Open Corporates API Alternatives:
When to Stay, When to Switch, and What You Actually Pay

Where each provider wins, and where we win

Honest routing. Pick the right tool for the job, not the loudest vendor. The blue column is us. Every other column is a vendor that beats us at the specific job described on its row.

OpenCorporates vs CompanyData: head-to-head

The closest direct comparison. OpenCorporates and CompanyData both source from official registries. Here is where they differ on the attributes most teams ask about.

What the Open Corporates API actually covers (and what it misses)

The Open Corporates API is a RESTful JSON API with token-based authentication, cursor-style pagination, and three primary resource types: companies, officers and statements. Rate limits on the free tier sit at 50 calls per day and 200 per month, with paid tiers raising the ceiling but capping daily throughput. Bulk export is only offered under enterprise contracts, and there is no webhook channel for change-data-capture. We are not interested in selling you a switch you do not need. The team behind it has earned the trust of the open-data community over a decade. If your project lives in the categories below, stay.

Stay with OpenCorporates if you are an investigative journalist, an NGO, or an academic researcher working under their public-benefit free tier. The same applies if you are publishing open-source research and need the moral high ground that comes from sourcing data from an ODbL-licensed open project. The tool is fit for purpose, the politics are clean, and the cost is nothing.

Stay if your workflow only touches 140 jurisdictions of raw legal entity data and you do not need group structure, beneficial ownership trees, contact data, or webhooks. Stay if your call volume sits comfortably under 500 a month and you can absorb the $0.57 per call commercial pricing without it deforming your unit economics. Stay if your stack is built around polling and you have no need for delta updates.

Switch when those conditions stop holding. The most common reasons we see teams move are: needing group hierarchy for KYB and risk, needing webhooks for monitoring at scale, needing bulk CSV at standard pricing instead of an enterprise contract, or simply hitting a per-call cost wall when call volume grows past a few thousand a month. At that point compare against our CompanyData API and the shortlist on this page.

Open Corporates API pricing: per-call math by volume

The number nobody on the search results page does honestly. Below is the actual monthly bill at 1,000, 10,000 and 100,000 calls per month across six providers with public pricing. Enterprise vendors are marked "custom" because their pricing is not public.

The math gets stark at scale. At 100,000 calls per month an OpenCorporates workflow priced at the public Basic rate is already bursting the plan cap of 5,000 calls a month and forced into a custom Enterprise contract. CompanyData runs the same volume on a published $499 plan, roughly 100x cheaper per call. For honest pricing in detail see CompanyData API pricing.

Open Corporates API vs registry-grade alternatives: group structure and corporate linkage

Group structure is the parent-subsidiary tree that links a business to its ultimate parent and to every sibling that sits under that parent. UBO (ultimate beneficial owner) is the natural person at the top of that tree who ultimately controls the entity. Both matter for KYB, sanctions screening, M&A research and supply-chain risk, and neither is something OpenCorporates carries as structured data.

The reason is structural. OpenCorporates surfaces what registries publish. Most registries publish only what is filed for that single legal entity, so the ownership graph that links Apple Inc. to Apple Operations International to Apple Operations Europe lives across hundreds of separate filings in different jurisdictions. To turn that into a usable tree, a data vendor has to do the cross-jurisdiction linkage work. Bureau van Dijk does it for enterprise procurement. D&B does it through the DUNS-chain hierarchy. CompanyData does it across 200+ jurisdictions with the linkage exposed in a single API call. See company ownership structure data and the dedicated UBO registry guide for how the fields are exposed.

The practical consequence for a KYB team is simple. Without group structure you cannot answer the question "is this business ultimately owned by a sanctioned entity?" without manually walking filings. With group structure, that question is one query. Without UBO you cannot answer "who is the natural person we need to verify?" without third-party enrichment. With UBO it is a field on the response. The cost of the missing field shows up as analyst hours and missed risk.

Coverage by region

Regional depth varies. A vendor that looks "global" on its homepage is often thin in two of the regions you actually buy for. Below is honest scoring.

Legend: ✓ full coverage, ~ partial, — none. CompanyData links by country: USA, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Europe, Worldwide.

Capability matrix

The eight attributes most teams ask about in an RFI. Use this as a quick disqualifier before reading the long reviews.

GDPR, lawful basis and where the data actually lives

For EU buyers this is the line in the procurement DPA that gets a vendor cut from the shortlist. Two things matter: where the data is sourced from, and where the data is physically processed. OpenCorporates sources from official registries (clean lawful basis) and processes in the UK. CompanyData sources from official registries and processes inside the EU, which is the answer EU procurement teams need to hear without extra adequacy-decision paperwork.

Vendors that scrape rather than source from registries (Coresignal, People Data Labs, parts of ZoomInfo) sit in a different legal category. The data may be useful and is technically lawful in many jurisdictions, but the procurement story is harder and the DPA is longer. Registry-sourced data, by contrast, has been published by the government and the lawful basis is settled. This is why our approach to know your business and know your customer pipelines defaults to registry sources first.

A practical test for any vendor: ask where the processing happens, whether they hold any ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certifications, and whether they have a public DPA you can sign electronically without negotiation. Most enterprise vendors do not. Most registry-first vendors do. The gap between those two answers tells you most of what you need to know about how procurement is going to feel.

Frequently Asked Questions