Every few weeks someone asks where to get company data without paying a provider or scraping something they shouldn't. Here's the list I actually use for seed and reference data, with the honest notes, because most of these lists skip the licensing part that decides whether you can really use the thing.
Legal entity and registry data:
– GLEIF (LEI) – global legal entity identifiers, released as daily "golden copy" files under CC0. Around a few million entities, and it includes parent and child relationships, which is rare in free data and directly useful if you deal with company hierarchies. This is the cleanest genuinely open one on the list.
– SEC EDGAR – every US public filer, public domain, with bulk downloads and a full-text search API. Deep financials, but only for public companies, so it's a small slice of the world.
– UK Companies House – free API and a bulk data product for roughly 5M UK companies under the Open Government Licence. Registered address, officers, status, filings.
– OpenCorporates – the largest open database of companies pulled from official registers. Free to search on the site; reuse of the data has its own terms, so read the license before you build on it rather than assuming it's fully open.
– National open-data portals and SAM.gov (US entity registrations) for country-specific coverage.
Local businesses and places:
– Overture Maps (Places theme) – tens of millions of places, released openly under a permissive data license. This is the serious free option for local business POIs now.
– OpenStreetMap – POIs and businesses under ODbL. Great coverage in some regions, thin in others, and the share-alike and attribution terms are real obligations, not decoration.
– Wikidata – company and organization entities under CC0, good for linking and disambiguation, not for coverage of small businesses.
The honest gaps, because this is the part that matters:
– The registry sources give you legal name, address and status, and almost never website, email, phone or social. The web-presence fields you actually want for outreach are the ones no free authoritative source publishes.
– The genuinely hard fields, revenue, employee count and technographics, have no free authoritative source at all. Anything free is modeled or estimated, and you should treat it that way.
– Google Places, Yelp and LinkedIn are not on this list on purpose. They have real data, and their terms restrict scraping and redistribution, so they are not a legally usable source no matter how tempting.
What's on your list that isn't on mine? I'm especially interested in good country-specific registers outside the US and UK, which is where free coverage falls apart.
Source: r/Data_Enrichment · by /u/company_url_finder