We study in detail the main features of the unitarized Regge model (CFKS), recently proposed to describe the small-$Q^2$ domain. It takes into account a two-component description with two types of unitarized contributions: one is the multiple Pomeron exchanges contribution, interacting with the large dipole size configurations, and the other one consists on a unitarized dipole cross section, describing the interaction with the small size dipoles. We compare the resulting dipole cross section to that from the saturation model (GBW).