Grata Alternatives for Searchers and SMB Buyers (2026): Free and Paid Options

Most people searching for a Grata alternative are happy with Grata. They hit the pricing page. Grata is good at what it was built for: private-company intelligence for PE and corporate development teams. Its own site claims 21M+ companies, 10M+ executive contacts and over 1,000 customers. What the site never says, on any tier, is what the thing costs.

If you are a deal team at a fund, a quote-only annual contract is a normal purchase. If you are a self-funded searcher, an independent sponsor, or an individual buying one business, it usually can't. This page maps the alternatives from that seat. For the wider category, including CRMs and outreach tools, see deal sourcing software for self-funded searchers. For a head-to-head, see Scouly vs Grata and Scouly vs SourceScrub.

Disclosure up front: we build Scouly, one of the options below. It has a free tier, on purpose. We think the individual-buyer end of this market shouldn't have to pay enterprise prices to see public data. Read our section knowing who wrote it.

Grata pricing

Grata's pricing page lists three tiers, Growth, Scale and Alpha, and not one dollar figure. Every tier ends in the same button: Book a demo. Growth is pitched at family offices and independent sponsors, Scale at advisors, mid-market PE, growth equity, corp dev and consulting, Alpha at investment banks and mega funds. So the honest answer to "what does Grata cost" is that Grata doesn't say. Numbers circulate on review sites, but they come from customers rather than from Grata, and a quote moves with seats and modules. The only figure that matters is the one on the paper they send you.

First, be honest about what you're replacing

"Grata alternative" hides four different needs. Pick yours before picking a tool:

Off-market company discovery. Building a list of companies that are NOT for sale yet, matching a thesis. This is Grata's core.
Contact enrichment. Owner names, emails, phone numbers at scale.
Listed-deal aggregation. Seeing everything that IS on the market in one place.
Deal flow through relationships. Intermediaries and networks sending you opportunities.

Rows 1 to 3 are software problems. Row 4 is a relationship problem, and no subscription solves it, though Searchfunder below is where a lot of those relationships start. No single tool covers all four. Most disappointment with sourcing software comes from buying something built for a different row of that list.

The alternatives

Scouly (our product): off-market, public records only, free tier

Scouly is an off-market sourcing database covering 173,769 US companies across seven verticals (HVAC and plumbing, dental practices, manufacturing, auto repair, landscaping, funeral homes and veterinary practices) plus UK coverage from Companies House. It is built entirely from public records: SBA 7(a) and 504 loan histories, PPP payroll snapshots, state registry formation dates, DOL Form 5500 filings and market-fragmentation indexes computed from OpenStreetMap. Every company gets a deterministic 0 to 100 score from loan maturity, registry longevity and fragmentation, with the full breakdown shown, and every signal links to its source record. The Explorer tier is free with 10 full profile unlocks. Operator is $35 a month for unlimited unlocks.

Where it beats Grata for an individual buyer: price, and auditability. Every score opens up into the loan, registry and fragmentation signals behind it, and each signal links back to the filing it came from. SBA loan maturity is an owner-transition signal a generalist database won't model for you.

Where it honestly doesn't: coverage stops at seven verticals. There's no contact enrichment. Scouly never contacts owners, and you find the owner's address yourself, which public registries give you. No revenue or EBITDA estimates either, because private-company financials are not public and we won't pretend otherwise. If you need 21 million companies across every SIC code with emails attached, Scouly is not that, and we'd rather tell you now.

SourceScrub: the closest like-for-like, and just as quiet about price

SourceScrub is the platform PE teams evaluate against Grata head to head. It describes 17M company listings woven together from 290,000 sources and lists, cleaned by what it calls an expert-in-the-loop machine learning model. Its pricing page runs the same play Grata's does: three tiers, Essentials, Plus and Professional, each one a Request pricing button. So if your problem with Grata was coverage or workflow, book the demo. If your problem was that the price only arrives through a sales call, you are starting that call over. We break down the two side by side on Scouly vs SourceScrub.

Inven: the newer AI entrant

Inven sells AI search over private-market data to consultants, bankers and PE teams, claiming 28M+ companies across 160+ markets and 3M+ transactions. That is a bigger company count than Grata publishes, on paper anyway. Pricing works the way it does everywhere else in this tier: nothing published, one Book a demo button. For a solo buyer the calculus doesn't change. It's built for teams that source all year.

Kumo: every listed deal in one feed, and it prints its prices

Kumo solves the third row of the list above. It pulls 100,000+ live listings from brokers and marketplaces into one searchable feed with saved searches and a daily alert email. It also does the thing nobody else on this page does, which is put numbers on its pricing page: a free plan limited to deals 30 days old and older, Pro at $89 a month, Ultimate at $149 a month, Enterprise by quote, as of August 2026. The catch is structural. These are on-market deals, so you see what every other subscriber sees the same morning. Good listed-deal infrastructure. It won't find you anything off-market.

Searchfunder: the community

Searchfunder calls itself an online community of searchers, investors, lenders, brokers and other professionals, and that is what it is. Members post deals, questions, job listings and events, brokers list opportunities there, and the pile of threads on sourcing, diligence and structuring is worth reading before you buy any database at all. It won't generate a target list for you, and full access is a paid membership. Be on it regardless of which database you use.

The fully-free path: the public records themselves

Everything Scouly models is public. You can pull SBA 7(a)/504 loan data and PPP records from data.sba.gov, formation dates from state registries, and build your own screens. We wrote up exactly how in our guide to finding off-market businesses and the SBA loan signal. The honest cost is time. Entity resolution across sources, matching "R & B PLUMBING LLC" in one dataset to "RB Plumbing" in another, is where the weeks go. That build-vs-use tradeoff is the entire reason Scouly exists.

The short version

You need	Look at
Off-market discovery, every industry, team budget	Grata, SourceScrub, Inven
Off-market discovery, individual budget, our 7 verticals	Scouly (free tier, $35/mo Operator)
Every listed deal in one feed	Kumo (free tier, $89/mo Pro)
The community and its accumulated knowledge	Searchfunder
Zero dollars and lots of time	data.sba.gov + state registries yourself

If you already know what you'd buy, our thesis builder turns that into a screen over the 173,769 companies we track.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a genuinely free Grata alternative?

For off-market discovery, Scouly's Explorer tier is free within its seven verticals with 10 full profile unlocks, and the underlying public records (data.sba.gov, state registries) are free everywhere, at the cost of building your own pipeline. Nothing free replicates Grata's all-industry coverage with contact enrichment. That data assembly is what the enterprise contracts pay for.

What does Grata actually cost?

Grata doesn't publish pricing. Its pricing page shows three tiers, Growth, Scale and Alpha, and every one routes to a demo request instead of a number. Figures do circulate on software review sites, but those come from customers rather than from Grata, and a quote moves with seats, modules and contract length. Treat any number you read, including on this page, as somebody else's contract and never as your quote.

Grata vs SourceScrub: which is better for a searcher?

Neither, in most cases. Both are enterprise contracts built for teams that source year-round. A searcher buying one company usually gets more from a tool that publishes its price, plus the free public records, then Searchfunder for the network. Our Scouly vs Grata and Scouly vs SourceScrub pages go feature by feature.

Do any of these tools show revenue or EBITDA for off-market companies?

Estimates only. True financials of private companies are not public in the US. Tools differ mainly in how honestly they label the modeling. Our position: show what the public record supports, meaning SBA loan sizes and PPP payroll snapshots, and label everything else an estimate or leave it out.

Does Scouly replace Grata's contact data?

No. Scouly gives you the company, its public loan and registry history, and a score. It never contacts owners and doesn't sell emails or phone numbers. The registry record usually includes a registered agent or principal address, which is where most searchers start their letter. Verified executive contacts at scale are a Grata or SourceScrub purchase.

Sources

Scouly tracks 173,769 off-market US businesses across seven verticals, scored on public signals. Start with a thesis or read how the scoring works.

By Nishkal Dachepelly, founder of Scouly. Published 2026-07-11. Updated August 2026.