---
title: "Companies House API vs entity resolution"
summary: "Free, authoritative, and the right answer for a lot of UK teams. It is one of our sources too."
canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/compare/companies-house-api
last_updated: 2026-10-12
copy: full
---

# Companies House API vs entity resolution

> Free, authoritative, and the right answer for a lot of UK teams. It is one of our sources too.

Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/compare/companies-house-api
Last updated: 2026-10-12

## Entity Bind vs Companies House

Free, authoritative, and the right answer for a lot of UK teams. It is one of our sources too.

Keep Companies House, and put Entity Bind beside it. Send a few hundred rows with the matches you already have on them: each one comes back accepted, withheld or contradicted, with the register page that settles it and a receipt that reopens at a URL.

Your company master has to survive somebody else’s audit, and every merge in it needs a reason a person outside your team can read. This page compares on that axis: what each side is for, where the alternative is stronger, and what we would do in your place.

Companies House: Free, authoritative, and the right answer for a clean UK file. It is also one of our own live sources. Entity Bind: A search returns candidates; we return a decision, a confidence with a floor beneath it, and a refusal where the evidence will not carry a match.

- Our recommendation: Run both
- Rows to Companies House: 3 of 12
- Rows to Entity Bind: 7 of 12
- Rows genuinely even: 2

Settle it on your own data: A sample with the matches your current process already produced. We accept, withhold or contradict each one, with a citation you can open. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1)

Self-service. Create your workspace online and verify your email to start matching company records. Free starts with 300 credits and no card. Paid monthly plans are available in workspace Billing; VAT is added where applicable. Usage is tracked without automatic overage charges. [Trust and security](https://entitybind.com/trust)

3 of the 12 rows in the table below go to Companies House and 7 go to Entity Bind. The rows on their side are the reason to keep what you already run; the rows on ours are what we would add beside it.

By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 12 October 2026

## The short answer

For a UK-only file the register's own API is free, authoritative and frequently the correct answer, and we have an unusual view of it: the register is one of our own live sources, and the UK evidence published on this site was measured against it. If you know which company you mean, or your names are clean enough to look up, calling the register directly costs nothing, adds no supplier and gives you the most authoritative answer that exists on a UK company's legal name, number, status, registered office and previous names. What the register does not do is resolve. Its search is a text search: hand it an abbreviated, misspelt, former or trading name and it returns ranked candidates with no opinion about which one is your row, and no record of the decision you then make. That gap is the product — and it is a smaller gap than a vendor would like to admit, because 99.53% of the 5,464,811 live companies on the UK register already have a unique name.

The answer for your own rows needs your own rows: a few hundred of them, with the matches you already have beside them. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1)

## What Entity Bind adds beside Companies House

Run both, and this is the half we do. Each of these is a job the other side of this page is not built for.

- Your names are abbreviated, truncated, trading names or names the company stopped using in 2016.
- Your file is not only UK, and the same row has to resolve against a French, Norwegian or US register too.
- You need the decision recorded, with a confidence and a citation, rather than a search result somebody eyeballed.
- You need to know which of the company numbers already in your systems are attached to the wrong row.
- You need per-field licence and resale rights carried on the data rather than inferred from a licence page.

A stewardship queue and a supplier file before a payment run want different halves of that list. Create your Free workspace to inspect your own rows, or contact us for a guided review of the checks your workflow needs. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1)

## The case for Companies House

Read these before the table. On some evaluations one of them settles the question on its own, and if it settles yours, keep what you have and put us beside it.

- It is free, under the Open Government Licence v3.0, with no contract, no supplier review and no data processing agreement to negotiate.
- It is authoritative. It is the register of incorporation, and in our own source precedence the register wins over every other source on a UK company's legal name — a rule that is in the code rather than in a style guide.
- It is stable. In our own source-fragility classification it sits in the top tier: a documented API with contractual stability, alongside the global LEI system and SEC EDGAR.
- A free monthly bulk snapshot of the whole register, plus a change stream. The snapshot behind our own published UK fixture was taken that way.
- Filing history, accounts documents, officers and persons with significant control on the same estate, at the same price of nothing.
- Most UK company names are already unique — 99.53% of 5,464,811 live companies — so a straightforward exact-name lookup lands far more often than vendors in this category tend to admit.

### Requirements that point to Companies House

- Your file is UK only and you already hold company numbers, or your names are clean.
- Budget is zero and the cost of a wrong match is an untidy report rather than a payment.
- You want the register's own answer and nothing added to it.
- You are happy to own the rate limiting, the retries, the normalisation and the storage.
- Adding a supplier is a process you would rather avoid entirely, which is a perfectly good reason.

If one of those is your requirement, say so when you write to us. We will tell you where the answer is Companies House, and what running Entity Bind beside it would add: an independent verdict on each match, with the register page that supports it. Cheaper for both of us than finding out in month three.

## Entity Bind and Companies House, dimension by dimension

Every row carries a verdict. 3 go to Companies House, 7 to Entity Bind and 2 are even. Both columns are filled in on every row, so a verdict can be read against what each side actually does about it.

| Dimension | Companies House | Entity Bind | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Cost and procurement | Free, under the Open Government Licence v3.0, with no contract, no supplier review and no third party in the path. | A supplier, with a published credit rule and no SOC 2, no independent validation and no production reference in a regulated firm. | Companies House |
| Authority on a UK legal fact | It is the register. There is no higher authority on a UK company's legal name. | The same source, with the register ranked above every other source in the precedence order. On a UK legal name our answer is the register's answer. | Even |
| Exact-name lookup | Works, and for most of the register that is genuinely enough: 99.53% of 5,464,811 live companies on the UK register have a unique name. | The same lookup, and a decision for the remainder. On a clean file with numbers already attached this buys you very little: the identifier tier resolves 100% (317/317) and so would a direct lookup. | Companies House |
| Officer-level detail | Full officer records and person-level filings, published by the register. | Deliberately not carried. Five personal fields the register volunteers on a person with significant control are dropped at the ingestion boundary and never reach storage. Corporate owners are kept. | Companies House |
| Jurisdictions | The United Kingdom. | Five measured registers — United Kingdom, United States at state level, United States (filers), France and Norway — plus the global LEI system, with a combined parity of 0.999955 against a pre-declared 0.9565 bar. | Entity Bind |
| Abbreviated, truncated and former names | A text search ranks candidates. It does not tell you which one is your row. | A decision, or a documented refusal: truncated names resolve 58.10% (61/105), and the rest come back as an abstention with a ranked shortlist, which is the correct answer when the missing tokens were the discriminating ones. | Entity Bind |
| Deciding which candidate is yours | Yours to decide, every time, with no record that you decided it. | The cascade decides: identifier rules, then scoring, then adjudication of the borderline band, then registry and web research for the tail, stopping at the cheapest stage that can decide. | Entity Bind |
| What a confidence number means | There is none. A search returns relevance, which is not a claim about your record. | A lower bound on measured accuracy for the population the decision belongs to, recomputed from recorded counts by the test suite. Confidence bounds depend on the recorded evidence population; there is no universal score for every match. Read match_confidence_basis and the evidence. A 0.99 filter can return some v8 adjudicated matches while excluding valid identifier matches, so validate its coverage cost on your own inputs. | Entity Bind |
| Refusing to answer | A search always returns something, including for a company that does not exist. | A match below 0.90 confidence is unrepresentable. The record comes back as an abstention with a ranked shortlist instead. In the historical 50-record wrong-town fixture, 72% resolved and zero wrong bindings were observed. This is a measured adversarial sample, not a guarantee for every misleading description. | Entity Bind |
| Handling a file rather than a company | One company per request. You write the loop, the back-off, the caching and the dedup. | Order-independent batch clustering, a duplicate report in your own record ids, and an audit pack whose totals reconcile or the run does not ship. | Entity Bind |
| A record of the decision | None. The register records companies, not your interpretations of them. | A receipt per decision including every refusal, queryable as a population by pipeline version, threshold and date, and re-scorable from stored features. | Entity Bind |
| What you may store and resell | The Open Government Licence permits reuse including commercial reuse with attribution. Generous, clear, and you do not need us to interpret it. | The same licence, enforced per field on the write path, with attribution generated from the sources your file actually contains and resale rights on the open-licensed subset on the Scale plan. | Even |

Our evidence basis: internal fixtures only · independent validation held: none

Three limits sit behind every comparison in this section — what we hold, where we stand and how ready we are — and the [comparison hub](https://entitybind.com/compare#not-a-contest) states all three at full size. The figures in our own column were measured on internal fixtures; the [accuracy page](https://entitybind.com/accuracy) carries the method and the population behind each one.

### What we do not hold

- No SOC 2. It has not been started.
- No independent external validation of the accuracy figures. Every fixture is one we built.
- No production customer holdout. The evidence is internal.

A table cannot weigh those rows against your file, and neither can a fixture of ours — your own records are the only ones that settle it. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1)

## Built for, and wrong for

Neither of these depends on which alternative you are weighing. They are the two answers that decide whether the comparison above is worth your time at all.

### Built for

Teams with a company master they have to defend — an MDM or stewardship queue, a CRM after a migration or a merger, a supplier file before a payment run, or counterparty onboarding that has to survive an audit.

### Wrong for

Buying breadth as the product: we hold a fraction of an incumbent’s records and are not building a global company graph. Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.

## Where the figures on this page come from

Only the numbers that are not ours are listed here. Each one is the vendor’s own published claim. We have not audited anybody’s coverage figure, and as far as we know neither has anybody outside the company that published it.

- [Companies House developer documentation](https://developer.company-information.service.gov.uk/): The register's own published API documentation and rate limits. Their figures, not ours, and they can change them without telling us. Recorded on 2026-09-02.
- [Open Government Licence v3.0](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/): The licence the register publishes under. The reading of it here is ours, and it is not legal advice. Recorded on 2026-09-02.

## The method behind our half of this comparison

2 articles that set out how the decision is made and measured, rather than how it compares.

- [Blocking and candidate generation](https://entitybind.com/guides/blocking-and-candidate-generation) (Guide): You cannot compare every pair. How blocking keys work, why rarity weighting matters, how to measure retrieval with recall@k, and the silent failure mode that mints duplicates.
- [Company identifiers explained](https://entitybind.com/guides/company-identifiers-explained) (Guide): Company number, LEI, CIK, ticker, SIREN and SIRET, DUNS, VAT, EUID and ISIN. What each identifies, who issues it, what it does not guarantee, and which ones actually decide a match.

## The other options you are weighing

The other 11 comparisons, on the shelves the hub uses. Four are not vendor contests: two are the options that beat most vendors most of the time — the fuzzy match you already run, and building it yourself — and two are categories we refuse rather than compete in.

### Data providers and registers

- [Entity Bind vs OpenCorporates](https://entitybind.com/compare/opencorporates) (2/9 rows to them): An excellent register mirror. A register mirror is not a decision.
- [Entity Bind vs PermID](https://entitybind.com/compare/lseg-permid) (4/11 rows to them): Free permanent identifiers, and largely unrivalled in capital markets. We do not issue them.

### Resolution engines and platforms

- [Entity Bind vs Senzing](https://entitybind.com/compare/senzing) (5/12 rows to them): A mature engine you run yourself, at no cost per decision. It resolves what you give it.
- [Entity Bind vs Splink](https://entitybind.com/compare/splink) (5/12 rows to them): Free, open source, and it weighs the evidence properly: Fellegi–Sunter, done right. Our scoring stage is the same family.
- [Entity Bind vs AWS Entity Resolution](https://entitybind.com/compare/aws-entity-resolution) (5/12 rows to them): Cheap, inside your own account, and it needs no new vendor. It also matches only what you loaded.
- [Entity Bind vs Tamr](https://entitybind.com/compare/tamr) (5/12 rows to them): Machine-learning mastering at enterprise scale. It learns your labels — including the wrong ones.
- [Entity Bind vs MDM platforms](https://entitybind.com/compare/informatica-and-reltio) (5/12 rows to them): They are the system of record. We are a decision layer beside one, and we write nothing.

### What you would otherwise do

- [Entity Bind vs Fuzzy matching](https://entitybind.com/compare/fuzzy-matching) (3/10 rows to them): Free, already there, and perfectly good until a wrong merge costs money.
- [Entity Bind vs Build it yourself](https://entitybind.com/compare/building-it-yourself) (3/11 rows to them): The right answer if entity resolution is your product. Several teams have done it well.

### Not what we are

- [Entity Bind vs Enrichment vendors](https://entitybind.com/compare/zoominfo-and-clearbit) (5/12 rows to them): A different product, not a competitor. They sell contacts and firmographics; we resolve identity.
- [Entity Bind vs Screening tools](https://entitybind.com/compare/sanctions-screening-tools) (7/12 rows to them): We are not a screening tool and must not be used as one. This page is scope, not competition.

## Questions about Entity Bind and Companies House

### Should we just call the register ourselves?

If your file is UK only and either carries company numbers or has clean legal names, then yes. The register is free, authoritative and stable, most UK names are unique, and a direct lookup will answer a large share of your rows. Come back when the names are abbreviated, when the company changed its name, when the file crosses a border, or when somebody has to defend a match afterwards.

### You use Companies House. Are we paying for a wrapper?

For a clean UK file with numbers attached, largely yes. What you are paying for on a messy file is the part that is not the register: normalisation that knows a Companies House number is eight characters behind an optional letter prefix rather than a string of digits; candidate retrieval with measured recall; scoring, adjudication and research for the rows a lookup cannot settle; a floor that refuses rather than guessing; provenance and licence per field; and a receipt. The register supplies the truth. None of that is the register's job.

### The register has a search endpoint. Is that not resolution?

No, and the difference is where the accountability sits. A search takes your string and returns ranked candidates; whoever reads the list makes the decision, and nothing anywhere records that they made it. Resolution takes your row, brings evidence that is not in your row, decides or declines against a published threshold, and writes down why. On a file of forty thousand rows that difference is not philosophical: it is the difference between forty thousand undocumented human judgements and a population of decisions you can audit.

### What about companies outside the UK?

That is where a single-register strategy stops. We measure five registers, and the claim is per register rather than per continent: United Kingdom, United States at state level, United States (filers), France and Norway. The French position is worth knowing before you plan anything: only 67.96% of French company names are unique, so a French file needs a town or postcode column to be resolvable at all. And Germany is a hole rather than limited coverage.

## Settle it against Companies House on your own rows.

Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration.

[Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [Plans and prices](https://entitybind.com/pricing)

300 credits. No card.

For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack).

---

The 0.90 confidence floor. It is an acceptance contract, not calibration evidence: it says what we refuse to return, not how often an accepted match is right. Read it with the coverage it costs.

Historical results on an internal UK fixture with a preloaded catalogue. The September 5 replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot establish current calibration. No independent customer holdout or global coverage claim.

Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.

This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/compare/companies-house-api, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.