The 14 Best B2B Data Providers in the UK: Beyond Companies House (2026)

Companies House is one of the most open registers in the world. Free API, free bulk downloads, every filing viewable at no charge. So the obvious question for any British buyer is why a commercial data industry exists here at all, and the honest answer is more interesting than the marketing: you are not paying for the register, you are paying for the three things it structurally cannot contain.

Whether a company actually pays its bills. Who to call, since the register publishes names and nothing else. And the 3.2 million sole traders who never appear on it in the first place, because they are not required to register.

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

In a hurry? The short answer

Jump to a provider

1. Creditsafe: the volume default

The most widely used UK credit file, and the one that made unlimited reports normal.

Founded in Oslo in 1997 and running its UK operation from Cardiff since 2002, Creditsafe built its position by selling subscriptions with unlimited reports while incumbents charged per check. Scores run 1 to 100 as an insolvency probability, alongside credit limits, group structures, monitoring and AML screening. Its 2022 acquisition of Graydon added Benelux depth, and it also owns Company Check, the free search tool that quietly feeds it traffic.

Cardiff, United Kingdom · Subscription, quoted · Built on: Companies House, Gazettes, Payment data

3. Experian Business: the one you can just buy

The rare UK bureau with a price on the website, and a payment-behaviour pool to match.

Experian started life in Nottingham in 1980 as CCN Systems and remains one of the two names every UK finance team knows. Its commercial file combines Companies House records with the London, Edinburgh and Belfast Gazettes, county court judgments via Registry Trust, and its own Payment Performance programme, into which suppliers report how promptly customers actually settle. Around 100,000 data updates a day, and unusually for this market you can subscribe online without talking to sales.

Nottingham, United Kingdom · My Business Profile from £24.99 + VAT/mo · Built on: Companies House, Gazettes, Registry Trust, Payment data

4. Dun & Bradstreet UK: PAYDEX and the global tree

Worth it when you need one identifier and one risk view across borders, not just Britain.

The UK entity was incorporated in 1919, which makes it older than most of the register it reports on. What you buy is the scoring apparatus, PAYDEX, Failure Score, Delinquency Score and a maximum credit recommendation, layered on trade payment history from D&B's contributor network, plus the family-tree data that maps a British subsidiary to its ultimate parent. D&B was taken private by Clearlake Capital in August 2025, so it is no longer a listed company.

London, United Kingdom · Credit Insights from £245 + VAT/yr · Built on: Companies House, Trade payment network, Gazettes

5. Company Watch: the early warning system

Not a data file but a verdict: one number that has called several high-profile collapses early.

Founded in 1998, Company Watch does one thing: it reads filed accounts and reduces financial health to an H-Score from 0 to 100, where anything at or below 25 sits in the warning area. It publicly flagged risk at Kier and Galliford Try, which is the kind of track record this industry rarely evidences. Acquired by Volaris, part of Constellation Software, in March 2022. If you want raw data this is the wrong purchase; if you want an opinion, it is the sharpest one here.

London, United Kingdom · Subscription, quoted · Built on: Companies House filed accounts

6. Red Flag Alert: the independent one

The last sizeable UK-owned credit agency, and it makes that the pitch.

Started inside Begbies Traynor in 2004 and spun out as an independent business in 2012, Red Flag Alert now runs on backing from Foresight and, personally, Begbies' founder. It splits into Acquire for prospecting and risk, Onboard for KYB, and Monitor for real-time alerts, and claims to predict insolvency within twelve months with 97% accuracy, which is a vendor figure rather than an audited one. Note the name collision: Begbies still publishes an unrelated quarterly research report under the same name.

Manchester, United Kingdom · Subscription, quoted · Built on: Companies House, Gazettes, Own analysis

7. The Data City: because the codes are wrong

The most interesting idea in UK company data: classify firms by what their website says they do, not what they ticked years ago.

Founded in Leeds in 2018, The Data City built Real-Time Industry Classification: machine learning reads live company websites and assigns sectors, including 500-plus emerging ones that no official taxonomy covers. The evidence for the problem it solves is its own finding that 142,601 active companies are still coded as dormant, between them growing 8.8% a year on £31bn of turnover. Since UK activity codes are self-declared, never verified and were 19 years stale until 2026, this is a real gap.

Leeds, United Kingdom · Subscription, quoted · Built on: Companies House, Live website content

8. Beauhurst: the growth-company tracker

The only file that tells you a company just raised money and who from, which the register never will.

Beauhurst tracks Britain's high-growth and private companies through fundraisings, valuations, investors, patents and hiring signals, researched by an in-house team rather than scraped. Its client list, the British Business Bank, HM Treasury and Innovate UK, tells you the data is trusted where it counts. Expensive per seat, and irrelevant if your market is established mid-market firms rather than scale-ups.

London, United Kingdom · From roughly £24,500 per seat/yr · Built on: Companies House, Own research team, Public filings

9. Tussell: the public sector map

If your buyer is a council, an NHS trust or a ministry, no general provider comes close.

Founded in 2015, Tussell harvests Contracts Finder and Find a Tender then does the hard part: cleaning and reconciling messy procurement records into something you can actually analyse across central government, local authorities, the NHS, housing associations and schools. Given UK public procurement runs to hundreds of billions, knowing who holds which contract and when it expires is a different kind of business intelligence entirely.

London, United Kingdom · From roughly £11,400 per licence/yr · Built on: Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, Public bodies

10. OpenCorporates: the open-data institution

Publishes its prices and its mission, covers 140 jurisdictions, and is weakest exactly where you might need it most.

Founded in 2010, OpenCorporates aggregates official register data from around 140 jurisdictions covering 200 million companies, under an open licence, and became a B Corp with its mission written into its articles. Pricing is public and tiered from £2,250 a year, and it is free at scale for journalists, NGOs and universities. The honest limitation is beneficial ownership: it maps registered entities well but does not resolve who ultimately controls them.

London, United Kingdom · From £2,250/yr, published · Built on: 140+ official registers

11. Equifax UK: the director-level view

The one that looks at the people behind the company, which is how most small-business lending actually gets decided.

Equifax's distinctive move in the UK is blending commercial data with director-level consumer credit information and Open Banking transaction data. For a two-year-old limited company with no filed accounts, the director's personal credit history is often the only real signal available, and this approach also surfaces hidden directorships and linked judgments. Its Commercial Credit Data Sharing scheme covers more than 80% of UK small businesses.

London, United Kingdom · Not published · Built on: Companies House, Consumer credit data, Open Banking

12. Endole: the accessible middle

Sits between free search tools and enterprise contracts, which is where a lot of British buyers actually live.

Incorporated in 2014 and run from the West Midlands rather than London, Endole packages company records, financial summaries, director information and risk indicators through Explorer and Insight. It is neither the cheapest nor the deepest option, and that is rather the point: a small team wanting more than the free register but unwilling to sign a bureau contract has few other places to go.

Oldbury, United Kingdom · Tiered subscription · Built on: Companies House, Gazettes

13. FAME (Moody's): the analyst's standard

The research tool British universities and corporate finance teams have standardised on.

FAME covers 22 million UK and Irish companies with filed financials, directors, ownership structures, M&A history and adverse filings, and connects into Orbis for cross-border work. The Bureau van Dijk brand it carried for decades was retired in 2024. It is built for people who screen and model rather than prospect or chase payment, and it is the default in university libraries, which is why so many British analysts learned company research on it.

United Kingdom and Ireland coverage · Institutional licence · Built on: Companies House filed accounts, News sources

14. Databroker: the independent broker

Owns no data on purpose: it shops hundreds of sources so you do not have to pick one blind.

Databroker, founded in Manchester in 2009, makes a virtue of holding no database of its own. As an independent list broker it compares hundreds of UK and global business data sources against your brief, then supplies the email, telephone or postal file that fits, along with cleansing and verification. It is ICO-registered and a member of the industry association, which for a broker handling third-party personal data is a signal worth having. Pricing is quoted per brief rather than by fixed volume.

Manchester, United Kingdom · Priced per brief · Built on: Third-party UK and global data files

Britain spent three years trying to fix its register

The open-register story took a turn when it became clear how much of the register was simply false. What followed is the biggest shake-up Companies House has had in its history:

So who is still actually British?

The credit end of this market is almost entirely foreign-owned, while the interesting newer players are still independent:

What Companies House actually gives you for free

More than almost any register in the world. A free REST API with a generous rate limit, a free streaming API for near real-time events, monthly bulk snapshots of the whole register, daily machine-readable accounts, and every filing viewable at no charge. The only things you pay for are physical certificates. If a provider's pitch is that they will get you register data, they are selling you something you already have.

Three gaps explain the entire commercial market. Payment behaviour is not in the register and never can be, because it lives in commercial relationships rather than filings. Contact details are not published: you get director names and nothing else, and even the email address companies must now supply is deliberately withheld. And most British businesses are not on the register at all, because 3.2 million sole traders and around 368,000 ordinary partnerships have no obligation to register, out of a private-sector population of roughly 5.7 million.

• Companies House Service : Free search of every registered company and filing. No account needed, no charge to view documents.
• Companies House API and bulk data : Free REST and streaming APIs plus monthly bulk downloads. The rate limit is the only real constraint.
• The Gazette : Official notices for insolvency, winding-up and strike-off across London, Edinburgh and Belfast.

Four questions before you sign anything

1. Are you buying anything the register does not already give you? Companies House data is free and comprehensive. If a quote is mostly for register access with a nicer interface, negotiate hard or build it yourself. The defensible purchases are payment behaviour, contacts, scoring, monitoring and entity matching.

2. Do your targets even file useful numbers? Micro and small companies are exempt from filing a profit and loss account, and that covers most of the register. If you are assessing small firms, financial data will be thin no matter who you buy from, which is exactly why payment behaviour and director-level signals earn their price.

3. Do you need the businesses that are not registered? Sole traders outnumber registered companies in Britain. If they are your market, any Companies House-derived file will miss most of them, and you need a provider that collects independently.

4. How stale is the classification you are filtering on? Industry codes are self-declared, never verified, and were nineteen years out of date until 2026. Ask how a provider classifies companies, and whether it does anything beyond passing through what the company itself ticked.

Frequently asked questions

Keep exploring