Why there is no single German B2B database
Anyone searching for a B2B database for Germany is usually searching for four different things at once: the company profile, the financial figures, the credit standing and a human being to call. Those four come from four different sources, and they are maintained by four different kinds of vendor.
Profile and figures come from the official registers. Credit standing comes from the credit agencies, which additionally evaluate payment experiences reported by their members. Contacts come from an entirely different world: professional networks, imprints and pattern inference. And the buying trigger comes from none of those, but from what a company is publishing about itself right now.
A vendor leading on all four would have to run four separate data operations at once. That vendor does not exist. So the right question is not which database is best, but which of the four is your bottleneck.
The trap with international vendors
American vendors build their records around people. That works well in markets where nearly every decision maker maintains a professional profile. In Germany it works reasonably for corporates, consultancies and technology firms, and considerably worse for the classic mid-market.
Take a supplier with 180 employees in East Westphalia. Management has been in post for twenty years and is active in no network. The website has nine pages. In a people-first database this company exists as a thin entry with a generic address. In the official registers it exists completely: legal form, register number, shareholders, annual accounts, shareholdings.
That is why a German vendor wins in Germany despite being the smaller one globally. It is not a difference in craft, it is a difference in source.
What you get for free before buying anything
Before signing an annual contract, look at the free routes. The Unternehmensregister and the Bundesanzeiger are publicly accessible. North Data presents the same publications more readably and answers single lookups without a contract.
If you research twenty companies a month, you need no tool. If you need two thousand, you do, and then it is about export, APIs and refresh. The break point is volume, not data quality.
The point no database covers
Every vendor listed here answers: which companies match my criteria. Industry, size, region, legal form, credit standing. That question matters, and it is well answered.
The question that actually decides whether you get the meeting is a different one: why should this company talk to me right now. That answer is in no master-data record, because it is not master data. It sits on the company's news page, in a freshly posted job ad, in an official notice, in a new certification, in an investment reported by the local paper.
Anyone holding a list of two thousand matching companies and still getting no meetings does not have a database problem. They have a trigger problem, and that takes a different kind of tool.