Two credit agencies, two maps

The same question, two maps

Creditreform and Dun & Bradstreet are often treated as alternatives in procurement, finance and legal, and in one respect they are: both answer the question of how solid a company is. Creditworthiness, risk, master data. At that level they are two credit agencies, and both are reputable.

The difference lies in the map. Creditreform is an association from Neuss with around 130 local offices in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Dun & Bradstreet is a US corporation with a global database that has included the former Bisnode data in the DACH region since 2021. Anyone asking which one fits whom must first ask where their own customers and suppliers sit.

DACH depth: Creditreform wins here

The local-office structure is more than organisational folklore. It means that the report on a mid-sized company from the Black Forest is maintained by people who know the region, with register-backed master data and the credit verdict on top. Banks, credit insurers and procurement departments have accepted that verdict for decades.

Dun & Bradstreet does cover the German mid-market, but in our assessment less deeply than a register-native provider. That is not an accusation but the consequence of a global model: a database that treats every country the same cannot be as deep in each one as a database that knows only three.

Global reach and corporate hierarchy: Dun & Bradstreet wins here

The D-U-N-S number is the globally used key for naming a company unambiguously, and in the procurement processes of large corporations it is, in our experience, requested as a matter of course. On top come the corporate hierarchies: who is the parent of the subsidiary in Singapore, who owns the supplier in Mexico, and do both hang on the same risk?

For compliance that is the deciding point. A company that buys in fifteen countries needs an identifier that holds in all fifteen. Creditreform can do that in the German-speaking region, but the radius ends there.

Sales: marketing addresses versus Hoovers

Both providers have a sales product next to the credit report. Creditreform offers marketing addresses, meaning company addresses by firmographics from its own database: industry, size, region, legal form. Dun & Bradstreet offers D&B Hoovers, a sales platform with search across the global database.

For selling to German mid-sized companies, Creditreform is usually the better source here, because address and master data come from the same depth as the credit report. For selling to corporations in several countries, Hoovers is the fitting tool. In both cases you get a firmographic selection, not research.

Pricing: per transaction versus enterprise contract

Creditreform bills per report or per list. That is transparent with few transactions and becomes an arithmetic exercise with many. Dun & Bradstreet works with enterprise contracts, whose size we do not quantify here, but which are tailored to corporations. A sales team of two that wants to call fifty companies a month is, with both, not the customer the pricing model was built for.

The honest calculation goes beyond the list price with both. A credit report answers whether you can trust a company. It does not answer whether you should call it. That second question then costs the hours in which someone reads the website, looks for the right contact person and finds the trigger. Anyone who counts those hours compares the price per conversation actually held, not the price per report.

What neither one answers

Both providers describe a company you already know: solid or not, part of a group or independent, large or small. That is the right question for the credit decision and the supplier approval. It is the wrong question for selling to manufacturing companies.

There the question is: what can this company do, who decides, and why should it talk to me right now? Whether a business machines or injection-moulds, whether it holds an IATF 16949, which machines stand in the hall, sits in no credit report. And the new hall, the open role in production, the fresh certification sit on the company's website, not at a credit agency. Neither Creditreform nor Dun & Bradstreet reads them. How pure register research differs from a credit verdict is shown in our duel NorthData vs. Creditreform.

If your question is creditworthiness in the DACH region, take Creditreform. If your question is group structure and a global identifier, take Dun & Bradstreet. If your question is the trigger for the next call, neither solves the problem, and you should look at the category below.