OpenCorporates alternatives

OpenCorporates has been the reference open-company-data resource for over a decade, and for a great deal of work it still is. People start looking elsewhere when they hit a specific wall. Sometimes it is freshness: the data is a periodic crawl, not a live read. Sometimes it is the free API running out at 200 calls a month, a REST surface that predates AI agents, or a jurisdiction that turns out thin past the basics. The rest of this page is the realistic set of options, and what each is good for.

Why teams look for an alternative

Four limits account for most of it. None is a complaint about OpenCorporates as a project so much as a place its model stops fitting.

• Freshness. OpenCorporates is a scrape-and-cache aggregator. A query returns the most recent crawl of each register, not the registry's record at the second you ask. For onboarding checks, sanctions screening, and adverse-event review, the crawl window is where it bites.
• Free-tier ceiling. The public API key allows 50 calls a day and 200 a month, licensed for open-data and public-benefit work rather than commercial products.
• AI-agent integration. The REST API dates from 2010. Wiring it into an LLM agent means writing and maintaining a custom tool wrapper around it.
• Per-country depth. Breadth is OpenCorporates' strength, at roughly 145 jurisdictions. Depth past name, identifier, and status is uneven, and some registers are thin.

Alternatives to OpenCorporates

OpenRegistry

The case for OpenRegistry over OpenCorporates is freshness and shape. Every call lands on one of 27 national registries in real time and returns its payload raw, filing bytes included inline via fetch_document. Because it runs on the Model Context Protocol, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Goose and Zed pick it up from a single config block, no key needed, and the anonymous tier is free to use commercially at 20 requests a minute per IP. The catch is breadth: 27 registries next to OpenCorporates' roughly 145. There is a full side-by-side comparison if you want the row-by-row version.

National registries, direct

A handful of registries — UK Companies House, Norway's Brreg, France's RNE among them — publish their own free APIs. If your scope is a single country and you are willing to learn that registry's schema and reuse terms, nothing is more direct. It just does not extend: each additional jurisdiction brings fresh auth, rate limits, an identifier format and quirks of its own. OpenRegistry carries all 27 so you integrate once.

GLEIF and LEI reference data

The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation publishes LEI records as a free bulk download and API. The data is well-maintained and openly licensed, but it only covers entities that hold an LEI, which is a small slice of any national register and skews toward financial-market participants. Treat it as a complement to a registry source rather than a replacement.

Enterprise data vendors

Dun & Bradstreet, Bureau van Dijk's Orbis and datasets like them hold hundreds of millions of entities worldwide, with deep financial, credit and ownership records. They are enterprise products: annual contracts, institutional pricing. With the budget and a real need for global depth, they earn it. Drop one behind a developer who just wants a few live registry calls inside an AI agent and it is far too much tool. The vendor-specific breakdowns are at Dun & Bradstreet alternatives and Bureau van Dijk alternatives.

Staying with OpenCorporates

For a good amount of work, OpenCorporates is still the right tool and switching would be a mistake. Bulk catalogue analysis, public-interest research, anything where a periodic crawl across the widest possible jurisdiction list beats a live read on a shorter one. Its open-data licence for bulk export is genuinely hard to match, and the breadth is not a marketing number.

OpenRegistry vs OpenCorporates, side by side

The OpenCorporates figures come from its own API documentation and registers index. The four thematic pages go deeper on API and rate limits, pricing, data freshness, and UBO coverage.

How to choose

• One country, one schema, no budget. Use that national registry's own API.
• Live data, raw fields, or an AI agent across several registries. Use OpenRegistry.
• Widest jurisdiction list, bulk export, public-interest licence. Stay on OpenCorporates.
• Global depth at institutional scale, with the budget for it. Use an enterprise vendor such as Bureau van Dijk.
• Financial-market entity reference data. Use GLEIF, alongside one of the above.

Per-country detail: Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Spain, and Italy each get a page on what the upstream registry publishes and what OpenRegistry adds on top.