Why this comparison exists
If you sell professional services to UK businesses, you already know Companies House data is the single richest source of new-business leads in the UK. What is less obvious is which paid product on top of it is worth paying for — because the pricing spread is wide (from free to £5,000+/year) and the tools do very different jobs.
This piece is a working accountant's view of what each of the three main products actually delivers, based on public pricing and published product docs as of 2026. All prices are in GBP excluding VAT. If any of these change, email us and we'll update.
Companies House Advanced Search (free)
What it is: The official UK government portal for searching the company register. Advanced Search supports filtering by SIC code, incorporation date range, postcode, company status, and company type.
Best at: Direct one-off queries. If you want a specific list — "all Ltd companies formed in the last 7 days with SIC 62012 in the LE1 postcode" — you can build that query in about 90 seconds and download a CSV of up to 5,000 results for free.
Worst at: Push notifications. There is no scheduled digest, no email alert, no saved-search-that-runs-weekly. If you want to run the same search every week, you have to log in and re-run it manually. This is where 80% of people fall off the wagon.
Enrichment: None. You get the raw register data: name, number, address, SIC codes, officers, filings. No director previous-directorships summary, no likely-business-type inference, no website discovery, no email discovery.
Verdict: If you have the discipline to run the search every Tuesday morning without fail for a year, Advanced Search is the best free option. Most people don't have that discipline. That is the entire market opportunity for paid tools.
Endole (~£30-£100/month, individual tier)
What it is: A commercial search-and-report interface over Companies House data, plus some enrichment. Owned by Global Database.
Best at: Individual company profile pages with clean UI, credit reports, group structure visualisation, and cross-referencing directors across companies. Very fast for "look up one company" workflows.
Worst at: Push alerts and niche filtering for prospecting. Endole is optimised for lookup, not for outbound prospecting workflows. You can save searches but the alerting UX is quite manual.
Enrichment: Credit scores, group structures, financial summaries. Good for due-diligence use cases; overkill for new-Ltd prospecting where the company literally hasn't filed accounts yet.
Verdict: Excellent if your workflow is "someone hands me a company name and I need to know everything about them". Not ideal if your workflow is "who should I be reaching out to next week that I don't yet know exists".
Duedil (Creditsafe-owned) (~£100-£300/month, individual tier)
What it is: Similar to Endole in shape but more enterprise-flavoured. Owned by Creditsafe since 2020.
Best at: Enterprise sales-team workflows with Salesforce integration, credit monitoring across a large portfolio, and portfolio-wide risk alerting.
Worst at: Small-firm accountancy prospecting. The pricing and complexity are targeted at 20+ user teams doing due diligence at scale, not solo accountants trying to find their next 3 clients.
Verdict: If you are a corporate finance team, this may be your fit. If you are a solo accountant, this is not the right shape of tool for you at this price.
Big-data enterprise tools (Bureau van Dijk / D&B Hoovers, £3,000-£15,000/year)
Mentioned only because they come up in searches. These are enterprise data-licensing products. Do not pay for them unless you are a bank or a management consultancy running quantitative work on the UK company register.
Where Formation Alert fits in this landscape
Formation Alert is deliberately a narrow tool for one specific job:
- Weekly push of newly-incorporated UK Ltd companies matching your SIC + postcode filters
- AI-drafted one-line summary of what each company likely does (based on name + SIC, cached across all subscribers)
- Delivered every Tuesday 8am, before the crowd of prospecting emails lands on Wednesday
- £49/month, cancel anytime, 7-day free trial
We don't do credit reports. We don't do due diligence. We don't do group structures. We do one thing: put the freshest possible list of relevant new companies in your inbox on the same day every week, so your Tuesday prospecting habit actually happens.
The decision framework
- You do 100+ due-diligence lookups per month: Endole.
- You are a corporate sales team of 5+ people integrated with Salesforce: Duedil.
- You have a disciplined Tuesday-morning prospecting habit and never miss a week: Companies House Advanced Search, free.
- You want the prospecting habit but keep missing weeks because life happens: Formation Alert.