Last updated: August 2026
BizBuySell and Scouly both end at the same place, a signed purchase agreement, and they work opposite ends of the pipeline getting there. BizBuySell aggregates businesses whose owners already decided to sell. Scouly maps businesses whose owners have never listed, using public records, so you can start the conversation first. This page compares the two honestly, including where the marketplace is plainly the better tool.
Disclosure: we build Scouly. Read accordingly.
BizBuySell has been the default place to shop for a small business for longer than most of today's searchers have been working. LoopNet acquired it in 2004. CoStar Group, the Nasdaq-listed commercial real estate data company, picked it up in 2012 when CoStar bought LoopNet for about $860 million, so the marketplace you are browsing today sits inside a public data company.
A listing there comes with an asking price, a location, usually a broker, and often a cash-flow figure the seller chose to share. You can filter by industry and state, inquire through the listing, and be talking to a committed seller the same week. That speed is the entire point of a marketplace, and it is real.
The strength and the problem come from the same fact: a listing is public. By the time a business shows up, the owner has hired an intermediary, set a price, and opened the deal to every buyer running the same search. Brokers run the process to generate competing offers, because that is their job for the seller. Good listings move fast and price at market or above.
There is a second cost and it shows up by vertical. Some categories have a listing culture. They trade often, the buyer pool is wide, and the numbers a buyer needs fit on one page, so the owner reaches for a broker without thinking twice. Licensed multi-decade operators work the other way around. A funeral home or a dental practice carries a family name, a license and a referral base, and those owners tend to sort out succession privately, years before they would let anyone publish that the business is available.
Scouly has no listings. It tracks 173,769 companies across seven verticals (HVAC and plumbing, dental, manufacturing, landscaping, auto repair, funeral homes, veterinary) by joining public records: SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA loan files, PPP loan data, DOL Form 5500 filings, state business registries, UK Companies House, and OpenStreetMap establishment density. Each company gets a deterministic 0 to 100 score built from loan maturity (an SBA loan reaching payoff marks a natural decision point for the owner), registry longevity, and local market fragmentation.
Nothing on Scouly is for sale, and it never contacts an owner on your behalf. It also refuses to estimate earnings, since no public record reports what a business makes. You pick the targets, you write the letter, you own the relationship. The Explorer tier is free with 10 full profile unlocks, and the Operator plan is $35 a month with unlimited unlocks.
| BizBuySell | Scouly | |
|---|---|---|
| What you're looking at | Businesses whose owners listed them for sale | Off-market companies with a public-records footprint |
| Coverage | Every industry, weighted toward categories with a listing culture | 173,769 companies across 7 verticals |
| Owner intent | Already decided to sell | Unknown until you ask |
| Price information | Asking price set by the seller or broker | None; per-vertical SBA borrowing quartiles as a benchmark |
| Who else sees the deal | Every buyer running the same search on a public marketplace | Whoever else pulls the same records |
| How you make contact | Inquiry through the listing, usually to a broker | You write to the owner directly |
| Financials | Often shared by the seller in the listing | Never estimated; loan sizes and filings shown as evidence |
| Cost | Free to browse listings | Free Explorer tier (10 unlocks); Operator at $35/month |
Use BizBuySell when your timeline is short and you want sellers who have already decided. A listed deal has a committed owner and financials on the table, and it can close inside a year. It is the obvious tool in any category where listing is the norm, and it stays useful deep into a search as a read on what people are asking in your metro.
Use Scouly when your thesis points at a vertical where owners don't list, or when you want to be the only buyer in the conversation. Off-market sourcing is slower. Outreach takes months, most letters get no reply, and the owner may want two more years before selling. What you get for the patience is a conversation with no process around it.
Most serious searchers end up running both. For the wider field beyond these two, other marketplaces, enterprise platforms and records tools, see BizBuySell alternatives for off-market sourcing.
The clearest case for the off-market side is funeral homes. Scouly tracks 3,384 of them across 384 U.S. metro markets, and the SBA FOIA files count 2,580 funeral home borrowers with a median peak loan of $697,250 and 36% of borrowers above $1M. Real, bank-underwritten firms with real buildings. Almost none will ever appear on a marketplace, because a multi-generational family firm sells through a private conversation about the name on the building. A buyer working from records gets that conversation. A buyer refreshing listings never sees the business at all.
If that is the kind of search you are running, build a thesis for free and rank every tracked company in your metro against your own criteria. The deal benchmark tool compares any SBA loan you find against the vertical quartiles.
Is Scouly a BizBuySell alternative? Only in a loose sense, since the two solve different problems. BizBuySell is a marketplace of businesses listed for sale. Scouly is a sourcing database of 173,769 off-market companies built from public records, with nothing listed and no brokers involved. If you want more listings, look at BizQuest or BusinessesForSale. If you want deals before they become listings, that is Scouly's category.
Does Scouly show asking prices or financials? No. A public filing reports what a business borrowed. Nothing public reports what it earns, and no record anywhere carries the number an owner would accept, so Scouly declines to invent either one. Profiles show the evidence that exists: SBA loan sizes and maturity dates, registry age, PPP payroll bands, Form 5500 filings. For price context, each vertical's SBA borrowing quartiles give you a floor, like the $697,250 median peak loan among funeral home borrowers.
Who owns BizBuySell? CoStar Group, the Nasdaq-listed commercial real estate data company that trades as CSGP and sits in the S&P 500. LoopNet bought BizBuySell in 2004, and CoStar acquired LoopNet in 2012 for about $860 million, which brought BizBuySell along with it. In practice that puts the marketplace inside a large public data business, run at the scale that implies.
Can I use BizBuySell and Scouly together? Yes, and that is the sensible setup for a serious search. Watch listings in your vertical and metro to calibrate asking prices and occasionally catch a fairly priced deal, while running records-based outreach for proprietary conversations. The two barely overlap: a company on Scouly is unlisted by definition, and a listed company has already reached peak buyer competition.
Why do funeral homes rarely appear on marketplaces? Because a listing is public and the business is the family's name. Owners of multi-decade licensed firms explore succession through their accountant or a trusted industry peer long before they would consider a marketplace, and many sell to the one buyer who wrote first. Funeral homes are Scouly's smallest vertical at 3,384 tracked firms, and a records-built list is the only way most of them surface at all.