Look at Dubrink's pricing page and then look at Formist's and you can read the business model in about thirty seconds. Dubrink charges a flat €1,990 per year for CBAM compliance software built by people who think about CBAM when they wake up and CBAM when they go to bed. Formist charges by usage and handles CBAM as one of fifteen-plus frameworks, from GHG Protocol to CSRD to CDP to EU Taxonomy. Different tools, aimed at different buyers, both legitimate.
This is a comparison post, so the temptation is to pick one and pretend the other is a disaster. That's not what's going on here. If you are a customs broker in Rotterdam whose only compliance job is quarterly CBAM filings for a handful of importers, Dubrink is a perfectly reasonable thing to buy. If you are the sustainability lead at a mid-cap that has to file CBAM and build a GHG inventory and draft a CSRD report, the math changes. We'll walk through both cases honestly.
What Dubrink and Formist have in common
Both are purpose-built for the CBAM definitive period, which started January 2026. Both produce the QReport XML that importers submit to the CBAM transitional registry. Both maintain the CN code catalog, the emission factor defaults table, and the mass-balance logic that the European Commission keeps quietly updating in its implementation regulations. Both let you invite your suppliers into the process so actual emissions data can come in from the installation operator rather than sitting in an email attachment.
Neither will do your materiality thinking for you. Neither will call your Turkish steel mill and convince them to measure their direct emissions properly. What they will do is stop you from hand-typing the same data three times into an Excel workbook that corrupts when you save it with macros enabled.
So the question isn't "which tool is better" in some abstract sense. The question is: what does the rest of your compliance life look like, and how narrowly can you scope your CBAM work?
Where Dubrink wins
Specialist domain knowledge baked in. Dubrink has been doing CBAM and nothing but CBAM since the transitional period. Their HS-code-to-CN-code mapping is refined enough that you can paste a messy commercial invoice description and get a plausible CN match with minimal cleanup. Their default values table tracks the Commission's regulation updates without you having to check. Their QReport generator produces XML that validates against the registry's schema on the first try — which sounds trivial until you've spent an afternoon debugging a namespace mismatch on a deadline.
Transparent, simple pricing. €1,990 per year. No usage meters, no per-declaration fees, no "contact sales for enterprise pricing" theatre. You sign up, pay, file your quarterly reports. For a customs broker handling ten importers, the per-client math works out to €199 each, which is lower than a single hour of consultant time. That pricing alone disqualifies a lot of comparison arguments.
Narrow-focus UX. Because Dubrink only does CBAM, every screen is about CBAM. You don't click past a sustainability dashboard, a Scope 3 module, a CSRD tree view, or a CDP questionnaire portal to get to the form you actually need. For someone who just wants to file and go, that matters. Software with a narrower scope can be more opinionated about the right way to do the one thing it does.
That's a real list. If your job is "file CBAM for a handful of clients, cheaply, without learning anything else," Dubrink is the right answer and you can stop reading.
Where Formist wins
Multi-framework under one roof. Formist, built by WeCarbon, is an AI-powered compliance platform that works like a colleague who has read all the frameworks — you talk to it, upload your documents, and it fills out the forms. CBAM is one module. GHG Protocol is another. CSRD, CDP, ISSB, EU Taxonomy, SBTi, and a dozen more sit next to it. If you have CBAM obligations and a CSRD wave-2 deadline and an annual CDP questionnaire from a customer who demands a B rating, you buy Formist once instead of subscribing to four specialist tools.
The cost calculus is obvious. Dubrink at €1,990 plus a CSRD tool at €8,000 plus a GHG platform at €6,000 plus a CDP response tool at €3,000 adds up to roughly €19,000 a year, and that's before you count the person-hours of re-entering the same supplier energy data into four different systems because none of them talk to each other. Formist's usage-based pricing scales with what you actually do. A small importer might pay less than Dubrink's flat fee. A mid-cap filing across four frameworks pays a fraction of the four-subscription total.
AI document extraction from supplier PDFs in any language. This is the feature that matters most if you are a non-EU exporter, or an EU importer whose actual emissions data lives in Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, or Korean PDFs. Your supplier in Hebei sends you a scanned production report at 2 AM. It's in Mandarin, half of it is a photograph of a hand-written log sheet, and the emission factor you need is on page 4 in a table that wasn't meant for a non-Chinese reader. Formist reads it. It extracts the fuel mix, the heat consumption, the electricity source, cross-references the EU emission factor catalog, and asks you to confirm one or two ambiguous fields.
Dubrink has a supplier portal. That works if the supplier logs in and enters data in English in the structured form. Many suppliers will not. Some cannot. The language reality of the global supply chain is not something a nicely-designed EU supplier portal fully solves.
Agent flow instead of click-through forms. Dubrink is a form-filler with good ergonomics. You click through screens, fill structured inputs, validate, submit. That's fine, and for some buyers it's better than fine because clicking through a familiar sequence is comforting. Formist works differently. You describe what you need — "help me file my Q1 2026 CBAM report for 47 shipments of flat-rolled steel from three Chinese mills" — and the agent asks the specific questions it needs answered, extracts what it can from the documents you upload, and shows you a structured card view of everything it proposes to submit before it submits. You can still edit any field by clicking on it. But you start from a draft, not a blank form.
For a team that files one report a quarter, the difference is modest. For someone filing across multiple frameworks with overlapping data — supplier electricity mix feeds CBAM and GHG Scope 3 and ESRS E1 — the agent flow saves more time than the form-filling difference suggests, because the agent remembers the data across modules.
Price comparison
Dubrink: €1,990 per year, flat. All CBAM features included. No metered usage.
Formist: usage-based, with a free tier that covers light CBAM usage and paid tiers that scale with the number of cards, documents processed, and frameworks used. A small importer filing quarterly CBAM only will typically pay less than €1,990 per year on Formist. A mid-cap using CBAM plus two other frameworks typically pays more than €1,990 for Formist — but considerably less than buying Dubrink plus two other specialist subscriptions.
There's no universal "X is cheaper" answer. It depends on how much software-driven compliance work you're doing in total. If CBAM is your whole compliance surface area, Dubrink's flat fee is hard to beat on price alone.
Which one to pick
This is the section where most comparison articles hedge. Fine, we'll commit to three recommendations.
If you are a customs broker or freight forwarder whose CBAM work is quarterly filings for a stable book of importer clients, and you don't touch CSRD, GHG inventories, or CDP questionnaires: buy Dubrink. The €1,990 flat fee is the lowest-friction answer. The narrow UX suits the narrow use case. You'll file faster with a tool that only does the thing you need to do.
If you are an EU importer or manufacturer with CBAM obligations and CSRD scope and a GHG inventory and at least one customer-driven questionnaire (CDP, EcoVadis, whatever): buy Formist. Four specialist tools is four vendor relationships, four sets of login credentials, four ways to enter the same supplier data, four renewal negotiations every year. Formist is one tool that covers the set. The pricing will usually work out in Formist's favor once you cross three frameworks.
If you are a non-EU exporter supporting EU buyers — Chinese, Turkish, Korean, Indian manufacturers filing actual-emissions data upstream — buy Formist. Not because Dubrink is bad at CBAM (it isn't), but because your documents, your certificates, and your supplier reports are not in English and the agent's document extraction in your native language is the feature that actually saves time. You need a tool that reads your source documents, not one that waits for someone to translate them first.
The middle case — a pure CBAM-only importer with no other ESG obligations — is the only one that genuinely goes either way. If your CBAM volume is low, Formist's usage-based pricing will usually win. If your CBAM volume is high and predictable, Dubrink's flat fee becomes attractive again because the marginal cost of a 500th filing is zero. Model your expected volume for the next twelve months before choosing.
A note on switching
If you're already on Dubrink and wondering whether to move: don't churn the subscription mid-year if it's working. CBAM filings are quarterly and switching tools during an active reporting period invites errors. The sensible move is to run Formist in parallel on the next quarterly cycle, compare outputs against your Dubrink-generated XML, and if the numbers match (they should, because both tools apply the same EU methodology), consolidate after your Dubrink renewal comes up. Don't pay an exit penalty to save €500.
Dubrink is a good product at a fair price for a narrow use case. Formist is a broader tool for a broader problem. Pick the one that fits the shape of your compliance work, not the one that looks flashier in a demo.
Formist is built by WeCarbon, a climate-tech company with offices in Paris, Dubai, and Shanghai. It covers CBAM, GHG Protocol, CSRD/ESRS, EU Taxonomy, CDP, ISSB, SBTi, and 15+ other sustainability frameworks under a single usage-based subscription.