Two directories, two radii

The same question, two radii

Kompass and wlw are both directories, and both are built for the buyer's question: who supplies this product? That is the perspective you have to understand first when comparing them. A directory lives on companies wanting to be found. It shows what a company says about itself, ordered by what it offers.

The difference lies in the radius. wlw is the German-speaking region, Kompass is the world, or more precisely: more than 60 countries with the same classification. For the buyer who wants to compare a supplier in northern Italy with one in Saxony, that is a real advantage. For the buyer who only searches in Germany, it is ballast.

Classification: Kompass wins here

The Kompass classification is what sets Kompass apart from an ordinary industry directory. It orders companies not by economic sector but by products and services, and it does so identically in every country. Anyone who needs a list of all manufacturers of hydraulic cylinders in Poland, the Czech Republic and Austria gets it in the same system.

wlw also works with product categories, but the search logic is tailored to DACH procurement and ends at the language border. Through the group with Europages there is a European counterpart, but it is a second directory, not the same one.

DACH breadth: wlw wins here

wlw names several hundred thousand supplier profiles and has been the first port of call for buyers in the German mid-market for decades. Searching is free for buyers. Anyone looking for a turned-parts supplier in Germany finds more candidates in wlw than in Kompass, whose German coverage is patchy because many companies never listed themselves there.

That is no small thing. A directory in which the company you are looking for is missing is worthless for that search, no matter how good the system is.

Lists and export: Kompass has a data product, wlw does not

With EasyBusiness, Kompass offers its own data product: lists by classification, country and size, as a file. Anyone who wants to build a sales list has a route. wlw is a marketplace. There is no export as a sales list, and anyone who wants to build a call list from wlw types out company names and looks up the phone number themselves.

For the buyer's question that does not matter. For the sales question it is the point where wlw drops out.

What both share: self-declaration

Here lies the limit both have in common. A directory entry is self-declared. The company writes what it can do, and on wlw it pays on top for being visible. What a company does not list is missing. What it lists is checked by nobody. That is bearable for a buyer who collects three quotes anyway. For a sales team that uses the list as the basis for first calls, it is the source of most wasted calls: the entry is from 2019, the contact person left long ago, the certification was planned and never came.

Neither directory knows a point in time, either. There is no date, no event, no trigger. Whether a company is building a new hall right now, advertising a role in production or has just obtained a certification is in no entry, neither at Kompass nor at wlw. And both name the company, not the person: the managing director who decides on a change of supplier is not in the directory.

The practical consequence is a calculation that is rarely done. A directory list is cheap per address, but every address then costs the hours in which someone reads the website, looks for the managing director and finds the phone number. Anyone who counts those hours no longer compares the price per row, but the price per conversation actually held. And that depends on who does the research.

The honest recommendation

As a buyer in the German-speaking region, take wlw. As a buyer or sales team with countries beyond the language border, take Kompass, and EasyBusiness for an exportable list. As a sales team that wants to approach German manufacturing companies actively and needs to know what the company actually does, who decides there and why a call fits right now, both are the wrong tool. Not because they are bad, but because they were built for the buyer.

What a buying signal means in this sense is explained in our glossary under buyer signals. Which other databases and directories exist for the German market is shown in our overview of B2B databases for Germany.