Kodo Leads vs. Dun & Bradstreet:
Global corporate data or a finished list

Looking for an overview of all company databases for Germany? Then our curation B2B database Germany is the better starting point.

The difference in one sentence

Dun & Bradstreet is a directory with access. Kodo Leads is a research service with a result. At D&B you buy the tool: you search, filter, export and rework. At Kodo you describe your target profile and receive the finished list, with contact person, phone number and the evidenced reason why this company is interesting right now.

Both builds have their place, and the choice hangs on one question: who on your side does the hours of work between the export and the first call?

What Dun & Bradstreet does well, stated honestly

By its own account D&B is one of the largest company directories in the world, and there are three things it can do that Kodo cannot. First: the D-U-N-S number. Every company gets a globally unique identifier, and anyone who has to keep master data clean across countries and systems has an anchor here that exists nowhere else. Second: the corporate tree. D&B maps which entity belongs to which group, across borders. If you sell to a group with forty subsidiaries, you need exactly this map. Third: risk and credit. Assessing how solid a company stands, and the checks for procurement and compliance, are at the core of D&B's business, and Kodo deliberately has no counterpart for that.

In the DACH region D&B has been present since 2021 with the former Bisnode, and with D&B Hoovers there is a dedicated tool for sales. If you work a global target group and need the same data logic in every country, you are in good hands here.

Where a global database ends in the German mid-market

The point at which D&B hits a limit for industrial sales has nothing to do with the quality of the provider. It lies in the build. A database can only filter by fields it has, and the criteria by which mechanical engineering actually qualifies are not fields in a worldwide directory.

An example that can be quantified. For the market overviews on this website we captured 2,276 manufacturing and trade businesses and profiled 1,001 of them in depth, meaning we machine-read their websites, brochures, imprints and register data. Result: 119 of these businesses state an ISO 9001 verbatim, 15 an ISO 14001, 5 an IATF 16949, on their website, not in a register. These statements sit in the footer, on a quality page or in a PDF, where the company wrote them itself.

The same applies to the machine park, the materials, the depth of manufacturing and the industries served. And it applies to the reason: the announcement of the new hall is on the company's own news page, the open position for the production manager on its own careers page. No global directory reads these pages. Anyone looking for these things has to have them read. That is exactly our work, and what comes out of it is explained in our glossary under buyer signals.

Creditworthiness is not need

A misunderstanding we hear often: a good credit rating is surely a buying signal. It is not. It says that a company can pay, not that it needs something. Need shows elsewhere: in the investment announcement, in the job posting for the new shift, in the fresh certification that opens a new customer base, in the change of managing director. Kodo collects these events with a date and a link to the source. D&B does not collect them, because they do not occur in its model.

The honest calculation

Per record, Kodo is more expensive than access to a database. That is not a weakness but a consequence of the build: for every company we read the website, imprint, job postings, registers and news. The comparison is therefore not worth making per address, but per meeting.

The calculation you can do yourself: how many hours a week does your team spend sifting through hit lists, opening websites and looking for contacts? Multiply that by your internal hourly rate. If the result is more than the list costs, the question is answered. Our prices are public on the pricing page: from 0.70 euros per researched company, ten companies free to check. If, on the other hand, your business hangs on corporate structures, compliance and worldwide master data, D&B is the right tool for you, and that sentence is here on purpose.