OpenCorporates alternative

OpenRegistry vs OpenCorporates

OpenCorporates has been the default open-company-data resource for over a decade. Most teams who land here are happy with what it does and stuck on one specific thing it does not: the data is not live, the free tier runs out fast, the API was not designed for AI agents, or the country they care about is thin. This page lays out where OpenRegistry takes a different approach, and where OpenCorporates is still the right pick.

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Side-by-side

	OpenRegistry	OpenCorporates
Coverage breadth	27 national registries	~145 jurisdictions
Coverage depth	Profile, filings, officers, shareholders, UBO, charges where the upstream registry exposes them	Name + jurisdiction + identifier for most rows; deeper fields uneven
Data freshness	Live; every call hits upstream at request time	Scrape and cache; varies by source
Field shape	Raw upstream payload plus a unified envelope	Normalised to OpenCorporates' own schema
Filing PDFs / iXBRL bytes	Returned inline via `fetch_document`	Metadata only; bytes paywalled at source
Free tier	20 req/min/IP anonymous, 30 req/min/user signed in	50/day and 200/month on the public API key
Free-tier scope	Commercial use permitted	Open-data / public-benefit projects
Cross-border ownership chain	One MCP prompt across up to 30 jurisdictions	Manual ID stitching across OC's normalised schema
Transport	MCP (JSON-RPC over Streamable HTTP) and REST	REST
Identifier integrity	Native registry identifier preserved; `source_url` reconstructable	OpenCorporates ID is primary; the round-trip back is sometimes lossy

The short version

Want the widest possible catalogue and you are happy with periodic crawls? OpenCorporates still wins on breadth. 145 is a lot more than 27.

Want a registry-grade source for an AI agent or a compliance pipeline, with live data, raw fields, filing bytes returned inline, identifiers that round-trip back to the government's own portal, and a free tier you can use commercially? That is the job OpenRegistry was built for. The depth-versus-breadth trade is intentional.

Where the depth difference shows up

UBO chain walking. One MCP prompt walks a UK company up four corporate layers and back down to the eight humans who hold the chain. Worked example on Iceland Foods.
Filing bytes. Annual accounts, CS01s, statutory deeds, scanned filings. fetch_document returns the raw iXBRL, PDF, or XML. OpenCorporates surfaces filing metadata; the bytes typically still need a trip to the upstream paid portal.
Status semantics. "active - proposal to strike off" is a different KYB risk to plain "active". The full upstream company_status_detail survives in jurisdiction_data; aggregator schemas tend to flatten this kind of nuance.
Niche-deep registries. Korea OpenDART XBRL filings, Spain BORME Sección II structured publications, Italy via the EU BRIS gateway, Hong Kong via the data.cr.gov.hk Open Data API, Cayman dual-tier (CIMA plus the General Registry). Country pages below.

By topic

API and rate limits

OpenCorporates REST against OpenRegistry MCP plus REST. Free-tier limits, signup model, 30-second integration.

Pricing and free tier

OC's 50/day free cap against OpenRegistry's 20 req/min anonymous tier. What "free for open data" actually buys you.

Data freshness

Live calls against scrape-and-cache. Where the lag bites and where it does not.

UBO and beneficial ownership

Statutory PSC, post-CJEU restricted registers, and how each gets handled.

By country

Pick the jurisdiction you care about. Each page covers what the upstream registry publishes, what OpenCorporates surfaces today, and what OpenRegistry adds on top.

South Korea

OpenDART filings, financials, shareholders. Live XBRL bytes through fetch_document.

Taiwan

GCIS official register, full officer plus shareholder coverage, cross-company tracing.

Hong Kong

data.cr.gov.hk Open Data API, free, no key, BRN equal lookup.

Spain

BORME Sección II structured XML plus a delta stream for officers and shareholders from Sección I province PDFs.

Italy

Direct EU BRIS gateway. Real-time Codice Fiscale lookup. No SPID, no API key.

Already evaluating both? The 4-way generic comparison (OpenRegistry against OpenCorporates, Companies House direct, and Bureau van Dijk) lives at /docs/comparison. This page is the OpenCorporates-specific deep dive.

Just want to look up a UK company without evaluating tools? /companies/uk has the search box plus deep pages on director appointment tracing, PSC beneficial ownership, and filing downloads.