vendor as payment scoring. One detail to settle in writing: ClearSale’s pricing page describes both an “Optional chargeback reimbursement guarantee” and a “100% chargeback guarantee on approved orders”, so confirm what your plan includes.

Accertify vs Kount: the closest like-for-like

If you want to swap Kount for something of the same shape, this is the pair. Both sell risk decisioning, chargeback management and account protection on one platform, neither offers a chargeback guarantee that we could find, and neither publishes a price. Accertify’s April 2026 platform guide argues against guarantees outright: “When a vendor holds fraud liability, their model is optimized to protect their own financial exposure, not to maximize the merchant’s approvals.” Kount’s “Chargeback Guarantee Alternative” pitch makes the same bet.

The differences are ownership and reach. Accertify left American Express for Accel-KKR in 2024, with Greg Dukat as chief executive since January 2026. It adds a payment gateway, and its industry list runs from travel, ticketing and retail to quick-service restaurants, grocery and sports betting. Kount sits inside Equifax, adds identity proofing and the new Signal Score APIs, and keeps a self-serve app on Shopify. Accertify is not always an either-or choice against a guarantee vendor, either: Signifyd lists it among its pre-built integrations, so a merchant can run the two side by side.

What a visit check adds in front of Kount, or any of these

Most vendors on this page make their main call on the order or the account, and several also read the device along the way, Kount’s new Signal Score for Device among them. Maskbreak sells only that earlier call, on its own: what is the browser that submitted this form hiding behind? Sometimes the honest answer is “not sure”, and that is useful too. Take a checkout on a stolen card. The address looks like an ordinary home line in the cardholder’s country, perhaps through a residential proxy the network check did not recognise, but the browser’s own clock is set to a time zone in another country and the receipt email is on a throwaway domain. With the email and the browser’s time zone (tz) forwarded, the checkout handler gets this back.

Example response, selected fields: a checkout from a home-looking address, browser clock in another country, disposable email.

{
  "decision": "review",
  "risk_score": 40,
  "reasons": ["disposable_email", "timezone_mismatch"],
  "network": {
    "vpn": false,
    "proxy": false,
    "datacenter": false,
    "tor": false,
    "residential": true,
    "service": null
  },
  "device": {
    "antidetect": false,
    "automation": false,
    "emulator": false,
    "tampering_score": 0
  }
}

Neither clue proves fraud. Travellers, expats and anyone with a hand-set clock trip the time-zone check, and people use throwaway addresses to dodge newsletters, so each one can move an allow to review but never blocks on its own. That is what review is for: your handler holds the order and lets whoever decides your orders, your own team, Kount or a guarantee vendor, look before it ships. The time-zone check is skipped behind a VPN, proxy, Tor or cloud exit, where a mismatch is expected, and the current server SDKs do not send tz, so add it to the HTTP call yourself.

The hard signals need no help from the order. A proxy, Tor, automation, an emulator or a fake browser comes back block; a VPN on its own is only flagged for review, because plenty of real shoppers use one; a cloud-server address alone stays allow, with datacenter_asn still listed. Most of those defaults can be moved per signal on the console’s Rules tab. A rule changes the answer only for the signal it names, so allowing VPNs never lets a proxy or fake browser on the same visit through.

Run it in watch mode first: record every answer, stop nothing, and turn enforcement on when the Events log agrees with what your team would have done. For the two signals in this example, see time-zone mismatch and the disposable-email playbook; the e-commerce chargeback walkthrough follows stolen cards behind residential proxies through a checkout, as a worked model rather than a customer result.