Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) alternatives

Dun & Bradstreet has sold business data since 1841, and its Data Cloud holds over 500 million records. Almost nobody shopping for an alternative wants all of that replaced. Usually the gap is narrower: the enterprise contract costs more than the budget allows, or a team pulls one kind of data out of a platform built to sell a dozen. Often what they really need is the government registry's own record, and a curated aggregate was never meant to be that.

Why teams look for a Dun & Bradstreet alternative

D&B sells a broad platform: business credit and risk scoring, firmographics, sales intelligence through D&B Hoovers, supply-chain and compliance data. Most of the reasons people start looking elsewhere fall under four headings.

• Cost and contract structure. D&B revenue is subscription and data-licensing based. Pricing is quote-driven and renews on annual contracts, which suits large buyers and frustrates smaller teams that need one data type.
• You need a slice, not the suite. If what you actually pull from D&B is official company-registry facts (does this entity exist, what is its status, who are the officers, what has it filed), you are licensing a whole platform to use one corner of it.
• Primary-source recency. The Data Cloud is a curated, aggregated dataset. It is not the national registry's record at the second you query. For onboarding and compliance refresh, that gap is the failure mode.
• AI-agent integration. D&B's APIs are enterprise products. There is no anonymous tier and no Model Context Protocol transport for AI clients.

Alternatives to Dun & Bradstreet

OpenRegistry

OpenRegistry calls 27 national company registries live and hands back the registry's own payload, raw, with filing bytes available inline via fetch_document. It speaks the Model Context Protocol, so Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Goose or Zed pick it up from one config block with no API key. The anonymous tier is free for commercial use at 20 requests a minute per IP; Pro and Max cost $9 and $29 a month. Set against D&B, it does one slice well: the official registry record, meaning whether a company exists, its status, officers, filings, and ownership where the registry discloses it. It is not a credit bureau, though. There is no D-U-N-S Number to obtain from it, no business-credit score, no firmographic or sales data.

The D-U-N-S Number itself, free from D&B

If the only reason you deal with D&B is that a counterparty, platform, or government portal requires a D-U-N-S Number, you can request one directly from D&B at no charge. The nine-digit identifier, in use since 1963 and now covering over 300 million entries, is free to obtain. A paid D&B subscription buys data and analytics, not the identifier. Needing a D-U-N-S Number is not, by itself, a reason to license a data product.

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. It is a good fit when breadth and bulk export matter more than live reads or derived analytics. There is a dedicated OpenCorporates alternatives page, and a deeper OpenRegistry vs OpenCorporates comparison if you want it.

National registries, direct

UK Companies House, Norway's Brreg, France's RNE and plenty of others run their own free APIs. If you only care about one country, that is the most direct and accurate option there is, and it costs nothing. The trouble starts at country two and country three: a different auth scheme each time, a different schema, quirks you have to learn. OpenRegistry sits over 27 of them so that part is not your problem.

Other commercial business-data vendors

Credit bureaus and B2B data providers, Bureau van Dijk's Orbis among them, compete with D&B on credit scoring, risk ratings, and firmographics. If what you need is a derived credit or risk product, the comparison to run is within that category, and OpenRegistry is not in it. The Bureau van Dijk alternatives page covers Orbis on its own.

Staying with D&B

None of this is a case against D&B. If you run business-credit and risk scoring, or you depend on the D-U-N-S Number as the identifier that ties your systems together, or you buy firmographic and sales data in volume, that is D&B's actual product and OpenRegistry has no answer for it. The same goes for raw reach: 500 million records is a different scale of question than 27 registries.

OpenRegistry and Dun & Bradstreet, side by side

The D&B figures above come from its public material and filings. On most rows D&B comes out ahead, and that is expected: credit scoring, risk products, firmographics and reach are what it was built to sell. OpenRegistry only pulls ahead where the row is about the registry record itself, which is current on every call and traceable back to the source the government publishes.

How to choose

• Official registry facts, live, cheap, or behind an AI agent. Use OpenRegistry.
• A D-U-N-S Number. Request one free from D&B directly; no data subscription needed.
• Business credit scores, risk ratings, or firmographic and sales data. Use D&B, or another vendor in that category.
• The widest catalogue of basic company data, or bulk export. Use OpenCorporates.
• One specific country, free. Use that national registry's own API.

Want to see the actual coverage before deciding? The openness ranking goes country by country through what each of the 27 registries publishes, and /companies/uk is a worked example for UK company, director and filing lookups.