Bureau van Dijk (Orbis) alternatives

Bureau van Dijk, part of Moody's since 2017, publishes Orbis: an enterprise database of more than 625 million companies, blended from over 170 sources into one standardised schema. Its buyers are banks, insurers, consultancies, governments and academic researchers. The teams that come looking for an alternative tend to fall into two camps. One cannot justify the enterprise contract. The other can, but needs the government registry's own record, not a standardised aggregate of it, and wants to reach it through an API without an Orbis licence.

Why teams look for a Bureau van Dijk alternative

Orbis is a deep and well-built dataset, and people shopping for an alternative rarely dispute that. Their reasons are about fit.

• Cost and contract model. Orbis is sold on enterprise contracts. Pricing is not published and is set per quote, which suits institutional buyers and rules it out for smaller teams.
• Standardised aggregate against primary source. Orbis blends 170-plus sources into one comparable schema. That comparability is the whole point of Orbis, but it also means a standardisation layer sits between you and the registry's own record.
• Recency. A blended dataset refreshes on its own cycle, not on the registry's record at the second you query.
• Integration. Orbis is delivered through a web platform, enterprise APIs, and bulk feeds. There is no free anonymous tier and no Model Context Protocol transport.

Alternatives to Bureau van Dijk's Orbis

OpenRegistry

Orbis standardises; OpenRegistry hands you the source instead. Every call goes to one of 27 national registries and comes back with that registry's own payload untouched, filing bytes available inline through fetch_document. It runs over the Model Context Protocol, so an agent in Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Goose or Zed reaches it from a single config block, no key. The free anonymous tier allows commercial use at 20 requests a minute per IP; Pro is $9 a month, Max $29. That gets you the record as the government holds it, traceable back to where it came from. It does not get you the things Orbis layers on top: standardised cross-border financials, a modelled ownership graph, M&A deal history.

OpenCorporates

The long-running open-company-data aggregator, covering roughly 145 jurisdictions at name, identifier, and status level, with a free tier for open-data and public-benefit use. A good fit when breadth and bulk export matter more than live reads or standardised financials. The OpenCorporates alternatives page and the OpenRegistry vs OpenCorporates comparison go further into it.

National registries, direct

Most of the big registries — Companies House, Brreg, the RNE — run a free API of their own. For one jurisdiction, nothing beats going straight to the source. The cost shows up later, when the second and third jurisdictions each show up with a different auth scheme, a different schema, and their own quirks to learn. OpenRegistry absorbs that across 27 of them.

Dun & Bradstreet and other enterprise vendors

D&B and platforms like it overlap with Orbis on firmographics, credit and risk scoring, and supply-chain data. If derived analytics at global scale is the requirement, that whole category is the comparison to run, and OpenRegistry sits outside it. The Dun & Bradstreet alternatives page goes into D&B on its own.

Staying with Orbis

Plenty of work still belongs with Orbis. Standardised financials you can compare across borders are the reason it exists, and M&A desks, transfer-pricing teams and academic researchers rely on exactly that. Its ownership graph and corporate-hierarchy data run at a scale OpenRegistry has no equivalent for, and so does its raw country coverage. None of that is a gap OpenRegistry is trying to close.

OpenRegistry and Orbis, side by side

The Orbis figures above are from Moody's own published material. Most rows of the table go to Orbis, which is what you would expect: breadth and standardised, comparable data are the whole proposition. The rows that go the other way are the ones about the registry record on its own, current because it is fetched live and traceable because it is the source's own data rather than a reshaped copy.

How to choose

• The registry's own record, live, cheap, or behind an AI agent. Use OpenRegistry.
• Standardised comparable financials across many countries, or ownership-link data at scale. Use Orbis.
• M&A deal history. Use Orbis's wider product range or a specialist.
• The widest catalogue of basic company data, or bulk export. Use OpenCorporates.
• One specific country, free. Use that national registry's own API.

Before committing either way, it is worth seeing the coverage in detail. The openness ranking walks through all 27 registries and what each publishes; /companies/uk is a hands-on look at UK company, director and filing lookups.