OpenCorporates vs SEC EDGAR: Which Is Right for US Company Data Research?

Quick verdict

OpenCorporates and SEC EDGAR solve different problems. They are not substitutes; they are complements.

SEC EDGAR is the definitive source for public-company data in the United States. It covers the roughly 7,500 companies that register securities with the SEC or file under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. For those companies, EDGAR provides the most detailed, most authoritative, and most complete financial and organizational data available anywhere, free and with a no-key-required API. It covers annual reports (10-K), quarterly reports (10-Q), ownership disclosures (Schedule 13D/13G, Form 4), proxy statements (DEF 14A), and thousands of other filing types stretching back to the early 1990s for electronic filers.

OpenCorporates covers the US company population at the registry layer: more than 200 million entities globally, normalized from 50 US state registries into a single searchable database. It does not provide financial statements, officer compensation, ownership stakes, or any of the substantive disclosures that EDGAR requires. It provides what the state SoS registries publish: entity name, registration number, status, registered agent, formation date, and (where the state publishes them) officer and director names.

The SBA counted 36.2 million businesses in the United States as of its 2025 Small Business Profile. EDGAR covers approximately 7,500 of them. OpenCorporates covers most of the rest at a registry level but with limited field depth. For compliance and due diligence buyers, the decision is usually not OpenCorporates versus EDGAR but rather which tool handles which tier of the company population.

What SEC EDGAR is and what it covers

EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) is operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and has been the primary repository for SEC filings since 1996 for mandatory electronic filers. The current EDGAR company database holds over 500,000 records, including historical registrants, but the active public-company population with current filing obligations is approximately 7,500 registrants.

What EDGAR actually contains for each filing company goes far beyond what any commercial registry or aggregator provides:

• Annual reports (Form 10-K) with audited financial statements, management discussion, risk factors, and business description.
• Quarterly reports (Form 10-Q) with interim financial statements.
• Current reports (Form 8-K) for material events: CEO departures, acquisitions, earnings, debt issuances.
• Proxy statements (DEF 14A) listing directors, executive compensation, and shareholder proposals.
• Ownership disclosure: Schedule 13D and 13G for stakes above 5%; Form 4 for insider transactions; Form 13F for institutional holdings.
• Registration statements (S-1, S-3) for securities offerings.
• Foreign private issuer filings (Form 20-F, 6-K) for cross-listed companies.

EDGAR’s API, available at https://data.sec.gov/, requires no API key and provides programmatic access to filing data. The API was updated in 2025 with EDGAR Next enhancements. Full-text search of electronic filings back to 2001 is available through the EDGAR Full Text Search interface. Both tools are free for any user globally.

For the public companies EDGAR covers, it provides:

• Audited financials going back decades for large issuers
• Named officers and directors with compensation detail in proxy statements
• Ownership stakes above 5% (Schedule 13D/13G)
• Related-party transactions
• Subsidiary lists (typically in the 10-K annual report as Exhibit 21)

This is the most detailed public company data available anywhere in the US and is provided free of charge as a matter of public policy under SEC rule.

What OpenCorporates is and what it covers for US entities

OpenCorporates aggregates company registration data from official state and national registries. Its US coverage spans all 50 state registries, normalized into a consistent format. The total global database covers more than 200 million entities across 145+ jurisdictions.

For US entities, the OpenCorporates API returns:

• Company name (including historical names where available)
• Registration number (state-specific)
• Entity type (LLC, corporation, LLP, etc.)
• Status (normalized from state-specific vocabulary)
• Registered agent (where state publishes)
• Formation date
• State of formation
• Officers/directors (where state publishes; missing for Delaware and others that do not disclose)
• Source registry URL and provenance for each field
• Jurisdiction-normalized identifiers

What OpenCorporates does not provide: financial statements, credit scoring, ownership percentages, beneficial owners, court records, sanctions data, or any enrichment beyond what state registries publish.

OpenCorporates rates the average quality of US state company data at 31 out of 100, which is low compared to jurisdictions with centralized national registries. The underlying problem is state-level: Delaware does not publish officer names; 35+ states have inconsistent officer disclosure; no US state files UBO data; few states offer bulk data. OpenCorporates can only surface what the states put online.

The API is available free for open-data and non-commercial use. Commercial self-serve tiers are priced annually in GBP: Essentials at GBP 2,250, Starter at GBP 6,600, Basic at GBP 12,000, with Enterprise tiers available on application. The API returns JSON with source provenance, which is useful for compliance teams that need to document data lineage.

OpenCorporates’s relationship dataset includes 30 million+ links covering subsidiaries, branches, control statements, and shareholdings, with some data sourced from the SEC (for public-company subsidiary relationships) and from the UK’s PSC register. For US entities, the relationship data is largely sparse for private companies.

The 7,500 vs 36 million gap

This is the central structural fact for US company data buyers.

SEC EDGAR covers approximately 7,500 active public companies. OpenCorporates (and the underlying state registries) covers the remaining 36+ million business entities in the US, but at a much shallower data depth.

The implication is that the tool depends entirely on the target company’s type.

For a US public company (listed on NYSE, NASDAQ, or another national exchange, or an OTC-registered issuer), EDGAR is the definitive data source. The financial statements, ownership structure, director identities, officer compensation, material events, and audit findings are all in EDGAR. OpenCorporates may list the state incorporation record but adds nothing beyond what the SoS portal publishes.

For a US private company (an LLC, an S-Corp, a closely held corporation, a partnership), EDGAR has no data. OpenCorporates has a registry record, but with limited fields, no financial data, and potentially missing officer information depending on the state of incorporation. The buyer who needs to understand a US private company is in a different and harder situation than for a US public company.

Public company data: what EDGAR provides that nothing else matches

For due diligence on a US public company, or on a subsidiary of a US public company, EDGAR is the starting point rather than a secondary check.

The subsidiary list in Exhibit 21 of the annual 10-K filing lists all named subsidiaries, their jurisdictions of incorporation, and their operational names. This is the authoritative source for the corporate family tree of a US public company. It is free in EDGAR and updated annually.

The proxy statement (DEF 14A) lists the names, tenures, compensation, and biographical summaries of all current directors and named executive officers. For a compliance team that needs to verify the identity of a public company’s control persons, the proxy statement is more detailed than any registry.

The Schedule 13D and 13G filings disclose every beneficial owner of more than 5% of any registered class of equity security. For a public company, this is the best available source of major ownership disclosure. It is not UBO in the full AML sense (it covers the top beneficial ownership layer rather than tracing to the ultimate natural-person owner), but it is the most structured ownership data available for any US entity.

All of this is free, API-accessible, and goes back to the early 1990s for large electronic filers.

Private company data: where both tools fall short

For US private companies, neither OpenCorporates nor EDGAR provides what compliance buyers most need: financial statements, ownership structure, and ultimate beneficial owner identification.

EDGAR: no data exists unless the private company has issued registered securities (some private debt issuers and Regulation A+ issuers file with the SEC; check by entity name).

OpenCorporates: registry record with name, status, registered agent, and (in many states) officer names. No financials. No UBO. No credit data.

The buyer who needs financial statements on a US private company must either request them directly from the company, access a commercial data provider with contractual private financial data (D&B Finance Analytics, Orbis), or infer from credit bureau signals (D&B, Experian Business) rather than from actual filings.

The buyer who needs UBO on a US private company faces the hardest gap in the US market: state registries do not file it, FinCEN BOI now exempts domestic companies following the March 2025 interim final rule, and commercial UBO providers work with limited and often inferred data for US private entities. [VERIFY: Check FinCEN https://www.fincen.gov/boi for any update to the BOI domestic exemption post-March 2025.]

API comparison

EDGAR provides a free, no-registration-required REST API at https://data.sec.gov/. The API serves company facts (structured financial data), filings history, and submission metadata. Full-text search of filings is available through the EDGAR full-text search endpoint. There are rate limits (up to 10 requests per second per user agent) but no pricing. EDGAR data is in the public domain.

OpenCorporates provides a structured REST API with per-endpoint rate limits that vary by plan. The free tier is limited to low-volume non-commercial use. Self-serve commercial plans start at GBP 2,250 per year for Essentials. The API returns JSON with source provenance fields. Enterprise plans are available on application for higher-volume production use.

For a developer building a compliance tool that needs to check all 50 US states plus public-company data, the practical stack is EDGAR API (free) for the public-company layer and OpenCorporates API (commercial plan) for the state-registry layer. That combination costs GBP 2,250-12,000 per year depending on volume, covers the full US business population at the registry level, and provides deep public-company data for the EDGAR-covered slice.

Coverage comparison matrix

Compliance use cases for each tool

For a US bank running customer due diligence on a new business account that is a publicly traded company: EDGAR is the first stop. Proxy statement for directors; Schedule 13D/G for major shareholders; 10-K for business description, subsidiary list, and risk factors; 8-K for any material recent events. All free.

For a US bank running KYB on a new business account that is a private LLC formed in Delaware: Start with OpenCorporates for entity status and registered agent. Pull the Delaware SoS directly for certified good standing. Use D&B or Experian Business for credit signals. For UBO, a commercial UBO provider (Sayari, Orbis) is the only structured option, and the data will be limited for a private Delaware entity.

For a compliance tech company building a KYB API for a US fintech platform: OpenCorporates API for the registry layer across all 50 states; EDGAR API for the public-company overlay; D&B or Experian Business API for credit signals; a separate sanctions screening feed for OFAC SDN checks.

For an international due diligence team investigating a foreign company’s US operations: SEC EDGAR to find any registered securities (foreign private issuers file Form 20-F). OpenCorporates to find state-registered entities. EDGAR subsidiary exhibits to trace the corporate structure. State SoS directly for certified good-standing certificates of the US subsidiaries.

What neither tool covers

Both OpenCorporates and EDGAR have clear coverage limits.

Neither provides sanctions screening. OFAC SDN list checking requires a separate service.

Neither provides credit scoring or payment-behavior data. D&B and Experian Business are the credit layer.

Neither provides real-time alert monitoring on entity changes for a private-company portfolio. Commercial KYB platforms and national aggregators (Accurint, CLEAR) handle this.

Neither provides full UBO data for US private companies. That gap is structural in the US market and is not solved by any single commercial provider.

Frequently asked questions

Is EDGAR really free?

Yes. All EDGAR filings are free to access, search, and download through the SEC’s website and API. The SEC has a policy of broad public access to filed data. There is no registration requirement and no fee for any level of access to the public filing database. Commercial data aggregators that redistribute EDGAR data may charge for their normalized, enriched versions, but the underlying source is free at sec.gov.

Does OpenCorporates cover private US companies?

Yes, OpenCorporates covers private US companies through the state SoS registry layer. A private LLC formed in California, Texas, or Florida will appear in OpenCorporates with its state registration record. A private Delaware LLC will appear with its registration date, status, and filing history but without officer names (because Delaware doesn’t publish them). Financial statements, ownership, and UBO data are not available for private companies in either OpenCorporates or EDGAR.

Can EDGAR tell me who the beneficial owners of a public company are?

EDGAR can tell you who owns more than 5% of a registered equity class (Schedule 13D and 13G disclosures). It can tell you who the directors and named executive officers are (proxy statement). For a widely held public company, the 5% disclosure threshold means many substantial but sub-5% holders are not visible. EDGAR is not a UBO tool in the AML sense; it is an ownership-disclosure tool for public securities. For AML-grade UBO tracing of a public company’s ownership to natural-person ultimate beneficiaries, a commercial UBO tool is still needed.

How current is EDGAR data?

EDGAR is updated as companies file. Large accelerated filers must file Form 10-K within 60 days of fiscal year end; smaller reporting companies have 90 days. Current events (8-K) must be filed within 4 business days of the triggering event. Insider transactions (Form 4) must be filed within 2 business days. For ongoing monitoring of a public company’s material events, EDGAR’s EDGAR RSS feed or the SEC’s EDGAR API provides near-real-time alert capability at no cost.

Does OpenCorporates have a free plan?

OpenCorporates provides free public search on its website for basic entity lookups. The free API tier is available for open-data projects and non-commercial use under OpenCorporates’ license terms. Commercial use, including use in products or services that derive revenue from the data, requires a commercial API plan starting at GBP 2,250 per year (Essentials tier). Academic and journalism use cases may qualify for the open-data tier; check OpenCorporates’ licensing documentation for the applicable terms.