TL;DR
Moody's Orbis, formerly Bureau van Dijk, standardises accounts from 170+ sources so private companies can be compared across borders. That comparability, plus its ownership link graph and M&A transaction history, is what you are paying for.
InfobelPRO holds the same underlying material rather than the analysis layer: filed statements on 25.8M companies across 23 European markets, as reported rather than restated, 81.1M UBOs across 99 countries, and tax ID verification across 79. Delivered as a flat file or REST API on volume pricing, with reseller rights and no enterprise minimum. For free, open registry records, OpenCorporates.
Quick verdict: which provider fits which job
| If you need… | Choose |
|---|---|
| Bulk, flat file and API delivery | Moody's Orbis, InfobelPRO |
| Comparable private-company financials | Moody's Orbis worldwide, InfobelPRO across Europe |
| Flexible licensing and redistribution rights | InfobelPRO |
| UBO and director identification at breadth | InfobelPRO |
| M&A deal data (Zephyr) | Moody's Orbis |
| Audit-proof live register retrieval | Moody's kompany |
| Free, open registry records via API | OpenCorporates |
What Moody's Orbis is good at
- Ownership link graph
- Roughly 1.9 billion ownership links, company-reported. No graph in this comparison approaches that scale.
- Country products
- Bel-First for Belgium and Luxembourg, FAME for the UK, and equivalents across Europe: deep, well-maintained, and locally trusted.
- M&A data
- Zephyr adds transaction history most company-data providers do not attempt.
- Institutional entrenchment
- Embedded in banks, universities and advisory firms, with analyst recognition to match.
- Transparent about being an aggregator
- Orbis says plainly that it standardises 170+ sources rather than claiming registry-direct sourcing.
Why teams look for Moody's Orbis alternatives
- 1. Licensing is expensive and restrictive
- Enterprise contracts with constraints on how data can be used, shared or embedded. If you want to build a product on the data, that is usually where the conversation ends.
- 2. There is an effective floor on deal size
- Orbis is sold on enterprise licences to banks, corporates and universities, and there is no small-deal route into it. In practice that means a minimum spend rather than a published entry price, so a requirement covering a few markets or a modest record volume often has no commercially viable way in.
- 3. You may be buying depth you do not need
- Orbis is priced for institutions doing deep financial analysis. If you need a company universe with industry codes and addresses, that is an expensive way to get it.
The alternatives compared
| Provider | Best for | Coverage claimed | Delivery | Key constraint |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dun & Bradstreet | The D-U-N-S standard, hierarchy and credit risk | 600M+ entities, 200+ countries | Platform, Direct+ API, bulk | Enterprise contract; bundled scope |
| Moody's Orbis | Comparable financials and ownership depth | 625M+ entities from 170+ sources; ~1.9B ownership links | Platform or API | Expensive, restrictive licensing |
| Creditsafe | Credit risk and KYB at accessible pricing | 430M+ companies, 200+ countries | Platform, Connect API | Credit-first; partner-sourced outside Europe |
| InfobelPRO | Multi-market company data with flexible licensing | 375M+ companies across 200+ markets, refreshed monthly | Bulk flat file, REST API | No credit scores; contact coverage partial |
| Global Database | Registry-direct data with reseller rights | Varies by page: 300M to 600M profiles | API-first, web platform, bulk | Published figures vary across their own pages |
| OpenCorporates | Open registry records for research and transparency work | 200M+ entities, 140–170+ jurisdictions (their pages vary) | API, bulk SFTP | Call caps; depth follows how much each registry publishes openly |
| North Data | European registry depth and network graphs | ~78 to 88M companies, 21 to 24 European countries | Freemium web, API | Europe only; quarterly bulk updates |
| Worldbox | Emerging-market and offshore reach | Figures vary by page; 249 countries claimed | API, S3, online DB | Small operation; inconsistent published figures |
Vendor details verified August 2026. Figures are vendor self-reported. Check each provider's site for current terms.
InfobelPRO vs Moody's Orbis
| Dimension | Moody's Orbis | InfobelPRO |
|---|---|---|
| Filed financial statements | Yes | Yes |
| Financial ratios and margins | Yes | Yes |
| Group structure | Yes | Yes |
| Industry classification in NACE and SIC | Yes | Yes |
| UBO identification | Part of the ownership graph | 81.1M UBOs across 99 countries |
| Global tax ID verification | No | Yes |
| Accounts restated for cross-border comparison | Yes | No |
| M&A transaction data | Yes | No |
| Country analysis products (Bel-First, FAME) | Yes | No |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Volume-based pricing, no enterprise minimum | No | Yes |
| Flexible data and reseller rights | No | Yes |
Vendor details verified August 2026. Figures are vendor self-reported. Check each provider's site for current terms.
Which one fits
Moody's Orbis, if you…
- Need accounts restated into one comparable template across borders
- Need M&A transaction history
- Need ownership network analysis at link-graph scale
- Do transfer-pricing benchmarking
- Need Bel-First, FAME or another country analysis product
- Work in an institution that already licenses it
InfobelPRO, if you…
- Need volume-based pricing with no enterprise minimum
- Cannot justify an enterprise licence for a company universe
- Are embedding company data in your own product and need reseller rights
- Need tax ID verification across markets
- Segment by NACE or SIC and need crosswalks
- Need filed statements and group structure across Europe, not restated comparables
What InfobelPRO cannot replace from Moody's Orbis
- Accounts restated for comparison
- InfobelPRO delivers filed statements as reported, in the filing currency, on a common schema across markets. Orbis restates accounts from 170+ sources into a comparable template and converts currency so companies can be compared directly across borders. We do not restate.
- Ownership link graph at scale
- InfobelPRO holds 81.1M UBOs across 99 countries and 42.1M group-structure links. Orbis reports roughly 1.9 billion ownership links, which is a different order for network analysis.
- M&A transaction history
- If deal history is part of the workflow, that is a hard dependency.
- Transfer-pricing benchmarking
- InfobelPRO holds the underlying ratios, including Berry ratio and net cost plus, but not a benchmarking product built on a comparables set. For transfer-pricing work Orbis is the standard.
Frequently asked questions
They solve different problems. Orbis is built for analysis: accounts restated into one comparable template, an ownership link graph at a scale nothing here matches, and M&A history. InfobelPRO holds the same underlying material, including filed statements and UBOs, and is built to be delivered into your own systems on volume pricing with reseller rights. Neither is better across the board.
Licensing and purpose. Both deliver by platform and by API, so access is not the dividing line. Orbis is licensed on enterprise terms that restrict embedding the data in your own product, and it is built for analysts working inside a platform. InfobelPRO is priced on volume with reseller rights, and built to be consumed by systems.
Yes. Bureau van Dijk was acquired by Moody's and its Orbis database now sits within the Moody's product range. Country products such as Bel-First for Belgium and FAME for the UK carry their original names.
Both are Moody's, but they do different jobs. Orbis is a standardised database you query for analysis: it aggregates 170+ sources into comparable financials and ownership data, and Moody's states plainly that it is not registry-direct. kompany goes to the primary register at the moment you ask, across a reported 328M+ companies in 200+ jurisdictions, and returns a result you can put in an audit file. Orbis trades provenance for comparability; kompany trades comparability for provenance. Both coverage figures are company-reported.
InfobelPRO, and the reason is licensing rather than access. Orbis offers an API, so the question is not whether you can query it programmatically. It is whether the licence lets you embed the results in your own product and redistribute them, which enterprise terms generally restrict. If you are building on the data, that is the deciding factor.
Yes for the company-data layer. Filed statements, group structure, UBOs and industry codes map across. What does not migrate is the analysis layer: accounts restated into a comparable template, the ownership link graph at Orbis scale, M&A history and transfer-pricing benchmarking. Most teams that move are replacing the data underneath, not the analysis on top.
Test on your own entities. Take 500 real accounts from your CRM, define the specific fields that matter, send the same list to every shortlisted vendor and compare match rate and fill rate per field. Ask how each field is sourced, how often it refreshes, and what happens to records that go stale mid-contract. Treat published record counts as marketing rather than measurement. Across this market they are self-reported, counted on different rules, and rarely comparable between vendors. An entity is not always a company.
Test it on your own records
Send us a sample of the entities you currently resolve through Orbis, including any outside Europe, and we will return match rates and field fill rates so you can compare on your own data.
Weighing several vendors? Read how InfobelPRO compares overall.
