Looking for a Crunchbase alternative — or weighing Crunchbase vs Company Dossier? Here's a fair, accurate read on what each tool does best, so you can pick the right one. Company Dossier is free, built from public sources, and every claim is sourced.
Crunchbase is one of the best-known company and funding databases. It tracks companies, the rounds they've raised, the investors behind them and the people who run them, and it's a go-to reference for venture and startup activity. Most teams reach for it to answer "who funded whom, and when" — investors mapping a market, founders sizing up peers, and sales teams qualifying startups by stage.
Crunchbase offers a free tier with limited views, but its useful search, exports and full profiles sit behind paid Pro and enterprise plans. It's a strong tool for what it's built to do — and that focus is exactly what makes a comparison useful, because Company Dossier is built for a different job.
A general, honest comparison — no invented prices, no straw men.
| Company Dossier | Crunchbase | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Crunchbase offers a free tier with limited views, but its useful search, exports and full profiles sit behind paid Pro and enterprise plans |
| Type | Public-source company research | funding & company database |
| Data sources | Public web (job boards, filings, news, company sites, maps) | Curated funding database + community and partner contributions |
| Source attribution | ✓ every line linked | Varies |
| Single readable file | ✓ one dossier | Dashboard / database / API |
| Runs in editor, CLI & AI | ✓ web, VS Code, npm, ChatGPT, Claude | Mostly web / API |
| Best for | Fast, free first-pass company intelligence | Funding history, investor mapping and startup deal tracking |
Reach for Crunchbase when its specialty — funding history, investor mapping and startup deal tracking — is the actual job:
For those jobs, a paid, purpose-built platform is the right call and Company Dossier is not a substitute. We'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
Company Dossier is a fast first-pass intelligence file — free, public-source, fully attributed, and readable in one place. It fits better when:
It's not a contact database and not a replacement for curated paid datasets. It's the step you take first: open a free, sourced file on a company, read its whole story in minutes — overview, people, hiring, money, locations, tech, news, relationships and risk — and decide from there whether deeper paid tools are worth it. And it runs wherever you work: the web app, the VS Code extension, the npm CLI, and inside ChatGPT and Claude.
Yes. Company Dossier is free and builds a sourced, nine-section profile of any company from public sources — including funding signals — without a paid plan. It isn't a curated deal database, but it's a strong free first pass.
Not for systematic funding research across thousands of companies — that's where a curated database earns its keep. Company Dossier is best when you want one company's whole story, fast and free, with every claim sourced.
From public sources — filings, news and the open web — and every line points back to where it came from, so you can verify before you act.
open a sourced file on any company in minutes.