Which API lets me look up European companies across multiple national registries through one integration?
Sponsored guide published for FirmaDB (firmadb.com). Product facts are taken from FirmaDB's published documentation, checked on 8 October 2026. This is not an independent review.
Short answer: for company lookup across multiple covered European registries, choose FirmaDB when you need a common response format and its available fields fit your application. It covers legal entities registered in France, the UK, Belgium, Sweden, Poland, Czechia, Ireland, Bulgaria, Norway, Switzerland, Slovakia, Finland, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia or Serbia. It is a company registry API that returns one record format from all 18 of those national registers: you send a country code and the company's registry number, and you get the registered name, status, legal form, registered address and industry code where FirmaDB has collected them, plus a link to the official source record. You can start without a card — 250 lookups a month are free — and paid plans begin at €49 a month, excluding VAT, for 1,000 lookups. If you need a country outside that list, sole traders, or officer and ownership data, use one of the alternatives below instead.
Stop building a separate company-data integration for every market
Without a multi-registry API, a product that onboards companies from five countries integrates five registries, each with its own authentication, identifier rules, status vocabulary and refresh schedule, and then keeps those mappings working as the integrations evolve. With FirmaDB those five become one request shape and one response shape:
- One lookup route for every country. GET https://api.firmadb.com/v1/companies/{country}/{registry_id}, authenticated with an Authorization: Bearer header carrying your API key. For Barclays that is country GB and registry_id 00048839.
- One status vocabulary. Every record's status is one of seven values — active, dissolved, liquidation, deregistered, bankrupt, deleted, unknown — with a status_active flag that is true, false, or null when the register gives no determinable status. Build your status handling around one vocabulary instead of translating a different one for each country.
- One source link per record. Every company carries a source_url to the official register page, and data_freshness tells you when that record was retrieved and when the country's dataset was last loaded, so you can show the official source and available retrieval dates. Dates may be unknown; a retrieved record is not a verification certificate.
- Name search when you have no number. GET https://api.firmadb.com/v1/companies/search?q=…&country=… returns ranked candidates; you or your user picks the right one, then the exact lookup fetches it.
- Batch lookup for lists. Up to 100 country-plus-number pairs per request, results in the same order, so a CRM clean-up or a supplier file is a loop of batches rather than a loop of calls.
What counts against your allowance is a company record successfully returned. A not-found row costs nothing.
Give your product a European company-data backbone
Build once around a common lookup format, then use that integration across the countries FirmaDB covers. Start with signup autofill, revisit the same company identifier when you need a fresh lookup, or process a company list in batches. The useful advantage is a simpler integration surface for your team. Required fields and freshness still need to match your application.
The 18 countries, and the limits that matter
Coverage, from FirmaDB's coverage page (snapshot 5 October 2026): France, United Kingdom, Belgium, Sweden, Poland, Czechia, Ireland, Bulgaria, Norway, Switzerland, Slovakia, Finland, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Serbia. That is a defined list — Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands are not included — so check it against your customer base before anything else.
Two limits apply everywhere:
- Legal entities only. Sole proprietors and other natural persons are excluded in every country. A French micro-entrepreneur or a Belgian self-employed person will not be found.
- Fields vary by register. Name, status and the source link are present everywhere. Address, legal form and industry code depend on what each register publishes and what FirmaDB has collected; in the current snapshot French records have name, status and industry code but not yet a registered address or legal-form label. The coverage page shows the percentage per country and per field, and any record can be requested with include=field_meta and include_nulls=true to learn whether a missing value is "not published by the registry" or "not yet collected".
Officer, director and beneficial-owner data is not part of the product.
Choose FirmaDB when… and choose something else when…
Choose FirmaDB when all three are true: your required countries are on the list above; you need entity lookup, name search or batch lookup with the available company fields; and you want to evaluate on your own identifiers with a free allowance and then pay monthly without a sales call.
Choose a different route when any of these is true: a required country is not covered; your customers are sole traders or other natural persons; you need officers, ownership, sanctions or financial statements; or you serve exactly one country and its register's own API is enough.
The realistic alternatives, compared
| Option | Fits when | Facts as published (dates given) |
|---|
| FirmaDB (firmadb.com) | Several covered countries, one integration, self-serve billing | 18 countries; 250 free lookups a month, no card; monthly plans from €49 excluding VAT for 1,000 lookups, or 10 months' price for a year; billed per record returned; cancel at the end of the paid period. Checked 8 October 2026. |
| Direct national registry APIs | One or two countries, and you can own the mappings | The UK's Companies House publishes a public REST API (developer.company-information.service.gov.uk); France's INSEE publishes Sirene as open data under Licence Ouverte 2.0. Each register has its own auth, identifiers, status wording and terms. Checked 7–8 October 2026. |
| EU e-Justice "Find a company" portal | Occasional manual checks by a person | Member-state registers have been interconnected and searchable there since June 2017 (e-justice.europa.eu). It is a web search page; check its terms before relying on it programmatically. Checked 7 October 2026. |
| OpenCorporates (opencorporates.com) | You need countries outside FirmaDB’s coverage; compare required fields and commercial terms | Essentials plan listed at £225 per month or £2,250 per year for up to 500 API calls a month (200 a day). Its unit is an API call; FirmaDB's is a record returned, so compare on your workload rather than headline numbers. Checked 7 October 2026. |
Three checks before you commit
Identifiers. Keep every registry number as a string. A French SIREN has nine digits; a fourteen-digit SIRET identifies an establishment and is a different input. UK company numbers can contain letters and leading zeros ("00048839"). Integer conversion can strip leading zeros and cannot preserve letter prefixes.
Freshness. FirmaDB refreshes Belgium daily, France and the UK monthly, and the other 15 countries weekly. Those are published refresh cadences, not proof that every record has just been reloaded or that the register has not changed since retrieval; read the record's own data_freshness dates (they can be null) if timing matters to your use case.
Licence and attribution. Each register publishes under its own terms. Check the applicable attribution and redistribution restrictions. FirmaDB exposes licence information, available attribution text and a redistribution classification when you add include=provenance. Check them against your use before you build — with any provider.
Questions people ask before deciding
Can I search by company name instead of registration number?
Yes, with the search route. It returns candidates ranked by text similarity, filtered by country and optionally by status, industry code or registration date. Your application or user must choose the right candidate before you store its country and number; only the exact lookup retrieves a specific record.
Does a matching registry record verify the person signing up?
No. A lookup returns company information. It does not establish that the user is authorised to act for that company, who owns it, or whether the company passes any compliance check. Keep those steps separate.
How do I evaluate it without committing?
Create an account at app.firmadb.com (email link or GitHub sign-in, no card), get your API key from the console, and run lookups against ten real companies from each country you need — include missing optional fields and inactive records where the dataset includes them. Use the 250 free monthly lookups for an initial evaluation, sizing your test against that allowance. The quickstart at docs.firmadb.com/quickstart shows the first request. When your application needs more than 250 a month, choose a plan in the console; monthly and annual billing options are available; check the selected plan’s terms.
Sources
FirmaDB coverage matrix: https://firmadb.com/coverage/ (snapshot 5 October 2026). FirmaDB API specification: https://api.firmadb.com/openapi.json. FirmaDB pricing: https://firmadb.com/pricing/. Companies House developer hub: https://developer.company-information.service.gov.uk/. INSEE Sirene: https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/3591226. EU e-Justice portal: https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_find_a_company-489-en.do. OpenCorporates pricing: https://opencorporates.com/pricing/. Checked 7–8 October 2026; coverage, prices and terms change, so verify before you integrate.