The 15 Best B2B Data Providers in Germany: After the Register Went Free (2026)

In August 2022 Germany did something few countries have done: it made the entire Handelsregister free. No fee per document, no login, and the scanned filings thrown in as well. If register data were the product, the German B2B data industry should have collapsed that summer. It did not, and understanding why tells you exactly what you are buying.

There is a second thing nobody outside Germany expects. Buying German business data is entirely normal, but cold-emailing it is illegal, with no B2B exemption. That single rule reshapes what a German data provider is for, and it is why the strongest players here sell payment behaviour and risk rather than outreach lists.

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

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1. Creditreform: not a company, a members' club

The default for German credit decisions, and structurally impossible for a competitor to copy.

Founded in Mainz in 1879, Creditreform is not a normal firm. You become a member of one of 128 independent local associations, not a customer of a national vendor, and roughly 130,000 German businesses have done so. That structure is the product: members and its own debt-collection arm feed payment experience back into the file, which is the one thing free register data can never contain. It sold its consumer arm Boniversum to Experian in 2025 and is now purely a business-information house.

Neuss, Germany · Membership based, not published · Built on: Handelsregister, Unternehmensregister, Member payment data

3. Dun & Bradstreet Deutschland: the global file, locally fed

Strongest when Germany is one country in a global risk picture, with DUNTRADE as the local edge.

This entity has changed names twice in a decade: Hoppenstedt became Bisnode, and Bisnode Deutschland became Dun & Bradstreet Deutschland in July 2021 after D&B bought the Bisnode group. What survived every rename is DUNTRADE, its German payment-experience pool, which sits alongside D-U-N-S numbering and 580 million records worldwide. If your risk team already thinks in D-U-N-S, the German arm is where that thinking lands.

Frankfurt am Main, Germany · Enterprise, not published · Built on: Handelsregister, Unternehmensregister, DUNTRADE

4. CRIFBÜRGEL: 1885 vintage, Italian owner

A credible number three on credit, and the one pushing hardest to bundle credit, KYC and ESG together.

The Bürgel name goes back to 1885; the legal entity has been CRIF GmbH since November 2021, owned by CRIF in Bologna, with CRIFBÜRGEL kept as the market brand. Its Panorama product is the clearest statement of where this market is heading: credit assessment, KYC and ESG screening delivered as one workflow rather than three separate reports. Around 40 locations in Germany including franchise partners.

Hamburg and Karlsruhe, Germany · Not published · Built on: Handelsregister, Unternehmensregister, Own research

5. Creditsafe Deutschland: the flat-rate disruptor

Picks the fight on pricing model rather than data depth: unlimited reports for a fixed fee.

Creditsafe entered Germany against three entrenched incumbents and competed on the commercial model instead of the file: a fixed annual subscription with unlimited reports, rather than paying per credit check. For a team that runs hundreds of checks a month, that changes the arithmetic entirely. Reports cover balance sheets, directors, group structures, industry benchmarks, insolvency data and monitoring, with international coverage on the same contract.

Berlin, Germany · Flat-rate subscription · Built on: Handelsregister, Unternehmensregister, Payment data

6. North Data: the one with a price list

The best free register research in Germany, and refreshingly upfront about what the paid tier costs.

Registered in 2011, North Data pulls roughly 97 million companies across 26 European countries from 157 sources: register entries, published accounts, insolvency notices, patents and trademarks, plus network graphs showing how shareholdings connect. The free layer is good enough that journalists and analysts live in it. Almost alone in this market, it publishes prices: €49 a month for Premium, €1,250 a year for a team of five, with bulk exports quoted separately.

Hamburg, Germany · Free tier, Premium from €49/mo · Built on: Handelsregister, Unternehmensregister, 26 European registers

7. Implisense: built for developers

The German file with the most modern delivery, including an MCP server for AI agents.

Founded in 2013 by data scientists out of Fraunhofer, Implisense covers around 2.3 million German companies built on the complete Handelsregister, refreshed daily. It has an unusually strong following among chambers of commerce and industry associations, which is a decent proxy for data quality. It is also the only provider here shipping an MCP server alongside its REST API, which matters if you are wiring company data into AI tooling. Prices are published: €59 a month for the platform, from €300 for API access.

Berlin, Germany · Platform €59/mo, API from €300/mo · Built on: Handelsregister, Public sources

8. beDirect: for the file you already have

Not a list vendor: a cleaning and matching service that happens to own a very large reference file.

A joint venture between Creditreform and Bertelsmann, beDirect holds around 6.3 million German company addresses, 7.2 million contacts at first and second management level, and 32 million historical records used specifically for cleaning up other people's data. That last number is the point: this is where you go when your CRM is full of duplicates and dead addresses, with connectors into Salesforce, Dynamics and SAP.

Gütersloh, Germany · Project and subscription, quoted · Built on: Creditreform data, Own address research

9. Capaneo: eighty years of addresses

The classic German address house, renamed in December 2025 and easy to miss under its old name.

This is Schober, the address-data institution that has been selling German lists for roughly eighty years, renamed Capaneo on 1 December 2025. The file holds about 4.6 million company addresses and 5.5 million decision-makers with 300-plus attributes per record, alongside a large consumer file. Search for Schober and you will still find most of the coverage; the rename is recent enough that even industry lists have not caught up.

Germany · Per record and licence, quoted · Built on: Own address research, Public sources

10. Leadfeeder: the EU answer to the US platforms

The German-rooted GTM platform, and the only entry here that competes with the global sales tools on their own terms.

Karlsruhe-based Echobot merged with Finland's Leadfeeder in 2022 on €180 million from Great Hill Partners, launched as Dealfront in 2023, and has since reverted to the Leadfeeder name. It claims 60 million companies and 400 million contacts from trade registers and public sources, built and hosted in the EU, plus website visitor identification. Given the German rules on outreach, treat it as a targeting and intent layer rather than a licence to start emailing.

Karlsruhe, Germany and Helsinki, Finland · Subscription tiers · Built on: Trade registers, Public sources, Own web data

11. MARKUS (Moody's): Creditreform in a research wrapper

Excellent for analysis, but know that you are largely buying Creditreform data through a different front door.

MARKUS is the German, Austrian and Luxembourg product in Moody's Orbis family, and the Bureau van Dijk brand it once carried was retired in 2024. The detail worth knowing: it was built with the Creditreform association, which supplies the underlying German and Austrian data. So MARKUS is a research and benchmarking layer over Creditreform rather than an independent collection effort, which is fine as long as you are not buying it expecting a second opinion.

Germany, Austria and Luxembourg coverage · Enterprise licence · Built on: Creditreform data, Unternehmensregister

12. Kompass Deutschland: the industrial taxonomy

Classifies what firms actually make in a way no activity code manages, which still matters in German manufacturing.

Kompass has been classifying industrial suppliers since the 1940s, and its taxonomy runs to more than 56,000 product and service codes across 43 million company profiles worldwide. In a country whose economy runs on specialised Mittelstand manufacturers, being able to find every maker of a specific component beats any statistical activity code. This is editorial directory data rather than register data, and prices are published from €345 a month.

Endingen, Germany · From €345/mo, published · Built on: Own directory research

13. GBI-Genios: the research desk's aggregator

Buys you everyone else's data plus the press archive, which is exactly right for due diligence and wrong for sales.

Owned by the publishers of Frankfurter Allgemeine and Handelsblatt, GBI-Genios is a host rather than a collector: around a thousand sources including 300 newspapers, plus 60 million company records resold from Creditreform, the Bundesanzeiger and Dun & Bradstreet. For background research on a counterparty, having the filings and thirty years of press coverage in one search is worth more than another register feed. Many public libraries provide free access.

Munich, Germany · Per article or flat rate · Built on: Creditreform, Unternehmensregister, 300+ news sources

14. Quadress: B2B addresses, AI-assisted

A focused B2B address house that leans on its own data and web crawling rather than the register.

Founded in Bochum around 2001, Quadress sells B2B address files, contact data and email-marketing services, and reads company purchase signals from a mix of its own data, web crawling and AI rather than from register feeds. It merged operations with aporta at the start of 2025. This is a marketing-data house, not a credit or compliance source, and a reasonable pick for a German B2B campaign list when you do not need financials attached.

Bochum, Germany · Quote only · Built on: Own data, Web crawling

15. SAZ: the direct-marketing veteran

Four decades of direct-marketing data, stronger on consumer campaigns than on B2B registry work.

SAZ has run direct-marketing services across the German-speaking market for more than forty years, out of St. Gallen in Switzerland and Garbsen in Germany. It combines its own consumer data and a campaign platform with multichannel execution, from acquisition and CRM to fulfilment. It is worth knowing that its centre of gravity is consumer direct marketing rather than B2B register data, so shortlist it for campaign delivery and audience work, not for company financials or KYB.

St. Gallen, Switzerland and Garbsen, Germany · Quote only · Built on: Own data, Direct-marketing sources

The four years that reset the German market

Germany changed the rules twice and the courts changed them a third time. If you last looked at this market in 2021, most of what you know is out of date:

So who is still actually German?

Germany kept more of its data industry in local hands than most European markets, helped by Creditreform's association structure, which has no shares to sell:

What the register gives you, and what it withholds

Since August 2022 you can read the whole Handelsregister for nothing, scanned filings included. What you cannot do is take it in bulk: there is no official API and no bulk download, so everything comes one document at a time through a web form. That gap is the entire commercial opportunity, and it is why an open-data project had to build the only free bulk copy that exists.

The bigger limitation is what German companies never have to publish. Sole traders and ordinary partnerships fall outside the disclosure rules completely, and small limited companies file a balance sheet with no profit and loss account. For most German businesses, the revenue figure you see in any commercial file is an estimate, not a reported number. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a model output as a fact.

• Handelsregister : The official register, free since August 2022 including scanned filings. No API, no bulk download.
• Unternehmensregister : Where annual accounts have been filed since 2022, with structured XML for the machine-readable filings.
• OffeneRegister : A free bulk copy of the Handelsregister under an open licence, built by the Open Knowledge Foundation because the official route offers none.

Four questions before you sign anything

1. Do you need payment behaviour, or just the register? This is the fork in the road. Register facts are free and several providers will package them nicely. Payment experience, whether a customer actually pays on time, exists only inside Creditreform's membership network and D&B's DUNTRADE pool. If that is what you need, your shortlist is short.

2. Are you buying data or buying outreach? Cold email to German businesses requires prior consent, with no B2B exemption, and the courts tightened the rules on cold calling in 2025. Buying, enriching and scoring data is perfectly lawful. Build your business case on segmentation, risk and research, not on a bigger send list.

3. How will the data reach your systems? The register has no API, so every provider solves delivery differently. Implisense and North Data publish modern interfaces, beDirect plugs into CRMs, and the bureaus mostly hand you a portal. Ask about refresh frequency and bulk access before you look at the record count.

4. Does revenue data actually exist for your targets? If you are targeting small Mittelstand firms, most publish no profit and loss account, so revenue is modelled. Ask any provider to tell you the difference between reported and estimated figures in their file, and be sceptical if they cannot.

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