Best Orbis Alternatives for Corporate Finance Teams

Orbis is Moody’s flagship global private company database, originally built by Bureau van Dijk and folded into Moody’s Analytics after their 2017 acquisition. One of the largest datasets on private and listed companies in the world, at least by volume, Orbis features over 625 million entities, blending data from more than 170 sources.

It is also, for a large share of UK and German corporate finance and advisory firms, the wrong tool for the job they’re trying to do. Orbis works well for compliance, KYC, and transfer pricing. But corporate finance and advisory teams often inherit it through a firm-wide FAME or MARKUS licence purchased for entirely different use cases, using evaluation criteria that do not reflect how deal teams actually work. The result is enterprise pricing for a tool designed for a different workflow, and an ultimately frustrating experience.

This guide compares the strongest alternatives to Orbis for UK and German advisory teams. We’ll break down the platforms that fit origination, BD, and pre-deal research the way Orbis fits compliance and risk.

Why users choose Orbis

Orbis has one of the broadest levels of coverage across virtually every country worldwide. For workflows spanning Europe, LATAM, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East, it boasts impressive coverage.

Because of this, Orbis is a fantastic option for companies seeking global, cross-border ownership mapping, knitting together ownership data from registries worldwide. This helps users identify a company’s international networks and operations.

It’s also the de facto standard tool for transfer pricing benchmarks — finding the independent companies that multinationals use to show tax authorities their internal cross-border prices are fair.

Why users look for Orbis alternatives

Orbis is built around firmographic data, i.e. what a company is. Its search function is largely focused on company size, sector, ownership, financials, geography, and corporate structure. And compliance and KYC teams will likely be content with this.

However, advisory and origination teams need something quite different, such as trigger-based intent data that shows what a company is doing. For example, recent hires, fundraising activity, leadership changes, patent filings, growth signals, and pre-deal triggers.

Whilst it has an impressive international scope, Orbis’s base dataset lacks the depth of more dedicated tools. To remedy this, Orbis relies on separate subsets of country-level databases for in-depth local insights. These include:

Sold separately from the global Orbis, they’re positioned as a more focused view of entities within those countries. In theory, this modular approach should mean a more cost-effective method of balancing cost with your data needs.

However, firms working across markets often find themselves holding multiple licences —for example a global Orbis subscription alongside FAME and MARKUS — and the cumulative cost of covering both markets at the depth advisory teams actually need can be considerable.

And whilst Orbis does track over 625 million entities worldwide, these figures are inflated, because entities are not the same as companies. For example, Tesco PLC alone has more than 360 entities within its corporate structure. Discerning a ‘true company’ from its myriad of subsidiaries and shell companies is a complex challenge, but one Beauhurst has solved.

Discover True companies

Why Beauhurst is the strongest Orbis alternative

Beauhurst (best for UK and German corporate finance and advisory)

Where Orbis is optimised for compliance and firmographic research, Beauhurst is built around corporate events on top of this underlying regulatory data. These include the changes in a company’s ownership, capital structure, and financial position that indicate a transaction may be approaching.

Beauhurst covers every UK and German company, with alerts configurable by event type, which can be routed to individual deal professionals. The platform also integrates with CRM systems, with intelligence feeding into existing workflows rather than sitting in silos.

Best for: Advisory teams originating mandates from the UK or German mid-market — M&A, fundraising, restructuring, and transaction services.

Limitations: Beauhurst covers the UK and German markets only. For firms with significant deal activity in other markets, it sits alongside rather than replaces a broader global database.

PitchBook (for VC and PE-backed company data)

PitchBook has built substantial coverage of institutional private markets: fund data, deal terms, investor profiles, and cap table information at the private equity and venture end of the market.

For advisory teams working on transactions where understanding the investor base is central — PE-backed buy-side M&A, secondaries, growth equity — PitchBook’s depth on deal terms, fund activity, and investor history goes further than Orbis’s ownership data.

Its depth drops away sharply outside of funded companies. The broad population of founder-owned, non-institutional businesses is where PitchBook’s coverage is weakest, which limits its usefulness for teams originating from the wider mid-market.

Best for: Transactions involving PE or VC-backed businesses, where investor context and deal history matter.

Limitations: Weak coverage of the non-institutional private company market. Not suited to origination outside the funded segment.

Crunchbase (low-cost option for startup lookups outside the UK)

Crunchbase tracks some funding rounds, founder profiles, and investor activity across global technology markets, and is widely used for quick, surface-level research on venture-backed businesses. It carries some financial data, primarily funding history and valuations alongside leadership information, but the depth and data quality is insufficient for the kind of qualification decisions corporate finance workflows require.

For UK early-stage and growth companies specifically, Beauhurst provides more complete coverage. Crunchbase’s relevance increases for non-UK markets, particularly US and global tech, where its reach is broader.

Best for: Fast, low-cost lookups on venture-backed businesses, particularly outside the UK.

Limitations: Patchy coverage. Financial and ownership data lacks the depth needed for corporate finance qualification work. Less relevant for UK-focused teams than for those covering global or US tech markets.

Dealroom (European alternative for tech and growth-stage intelligence)

Dealroom has reasonable coverage of funded technology businesses across key European markets — the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the Nordics — and is particularly useful for mapping investor networks, accelerator ecosystems, and sector clustering across the European tech landscape.

For advisory teams with a mandate in European tech M&A or growth equity, it offers more regional granularity than US-built alternatives. Outside the funded segment, however, its coverage is thin, and it is not suited to origination across the broader private company population.

Best for: European tech and growth-stage transactions, and sector-focused teams mapping funded company ecosystems.

Limitations: Limited to the funded segment. Not appropriate for origination across the general UK or German private company market.

Dun & Bradstreet (for global credit and compliance)

Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) is a credit and financial risk platform operating at global scale, with established capabilities in risk scoring, payment behaviour analysis, and compliance screening.
For firms running supplier due diligence or credit risk assessment across international markets, it offers a depth of credit and financial risk intelligence that deal-origination platforms aren’t designed to match.

It shares a fundamental characteristic with Orbis: it is a compliance-first tool. The corporate events and ownership signals that drive advisory mandate development are not what D&B is built to surface.

Best for: Credit risk assessment, supplier due diligence, and compliance screening across global markets.

Limitations: Not designed for origination or pre-deal intelligence. The wrong shape for a deal team’s day-to-day workflow.

Global Database (best for cross-border registry lookups)

Global Database covers 600 million company profiles across 200+ countries, sourced directly from official government registries. It includes beneficial ownership tracing, financial statements, PEP and sanctions screening, and continuous monitoring for changes in ownership or risk status.

For teams running cross-border KYB, counterparty due diligence, or compliance screening, it operates in similar territory to Orbis and D&B.
For UK and German advisory teams, however, it isn’t the right fit. Its positioning is firmly compliance and risk-oriented — the corporate events, deal signals, and origination triggers that advisory teams need are not what it is built to surface.

Best for: Cross-border KYB, counterparty due diligence, and compliance screening across international markets.

Limitations: A compliance platform, not an origination tool. For UK and German mandate development, Beauhurst is the more relevant alternative to Orbis.

Companies House and the German registries (free baseline data)

Companies House makes UK director appointments, PSC filings, charge data, accounts, and confirmation statements freely available through its WebFiling service and API. Germany’s equivalent infrastructure — the Handelsregister for commercial registration, the Bundesanzeiger for published accounts, and the Unternehmensregister as the central aggregation point — provides the same function for German companies.

These registries are the authoritative underlying source for most UK and German private company data platforms. Direct access is free and complete, making them a legitimate layer for teams building internal data pipelines or cross-referencing information from other sources.
What they cannot do is prioritise. Raw filing data arrives without context, without scoring, and without any way to distinguish a consequential change from a routine update. Monitoring a large target universe through registry access alone is not a viable system.

Best for: Reference checks, data validation, and as a foundation layer for teams building their own pipelines.

Limitations: No intelligence layer of any kind. Viable as a starting point if you know precisely what you’re looking for, but not as an operational tool.

Recommended alternatives to Orbis

For advisory teams, the case for Beauhurst over Orbis comes down to a simple mismatch: Orbis is an enterprise compliance platform, and the workflow it’s built for isn’t origination.

Its pricing reflects that — structured for firm-wide deployment rather than a focused team-level tool — and so does its UX, which is built for compliance analysts running structured investigations rather than deal professionals who need fast answers during a live origination process.

Beauhurst is built for the opposite end of that spectrum, with commercial terms structured around advisory teams, a platform designed for fast discovery, and origination intelligence that the whole team will actually use.

To see the platform in action, take a quick online tour, or book a demo with the team.