Global Database vs OpenCorporates

OpenCorporates and Global Database both start from the same place: official company registries. OpenCorporates built its reputation on open access — aggregating filings from 147 jurisdictions into roughly 220M+ freely searchable company records. Every freshness status is openly published on its own knowledge base, which is exactly how we were able to audit it.

The gap is in what that openness reveals: 61 of those 147 jurisdictions are currently sitting on frozen feeds — for 16 of them, the last recorded update is more than a decade old. That's not a hidden flaw; it's disclosed. It's just rarely part of a standard procurement check, since most buyers evaluate coverage breadth and per-record pricing, not the per-jurisdiction freshness file.

Global Database takes the opposite trade-off: rather than maximizing the jurisdiction count, engineering capacity goes toward keeping the 174+ territories already covered on a published, verifiable refresh schedule — daily for the large majority, real-time for the UK and Germany. On top of that registry layer, every profile is enriched with digitized financials, a global ownership graph, PEPs and sanctions data, and firmographic context that a raw registry filing never contains.

"The 174 territories already in our coverage are kept on the published refresh schedule. That commitment is what produces the freshness profile: 104 territories on a daily schedule, 7 on weekly, 5 on monthly, and 2 — the UK and Germany — on real-time API connections."

Neither platform is wrong for its use case. A one-off name-and-status check in a jurisdiction OpenCorporates actively maintains is exactly what its open model is for. Where ownership resolution, financial depth, compliance screening, or AI-native access is part of the job, that's the gap Global Database is built to close.

OpenCorporates runs a credit-based model where a basic search consumes a credit — the same cost whether or not it returns a usable record. Standard plans cap out at 500 calls a month (200/day), for a fixed annual fee regardless of actual usage.

Global Database separates search from retrieval: searching is free at up to 6,000 requests per minute, and cost applies only when a full profile or enriched field is retrieved. For AI-driven workflows specifically, data is also available through an MCP server and an Agentic API, with native connectors already built for Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot — so an AI agent can query company data directly, not through a scraped intermediary.