Grata Alternatives for Searchers and SMB Buyers (2026): Free and Paid Options
Last updated: July 2026
Most people searching for a Grata alternative are not unhappy with Grata. They hit the pricing page. Grata is genuinely good at what it was built for — private-company intelligence for private equity and corporate development teams, with millions of company profiles, contact enrichment, and a search experience those teams pay real money for. Third-party buyer guides commonly report contracts in the tens of thousands of dollars per year; Grata quotes custom pricing.
If you are a deal team at a fund, that math can work. 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.
Disclosure up front: we build Scouly, one of the options below. It is free, which is not a coincidence — 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. Competitor pricing figures are as reported by third-party buyer guides and review sites, not our numbers.
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.
No single alternative covers all four. Most disappointment with sourcing tools comes from buying a tool built for a different row of that list.
The alternatives
Scouly — free, off-market, public-records only (our product)
Scouly is a free off-market sourcing database covering 173,000+ 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, and market-fragmentation indexes computed from OpenStreetMap. Every company gets a 0–100 acquisition-readiness score with the full breakdown shown, and every signal links to its source record.
Where it beats Grata for an individual buyer: price (free, no trial clock), signal transparency (you can audit why a company ranks where it does), and owner-transition signals like SBA loan maturity that generalist databases don't model.
Where it honestly doesn't: seven verticals, not every industry; no contact enrichment (it drafts the outreach letter, you find the owner's address yourself — which public registries give you); and no revenue or EBITDA estimates, because true 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, same price class
SourceScrub is the alternative PE teams evaluate against Grata head-to-head: bootstrapped-company coverage built around conference lists, trade-show exhibitors, and buyer's guides, with contact data. It is an enterprise contract in a similar price class as Grata per review sites. If your problem with Grata was anything other than price, SourceScrub is worth a demo. If your problem was price, it isn't the answer.
Inven — the newer AI entrant
Inven positions itself as an AI-native company-search platform and generally quotes below the Grata/SourceScrub class, though still as custom-priced annual contracts aimed at deal teams. Coverage is broad and Europe-strong. For a solo searcher the calculus is the same as Grata's — it's built and priced for teams that source continuously, not for one acquisition.
Kumo — aggregation of listed deals, searcher-priced
Kumo solves the third row of the list above: it aggregates hundreds of thousands of listings from marketplaces and broker sites into one searchable feed with alerts. It is priced for searchers, not funds. The key distinction from Grata (and Scouly): these are on-market deals — you are seeing what every other buyer with the same subscription sees, at the same time. Great as listed-deal infrastructure; it is not an off-market discovery tool.
Axial — intermediated deal flow, as deals go to market
Axial is a deal network: intermediaries and owners bring opportunities to the platform, and buyers build a profile to receive matching deal flow. It describes itself as connecting buyers to deals as they go to market — which is exactly the moment competition begins. For lower-middle-market buyers with a credible profile it is real deal flow; it is relationship infrastructure, not a database you query.
Searchfunder — community, not a database
Searchfunder is where the search community actually talks: deal threads, investor lists, tool discussions, events. It won't generate a target list for you, but the accumulated threads on sourcing, diligence, and structuring are the best free education in the space, and intermediaries and investors are actually there. Most serious searchers should be on it regardless of which database they use.
The fully-free path: the public records themselves
Everything Scouly models is public. You can pull SBA 7(a)/504 loan data from data.sba.gov, PPP records from the SBA's FOIA releases, 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) |
| Every listed deal in one feed | Kumo |
| Intermediated deal flow at go-to-market | Axial |
| The community and its accumulated knowledge | Searchfunder |
| Zero dollars and lots of time | data.sba.gov + state registries yourself |
Frequently asked questions
Is there a genuinely free Grata alternative?
For off-market discovery: Scouly is free within its seven verticals, 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; third-party buyer guides commonly report annual contracts in the tens of thousands of dollars, varying with seats and modules. Treat any specific number you read (including here) as reported, not quoted.
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 (SBA loan sizes, PPP-derived payroll, headcounts), label everything else an estimate or don't show it.
Scouly tracks 173,000+ off-market US businesses across seven verticals, scored on public signals. It's free: browse markets or read how the scoring works.