Comparison · OpenRegister

OpenRegister Alternative

OpenRegister covers Germany. Prometiam covers official registries across Europe. This is the rare comparison where the honest answer is often "use both".

TL;DR

These two products barely compete. OpenRegister (openregister.de) is a Germany-only company-data API built on the Handelsregister, Bundesanzeiger and Transparenzregister — 4M+ German companies, statutory UBO extracts, structured financial statements, and official documents on demand. Prometiam is a multi-country registry API — and it holds no German commercial register, only German companies that hold an LEI.

So: if your counterparties are German, OpenRegister is the right tool and Prometiam is not a substitute. If they sit on any of Prometiam's registries, OpenRegister has nothing for you. If they're spread across Europe — which is the common case — running both is cheaper and more complete than stretching either one.

Where the two actually overlap

Only two places, and they're worth knowing before you assume you need a second vendor:

1. German corporate insolvency. Prometiam serves German corporate insolvency notices from the official Insolvenzbekanntmachungen — the same class of source OpenRegister uses for its insolvency endpoint — despite holding no German commercial register. The notices are refreshed daily and current to the previous day. If German distress monitoring is what you actually need, rather than full German registry data, Prometiam already covers it.
2. Sanctions screening. Prometiam includes it (beta); OpenRegister does not publish a sanctions endpoint. If you're pairing German registry data with a screening step, that step has to come from somewhere, and Prometiam bundles it.

Everything else — Prometiam's registries on one side; German registry, financials, UBO and documents on the other — is non-overlapping.

Prometiam in one paragraph

Prometiam is a REST API that unifies official multi-country company-registry data under one schema — Spain (BORME), France (BODACC), the United Kingdom (Companies House, including PSC beneficial owners), Norway (Brønnøysundregistrene), plus Ireland (CRO), Poland (KRS), Finland (PRH/YTJ), Sweden (Bolagsverket), Belgium (KBO/BCE), Denmark (CVR), Estonia (e-Business Register), Slovakia (RPO), Switzerland (Zefix), Latvia (Register of Enterprises), Cyprus (DRCOR), Romania (ONRC), Croatia (Sudski registar) and the United States at company level. Daily updates, normalized corporate events, cross-border corporate insolvency across sixteen markets, and sanctions plus US export-control screening (beta) — six sanctions lists (EU, UN, OFAC, UK, Australia (DFAT), French gels) and 11 US export-control lists, refreshed daily. Pricing is public from €9.99/month with a 14-day free trial and card required, nothing charged for 14 days. EU data residency in Frankfurt.

OpenRegister vs Prometiam — at a glance

Pricing

Both publish their pricing, which is refreshingly rare in this category — most of the incumbents in this space route you to a sales call first.

OpenRegister bills in credits: a free tier of 500 credits/month with no credit card, then paid plans at 5,000 and 30,000 credits/month, with overage at €0.01/credit and negotiated terms above 50,000. Credit cost varies by call — autocomplete search is 1 credit, a company/person/financials lookup is 10, historical data and Transparenzregister UBO extracts are 25, a realtime=true pull adds 10, and monitoring is 25–50 per company recurring. That last detail matters: continuous monitoring is charged per company per period, so ongoing surveillance of a large portfolio is the line item to model. Check their pricing page for the current monthly plan prices.

Prometiam bills per API call on flat monthly tiers:

• Starter trial — 14 days, 500 credits, card required, nothing charged for 14 days.
• Starter — €9.99/mo, 1,000 credits/month.
• Professional — €29.99/mo, 10,000 credits/month, full sanctions screening (beta) included.
• Scale — €99.99/mo, 50,000 credits/month.
• Enterprise — custom, for higher volume or custom SLA.

The models differ enough that a direct per-unit comparison misleads. The practical difference: Prometiam's monitoring is included in the call quota rather than priced per monitored company, so ongoing portfolio surveillance is flat-rate. OpenRegister's credit model, in exchange, lets you pay for exactly the depth you use — a cheap autocomplete costs a tenth of a full company pull.

Coverage and data model

OpenRegister goes deep on one country. The Handelsregister gives it registration, management and ownership history for 4M+ German companies across all 16 federal states, refreshed at least monthly with new registrations appearing within about 24 hours. The Bundesanzeiger layer adds real financial statements — balance sheets, income statements, multi-year indicators — for the subset of companies legally required to publish, updated daily. The Transparenzregister layer adds statutory beneficial ownership. That is a genuinely strong German stack, and nothing in Prometiam replaces it.

Prometiam goes wide across all live countries and normalizes them to one schema, so a company in Madrid and a company in Oslo come back with the same field names and the same ID semantics. Officers are live for Spain, France, the UK, Norway, Poland and the Czech Republic (Polish natural persons are masked by the register itself; Czech natural persons are the name and the month and year of birth only), and corporate events for Spain, France and the UK, plus register-change events for every other live country except Chile (none before 14 Oct 2026 for Ireland, Poland and Norway; Argentina is read monthly, none before 28 Oct 2026; Mexico covers its LEI-registered entities only); every other registry is company-level today. Where it reaches beyond its registries is distress: corporate insolvency spans France, Finland, Germany, the UK, Austria, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the US.

One deliberate limitation worth stating plainly: Prometiam serves only corporate insolvency. Personal bankruptcies of named individuals are held but never returned by any endpoint — a compliance boundary, not a filter you can switch off.

Beneficial ownership (UBO)

Honesty first: for Germany, OpenRegister is stronger, and it isn't close. Its Transparenzregister integration returns statutory UBO records — name, date of birth, city, country, ownership percentage — from Germany's official beneficial-ownership register, with the source document attached. One caveat to plan for: live Transparenzregister access still requires your own account, verified for legitimate interest (berechtigtes Interesse) under the German Money Laundering Act. OpenRegister brokers the request; it can't remove the legal gate.

Prometiam has real beneficial-owner data only for the UK, via Companies House PSC records. For every other country there is no UBO layer; the 2022 CJEU ruling closed general public access to beneficial-owner registers across most of the EU. We won't pretend otherwise, and you should be sceptical of any EU-wide API that claims full UBO coverage without explaining how.

API and integration

Both are developer-first with public docs, a 14-day free trial, and no procurement gate — and, unusually, both ship an MCP server, so either can be wired into Claude, Cursor or an agent SDK as native tools. Prometiam's is prometiam-risk-mcp on npm, exposing 36 tools across search, company detail, officers, events, insolvency, VAT/LEI lookup and sanctions screening (beta).

Prometiam's API is one bearer token, one base URL, structured JSON, cursor pagination, and per-tier rate limits. curl works within a minute of signup. Open /risk-api/docs and run requests straight from the page, or read the OpenAPI spec.

Who should choose OpenRegister

Pick OpenRegister if:

• Your counterparties are German — this is the whole ballgame, and Prometiam has no German commercial register, only German companies that hold an LEI
• You need German financial statements from the Bundesanzeiger
• You need statutory Transparenzregister UBO extracts
• You need to order official German documents through an API — register extracts, shareholder lists, articles of association
• Your usage is bursty and a credit model fits better than a flat monthly quota

Who should choose Prometiam

Pick Prometiam if:

• Your counterparties are outside Germany, on a European registry Prometiam covers — OpenRegister covers none of them
• You need sanctions and export-control screening (beta) in the same API as registry lookup
• You want multi-country data in one schema, rather than one integration per country
• You need cross-border corporate insolvency — including Germany — without buying a registry in each market
• You monitor a large portfolio continuously and want that flat-rate rather than priced per company

Using both

For a European KYB or credit-risk workflow, the clean split is: OpenRegister for German registry, financials and UBO; Prometiam for the other countries, sanctions screening (beta), and cross-border insolvency monitoring. Both let you start free (Prometiam's is a 14-day trial), so you can prove the split works before either bill starts.

1. Route by country. Send German company numbers to OpenRegister; send every other country Prometiam covers to Prometiam's /companies/search with ?country=.
2. Screen once, centrally. Run every counterparty — German included — through /sanctions/screen (beta), so screening logic and audit trail live in one place.
3. Monitor distress across both. Prometiam's insolvency coverage already includes Germany, so portfolio-wide distress alerts don't need a second integration.

Beyond the registry record

Two derived signals, neither of them a rating. Both are dated facts carrying the source they came from, so whoever reviews your file can check them.

• Companies that stopped filing. A company that quietly stops trading rarely dissolves; the register notices first. The registry_compliance flag returns that state in one shape for Spain (provisional closure of the registry sheet), the United Kingdom (a strike-off proposal, or annual accounts overdue), Ireland (the strike-off list) and Norway (compulsory liquidation). Read it on GET /companies/{id}?include=risk_flags, or list those companies with risk_flag_type=registry_compliance. It is a compliance signal, not an insolvency: read it together with status.
• Public contracts, and the buyer behind them. GET /procurement/awards returns public-contract awards from Spain, France, the UK, Ireland, Poland and Norway by supplier, buyer, identifier, CPV code and date, linked to the supplier’s registry record where the identifier resolves. GET /procurement/buyer/{id} scores the contracting body itself: the probability that its next award draws a single bid, and the probability that a supplier it awards to enters insolvency within two years.

Both are ordinary REST calls on the published price and included in the 14-day trial. Procurement awards cover Spain, France, the UK, Ireland, Poland and Norway (Ireland, Poland and Norway above the EU thresholds only), the buyer scores are Spain and France and in beta, and a score is a prompt to look, never a finding of wrongdoing.

FAQ

Does Prometiam cover Germany?
Not the commercial register. German companies that hold an LEI are served from GLEIF (name, legal form, status, address, register court and number), with no officers, capital or financial data. The other German dataset served is corporate insolvency from the official Insolvenzbekanntmachungen (refreshed daily). For German registry data, use OpenRegister.

Does OpenRegister cover Spain or France?
No. Its documentation states it focuses exclusively on German companies.

Does OpenRegister do sanctions screening?
Not in its published product. Prometiam includes screening (beta) against six sanctions lists plus 11 US export-control lists, refreshed daily.

Does Prometiam offer UBO?
UK PSC only. OpenRegister brokers statutory German Transparenzregister extracts, though live access still requires your own legitimate-interest-verified account under the German Money Laundering Act.

Can I use both?
Yes — and for most pan-European workflows that's the right answer, because the country coverage doesn't overlap at all.

Is Prometiam GDPR-compliant?
Yes. Data is hosted in the EU (Frankfurt). Officer data is processed under GDPR Article 6(1)(c) (legal obligation of public registries) and Article 6(1)(f) (legitimate interest in fraud prevention).

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