The 14 Best B2B Data Providers in France: Open Register, Hidden Accounts (2026)

France is the strangest company-data market in Europe. The state gave the register away: SIRENE became free open data in 2017, a court ruled that the court registrars never owned the commercial register in the first place, and since 2023 a single national register has published filings openly. A bootstrapped two-person startup then built the country's most-used company lookup on top of it, published its prices, and turned a profit in year one.

And yet roughly three quarters of French annual accounts are legally confidential. Not missing, not late: filed, held, and lawfully withheld from you. Only licensed credit bureaus may read them, by a decree most buyers have never heard of. That asymmetry, free identity data on one side and locked financials on the other, explains every provider on this page.

This guide ranks {count} providers on merit. We sell French business data ourselves, so our pitch sits in a marked box further down rather than at number one.

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1. Pappers: the bootstrapped disruptor

Hard to beat on value for register data, and the only serious player here that publishes every price.

In June 2020 the national institute finished putting the commercial register online for free. Pappers launched the following month, and now serves around three million visitors a month on a file assembled from SIRENE, the national register, the official gazette and the associations register. It took no venture capital, was profitable within twelve months, and roughly one percent of users pay for everything. API pricing runs from €30 a month for 500 credits to €1,400 for 100,000, with a company record costing one credit and a full scoring report fifty. It even ships an MCP server, which almost nothing else in this market does.

Clichy, France · API from €30/mo, 100 credits free · Built on: SIRENE, RNE / INPI, BODACC

3. Altares - Dun & Bradstreet: the licensed incumbent

The one that can read the accounts everyone else is locked out of, and the only source of a French DUNS number.

Altares is the exclusive Dun & Bradstreet partner for France and the Benelux, majority-owned since 2016 by Naxicap, part of the BPCE banking group, so despite the name it is French-controlled. Two things make it hard to work around. It holds a licence to read confidential annual accounts for scoring purposes, which the free tools do not. And it is the sole issuer of DUNS numbers in France. It absorbed the prospecting brand Manageo in July 2024 and reported €84.7m of French revenue for that year.

Puteaux, France · Quote only · Built on: SIRENE, Greffes, BODACC, INPI, DunTrade

4. Ellisphere: the other licensed incumbent

Deep French risk data and a genuine marketing arm, with a competition-law record worth knowing about.

Ellisphere traces back to 1893 in Lyon and was Coface Services until it was renamed in 2014. Since 2019 it has been owned by a French consortium of Andera Partners, Tikehau and the state bank Bpifrance alongside management, with around 285 staff. It runs risk, fraud and compliance products alongside an unusually strong marketing side, and it absorbed the predictive-sales tool Sparklane, formally merged in on 1 January 2026. One caveat buyers should know: in 2023 the French competition authority fined it €3.5m over a long-running price-fixing and customer-allocation arrangement in business-data subscriptions.

Puteaux, France · Quote only · Built on: Not publicly disclosed

5. Infolegale: the people behind the company

The sharpest French tool for onboarding checks, because it tracks directors' histories rather than just company records.

Founded in Lyon in 2008 and still led by its founders, who bought back shares in 2021 before NextStage took a stake in 2022, Infolegale is the French specialist in third-party risk. Its API returns something most competitors do not: directors' career histories and the shareholding links between entities, which is exactly what you need to spot a serial liquidator. Around €14m of revenue and 105 staff, with 3,000 clients. Its own research also produced the most useful finding in this market, that non-filing rather than confidentiality is what actually predicts failure.

Lyon, France · Quote only · Built on: Official registers, Legal publications

6. Coface: risk seen from the insurer's side

Its edge is not the register but the claims history of a hundred thousand insured trading relationships.

Coface is a listed credit insurer founded in 1946 that sells its risk intelligence separately through Urba360. What makes it different from a bureau is where the data comes from: around 700 underwriters making real decisions across more than 100,000 credit-insurance clients, which means its opinions are backed by money actually at risk rather than by a model alone. Coverage runs to roughly 190 million businesses with twelve-month default probabilities.

Bois-Colombes, France · Quote only · Built on: Own underwriting, Registers, Payment behaviour

7. Creditsafe France: the international challenger

Worth a look for cross-border credit work, though it is unusually vague about where its French data comes from.

Trading in France as Solvabilité Entreprise since 2006 and run from Roubaix, Creditsafe brings the same model it uses elsewhere in Europe: subscription access to reports across 161 countries, a Connect API with the usual CRM integrations, and pooled payment behaviour drawn from clients' own ledgers. French revenue was €25.7m in 2025. One honest caveat: unlike its French rivals it does not name the registers it draws on, describing its inputs only as local registers and partners.

Roubaix, France · Quote only · Built on: Local registers, Partner network

8. Societe.com: the veteran with a price list

The original French company lookup, still useful, and refreshingly clear about what a subscription costs.

Launched in 1999 under the impulse of Xavier Niel, Societe.com is the site French professionals have been checking counterparties on for a quarter of a century. It survived open data by being clear about what it charges: a free tier, then €19.90 a month, or €49.90 for a plan bundling fifteen certified extracts, monitoring on two thousand entities and 2,500 API credits. Not the cheapest per record any more, but the monitoring and document bundle is a fair deal for a small finance team.

Paris, France · Free tier, from €19.90 HT/mo · Built on: SIRENE, RNE / INPI, BODACC, Greffes

9. Societeinfo: register data for sales teams

Licensed register data wrapped in a sales-shaped API, with public prices from €39 a month.

Operating as Smart Data since 2017, Societeinfo licenses data from the national institute, the statistics office and the court registries, then layers web and social signals on top for eleven million French businesses. Explore took a minority stake in 2021 and it now sits within the Intescia group. Prices are published, from €39 a month at the entry tier up to €299, with pay-as-you-go credits that never expire, and separate company, contact, financial and gazette APIs.

Issy-les-Moulineaux, France · From €39/mo, PAYG credits · Built on: INPI, INSEE, Greffes, Web data

10. Scores & Décisions: solvency for developers

A credible middle option for solvency data delivered by API rather than through a portal.

Part of the Intescia group, Scores & Décisions covers more than ten million French businesses and processes over a million sets of accounts a year, combining the statistics office, the official gazette and legal-notice journals with its own credit analysis. Unusually for a French risk provider it leads with the API and a Salesforce connector rather than a portal, which makes it a sensible pick when solvency checks need to run inside an existing workflow.

Issy-les-Moulineaux, France · Quote only · Built on: INSEE, BODACC, Legal notices, Own analysis

11. Nomination: humans checked this

The opposite of a scraped file: half the company works on verifying the data by hand.

Founded in 2002 and still controlled by its founder through his own holding, Nomination tracks around 450,000 decision-makers at 100,000 French organisations with more than half a million verified emails and phone numbers. Roughly half its staff do nothing but verify records, and it supplies the executive-appointment columns of the French business press. In a market where most contact data is inferred, that is a genuinely different proposition, and the reason it can charge what it does.

Paris, France · Quote only · Built on: Own research team, Press monitoring

12. Corporama: prospecting inside the group

A solid French prospecting platform whose main advantage is everything else Intescia owns.

Corporama has been building French prospecting lists since 2010 and now belongs to Intescia, the Rothschild-backed roll-up that also owns Explore, Societeinfo and Scores & Décisions, with roughly €60m of revenue across the group. That ownership is the point: signals from public tenders, construction projects and solvency scoring can be combined in ways a standalone tool cannot manage. Worth checking that you are not paying twice for data you already get elsewhere in the group.

Issy-les-Moulineaux, France · Quote only · Built on: INSEE, Group data, Web sources

13. Orbis for France (Moody's): the analyst's standard

The research tool French analysts trained on, now folded into the Moody's platform.

This is what used to be sold as DIANE, the French national product from Bureau van Dijk, now branded as Orbis for France after Moody's retired the Bureau van Dijk name. It covers roughly 26 million French entities built from court filings, with the screening, peer-group and ownership tools that make it standard equipment in corporate finance and universities. Note that its former French competitor was fined in 2023 over an arrangement that covered these very products, with Moody's receiving immunity for reporting it.

France coverage, global product · Institutional licence · Built on: Greffes filings, INPI, News sources

14. Euroleads: the file broker

Not a data owner but a broker: useful when you want the right rented list rather than a register feed.

Euroleads has been broking marketing files since 1980, and moved into B2B in 2005. It does not hold its own register data. Instead it acts as a list broker, matching you to third-party postal, email and phone files from a catalogue it says runs to thousands in France and many more worldwide, then handling the enrichment and deduplication. That is a genuinely different service from the register providers above, and the right one if your problem is renting a campaign list rather than building a data pipeline.

Tours, France · Quote only · Built on: Third-party marketing files

How France opened its register, then locked the accounts

Two opposite forces shaped this market. The state kept making company identity data freer, while company owners kept gaining the right to hide their numbers:

So who is still actually French?

Unusually for Europe, almost the whole French market is French-owned, largely because domestic private equity bought it rather than foreign groups:

Free identity data, locked financials

France publishes more company identity data for free than almost anywhere: every business identifier, name, address, activity code and legal form, in monthly bulk files and a free API, plus a national register carrying filed accounts and articles of association since the 1990s. What the free layer does not include is telling. Directors' details are excluded from the open statistics files by design. There are no contacts, no scoring, no group structures. And business owners who object can have their name and address masked entirely.

The bigger asymmetry is the accounts. Small French companies may file their financial statements and legally request that they stay confidential, and roughly three quarters now do so wholly or partly. But confidential does not mean unreadable: a decree gives credit bureaus and rating agencies access for scoring purposes on production of an attestation. So the free tools see about a quarter of French accounts, while the licensed bureaus see all of them. If financial depth is what you need in France, that single rule decides your shortlist.

• Annuaire des Entreprises : The state's own free lookup, aggregating fifty-plus administrative sources. Free register extracts for anyone, no login.
• SIRENE open data : Free monthly bulk files of every French business identifier under an open licence, plus a free API.
• BODACC : The official gazette: incorporations, sales, insolvency proceedings and account filings, free with an open API and bulk archive back to 2008.

Four questions before you sign anything

1. Do you actually need the confidential accounts? This is the fork that decides everything in France. If you need financial depth across small companies, you need a licensed bureau, because roughly three quarters of accounts are confidential and free tools cannot see them. If you need identity, activity and contact data, the free-data providers do the job for a fraction of the price.

2. Are you being sold a count that includes micro-entrepreneurs? France registers well over a million new businesses a year, and around two thirds are micro-entrepreneurs. Any headline count including them overstates the addressable B2B market enormously. Ask for the count filtered to employers or to companies with filed accounts.

3. Is non-filing being confused with confidentiality? They are different problems and the second is the dangerous one. French research found that non-filing, not confidentiality, is what actually predicts failure: the overwhelming majority of companies entering insolvency had simply stopped filing. Ask providers how they flag non-filers, not just how they handle confidential ones.

4. Are you paying twice inside the same group? Three groups now own most of this market. It is entirely possible to buy prospecting from one brand and solvency data from another and find both invoices going to the same owner. Check the ownership before you negotiate, because it is leverage.

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