Kodo Leads vs. wlw:
Marketplace or finished call list

Not looking for supplier search but for a database to compare against? Then Kodo vs. Dealfront (2026) fits your question better.

The difference in one sentence

wlw answers the buyer's question: who supplies what? Kodo Leads answers the seller's question: who needs my product right now, and whom do I call there? One is a search engine in which suppliers pay for visibility. The other is a research service in which you describe your target profile and receive the finished list, with decision-maker, documented trigger and the link to every source.

Both builds are good, each for its own side of the table. The choice depends on which side you sit on, and on who at your company does the hours between the search and the first call.

What wlw does well, stated honestly

Wer liefert was belongs to Visable in Berlin and, since the merger with Europages, forms a group. At its core wlw is a B2B supplier search engine with a DACH focus: enter a product or service, compare suppliers, send an enquiry. For buyers that is free, and with several hundred thousand supplier profiles the breadth for Germany, Austria and Switzerland is considerable.

There are two things wlw can do that Kodo cannot. First, supplier search itself: if you need suppliers for a specific part, process or service, you get an idea of the market within a quarter of an hour. Second, visibility: anyone who pays as a supplier gets found when a buyer searches for their product. That is an inbound channel. Kodo is not a marketplace, makes you visible to nobody and does not bring you enquiries. If you want both, you need both.

Where a marketplace structurally ends for sales

The point at which a supplier search engine hits a limit for sales has nothing to do with the quality of the provider. It lies in the direction. A wlw profile is written by the supplier for buyers, and the supplier pays for it to be seen. It is advertising, and as advertising it is fine. But it does not say what the company currently needs, who decides there, or whether the business is actually certified to IATF 16949 or that merely echoes in its self-description.

An example that can be put in numbers. For the market overviews on this website we captured 2,276 manufacturing and trade businesses and deeply profiled 1,001 of them. 119 of these companies mention an ISO 9001 verbatim, 15 an ISO 14001, 5 an IATF 16949, and they do so on their website, not in a register. These statements sit in the footer, on a quality page or in a PDF, in other words where the company wrote them for its own customers. Anyone searching for these characteristics has to have the websites read. That is exactly our work.

The same applies to the trigger. A marketplace knows entries, not events. The announcement of the new hall sits on the company's own news page, the open position on the shop floor in a job posting, the KfW grant in an official notice, the change of decision-maker in the register. Kodo reads these sources and delivers the signal dated, with a link. What makes a buying signal reliable is explained in our glossary entry on buyer signals.

And then there is the decision-maker. A supplier profile lists a company address and an enquiry button. Kodo lists the managing director or authorised officer from the imprint and the team page, with role and with the source next to it. Sales needs the person who decides, not the contact form.

No sales list from a search engine

The practical point at which sales teams fail with wlw is the export. There is none. Anyone who wants to turn search hits into a call list copies out company names, opens every website, looks for the imprint, looks for the contact and thinks up the opening line. Those are the hours that lie between the search and the first call, and they come up anew with every list. Kodo delivers the list as CSV and through a Salesforce integration, fully researched. Which other tools come into question for this work is shown in our overview of B2B lead generation tools.

The honest calculation

Per address, Kodo is more expensive than a free search engine, that much is obvious. It is a consequence of the build: for every company we read the website, the imprint, job postings, the register and the news situation. Researched companies are available from 0.70 euros per company, as a single list without a subscription, and ten companies are free to start. The details are on our pricing page.

That is why the comparison is worthwhile not per address, but per meeting. Do the maths: how many hours per week does your team spend sifting through search hits, opening websites and looking for contacts? Multiplied by your internal hourly rate, that is the price you are already paying today. If it is above the cost of the list, the question is answered. If, on the other hand, you sit on the buying side or want to be found, wlw is the right tool for you, and that sentence is here on purpose.