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OpenCorporates alternatives compared

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OpenCorporates alternatives compared

Anyone evaluating OpenCorporates as a company-data source tends to hit the same handful of limits within a couple of weeks: data freshness, missing share register data, and patchy coverage of non-Anglophone registries. The table below compares the alternatives that come up most often in due diligence and KYC work.

All facts checked against the products' own pricing pages, API docs, and platform pages. Where the source is unclear, the cell says so.

Feature comparison

OpenCorporates OpenRegistry Sayari BvD / Orbis D&B Direct+ GLEIF National registry sites
Refresh model ingested, varies per registry live call to gov registry on every query full rebuild every 2 weeks + daily delta ingested from 170+ providers configurable INTRA_DAY → MONTHLY, ~5M updates/day 3× daily Golden Copy + delta live
Directors / officers ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ (entity only, no people) ✓
Shareholders (as a separate filing from directors) ✗ ✓ (get_shareholders) ✓ (ownership graph) ✓ partial ✗ varies by country
Persons with significant control / UBO partial (UK PSC mostly) ✓ (get_persons_with_significant_control) ✓ ✓ partial parent / ultimate parent only varies
Mortgages and charges ✗ ✓ (get_charges) ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ varies
Raw statutory filings as bytes (PDF / XBRL / iXBRL) filings list only ✓ (fetch_document returns upstream bytes) ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ on most
Native XBRL / iXBRL financials surfaced ✗ ✓ on FI, KR (XBRL) and GB (iXBRL) ✗ ✗ (extracted to proprietary schema) ✗ ✗ varies
Cross-jurisdiction name search in one call ✓ ✓ (with per-tier fan-out cap) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ (one country at a time)
Direct gov registry URL preserved on every record partial ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ (RA link) n/a (is the source)
MCP server for AI agents ✗ ✓ (public, free) beta (enterprise contract required) ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗
Free anonymous access (no signup) ✓ (web only, rate-limited) ✓ (API + web, 20 req/min) ✗ (demo request only) ✗ ✗ ✓ usually
Self-serve API for individuals ✗ (paid tier from £2,250/yr) ✓ (anonymous tier free) ✗ (enterprise only) ✗ (enterprise only) ✗ (contracted) ✓ (free) varies
Entry-tier price £2,250 / yr (Essentials) $0 anon, $9 / mo Pro enterprise (no published price) enterprise enterprise free mostly free
Pricing published on website ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ n/a
Jurisdictions covered 140+ 27 250+ global (no number published) 220+ 232 (LEI registrants only) 1 each
Entity count ~200M live proxy (no ingested count) ~1.5B ~380M (Orbis) ~500M ~3M active LEIs varies

What the table says about OpenRegistry

The OpenRegistry column is the only one that combines all of the following:

  • A live call to the underlying government registry on every single query, so a director, shareholder, charge, or filing recorded today is visible the same day.
  • Directors, shareholders, persons with significant control, and charges as four separate, machine-readable tools, because in most jurisdictions these correspond to four different filings and collapsing them loses information.
  • Document-level access: fetch_document returns the upstream PDF, iXBRL, or XBRL bytes, so audit and compliance work can cite the statutory record directly.
  • Native XBRL financials on Finland (PRH), Korea (DART), and the UK (iXBRL), without re-rendering or re-encoding.
  • A free public MCP transport. Sayari has an MCP product as well, but it is in beta and gated behind an enterprise contract; OpenRegistry's MCP endpoint is open at /mcp with no signup.
  • Self-serve API on a free anonymous tier (20 req/min). Every other paid product on this list starts at four-figure annual contracts or enterprise pricing.

The trade-off is breadth. OpenRegistry covers 27 national registries today, against the ~145 of OpenCorporates and the larger ingest piles inside the commercial analyst suites. For workflows where the binding constraint is freshness, share-register / UBO access, or document-level provenance rather than coverage of every jurisdiction on Earth, that trade-off usually goes the other way.

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