---
title: "OpenCorporates vs an entity resolution API"
summary: "An excellent register mirror. A register mirror is not a decision."
canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/compare/opencorporates
last_updated: 2026-10-12
copy: full
---

# OpenCorporates vs an entity resolution API

> An excellent register mirror. A register mirror is not a decision.

Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/compare/opencorporates
Last updated: 2026-10-12

## Entity Bind vs OpenCorporates

An excellent register mirror. A register mirror is not a decision.

Keep OpenCorporates, 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.

OpenCorporates: Open register data, cheap, and legitimately excellent at being a register mirror. Entity Bind: A register mirror is not a decision. We resolve which record is yours, and say when we cannot.

- Our recommendation: Run both
- Rows to OpenCorporates: 2 of 9
- Rows to Entity Bind: 4 of 9
- Rows genuinely even: 3

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)

2 of the 9 rows in the table below go to OpenCorporates and 4 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

OpenCorporates does something genuinely valuable and does it well: it mirrors company registers across a very large number of jurisdictions and gives each record a stable, openly licensed URL. If you know which company you mean and want to look it up, it is often the best and cheapest answer available, and its jurisdiction breadth is far beyond the five registers we have measured. What it does not do is resolve. Given forty thousand messy rows out of a CRM, a register mirror will happily return several plausible candidates per row and leave the decision — and the accountability for the decision — with you. Entity Bind is that decision: which record is yours, at what confidence, on what evidence, and an explicit refusal where the evidence will not carry one.

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 OpenCorporates

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.

- You have a file rather than a company, and the question is which register record each row points at.
- You need a calibrated confidence and a documented refusal rather than a candidate list.
- You need a receipt for the decision, because somebody will ask about it later.
- You need per-field resale rights enforced rather than a licence to interpret.
- Your data is concentrated in the registers we measure, where the resolution quality is published with its denominators.

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 OpenCorporates

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.

- Jurisdiction breadth far beyond ours. We measure five registers, and the claim is per register rather than per continent; they mirror company registers across a great many more.
- A stable, openly licensed per-record URL for an enormous number of companies, which is exactly the property this product insists on and rarely finds.
- Cost. For lookups against a known company it is cheap or free, and no per-decision pricing model beats that.
- A public-interest mission and a track record of making register data usable that predates most of this category.
- Simplicity. There is no cascade to understand, no confidence semantics to learn and no abstention behaviour to design around.

### Requirements that point to OpenCorporates

- You know which company you mean and need to look it up, cite it, or mirror the register.
- Your jurisdictions are outside the five registers we have measured, which is most of the world.
- Share-alike licensing is compatible with what you are building.
- You need breadth of registers more than you need a decision about which record is yours.
- The budget is small and the consequence of a wrong match is low.

If one of those is your requirement, say so when you write to us. We will tell you where the answer is OpenCorporates, 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 OpenCorporates, dimension by dimension

Every row carries a verdict. 2 go to OpenCorporates, 4 to Entity Bind and 3 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 | OpenCorporates | Entity Bind | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Jurisdictions | Register mirrors across a very large number of jurisdictions. | Five measured registers: United Kingdom, United States at state level, United States (filers), France and Norway. Adapters exist for three more with no evaluation fixtures, and we do not sell those as covered. | OpenCorporates |
| Cost of a lookup | Cheap or free. | One credit for a record decided by identifier rules or scoring, five if it needed adjudication or research, zero for an abstention or a replay. | OpenCorporates |
| Per-record citation | A stable open URL per record — the property this whole product is built around. | The same, taken from the register itself, carried per field with its licence and freshness. | Even |
| Deciding which record is yours | Search results. The decision is yours. | A decision, with the deterministic, probabilistic, adjudication and research stages behind it, and an abstention where nothing clears the floor. | Entity Bind |
| Confidence | Not applicable — a mirror makes no claim about your record. | Calibrated per stage against recorded outcomes and published as a lower bound rather than a point estimate. 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 | Returns what matched the query. | A match below 0.90 confidence is unrepresentable. The record comes back as an abstention with a ranked shortlist instead. | Entity Bind |
| Handling a file | You write the pipeline. | 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 |
| Licensing of what you take away | Share-alike, which is generous and is also a constraint if you are building a commercial product on top. | Open-tier facts only, with resale rights on the Scale plan and attribution generated from the sources the file actually contains. Enforced by a refusal on the write path rather than by a clause. | Even |
| Whether we use their data | Available under a share-alike licence. | We do not ingest it. Their identifiers reach us through the global LEI system's own CC0 payload instead, without touching their data or their terms. | 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.

- [OpenCorporates](https://opencorporates.com): Licensing and coverage descriptions are theirs. The share-alike incompatibility described here is our reading of their licence against our own resale promise, not a statement on their behalf. 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.

- [What is entity resolution?](https://entitybind.com/guides/what-is-entity-resolution) (Guide): Entity resolution decides which records refer to the same real-world thing. What it is, why company identity is hard, deterministic versus probabilistic matching, and why fuzzy matching is not entity resolution.
- [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 Companies House](https://entitybind.com/compare/companies-house-api) (3/12 rows to them): Free, authoritative, and the right answer for a lot of UK teams. It is one of our sources too.
- [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 OpenCorporates

### Why do you not just use OpenCorporates as a source?

Two reasons, one legal and one commercial. Their data is share-alike licensed, which is incompatible with a product that promises per-field resale rights enforced at the persistence layer — the write path would refuse it. And they are an adjacent product in the same category, so building on them would be a dependency in the wrong direction. Their identifiers do reach us, but through the global LEI system's CC0 payload rather than through them, which touches neither their data nor their terms.

### Is a register mirror not enough for our use case?

Often, yes. The test is whether you already know which company you mean. If your workflow starts with a company and needs its register record, a mirror is the right tool and cheaper than this. If your workflow starts with a spreadsheet row that says something like a company name and has to end with the right register record, that gap is the product — and it is the gap where a search interface quietly hands the accountability back to whoever is reading the results.

### Their coverage is much wider than yours. Does that not settle it?

For a lookup, largely yes. For a resolution, no, because resolution quality is a per-register property and an unmeasured register is not covered in any sense we would sell. We publish five registers with their name-uniqueness census and a combined parity of 0.999955 against a pre-declared 0.9565 bar across united Kingdom, United States (Colorado) and EMEA (France and Norway) — and Germany is a hole rather than limited coverage. A wider list with no measurement behind it would look better on a page and be worth less in an evaluation.

## Settle it against OpenCorporates 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.

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/opencorporates, 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.