Best public procurement data tools in Europe 2026: a comparison for manufacturers

For a manufacturer who wants to know which companies win public supply contracts in its category and country, the most useful tool is the one that reads contract award notices and groups them by company; TED holds those notices for free, and every other tool on this page either repackages TED, adds national portals, or adds work on top. Which one fits depends on four things: whether you need awards or open tenders, whether the tool joins one company's wins across notices, whether its licence allows commercial use, and what you can pay.

Putting it simply: If you can work with raw files and want no cost, use TED's XML packages and national portals. If you are a researcher, opentender.eu is excellent but non-commercial. If you want to bid, use a tender alert service. If you want a list of the companies that win your category in a country, with each name tied to its notices, a tool that resolves companies across awards does that job, and Cresques is one of them, for a fee.

Disclosure: Cresques is our own product. We compare on criteria you can check yourself and link to each source.

How we compared

We looked at each tool from one angle: a manufacturer looking for distributors, who wants to see who already sells its product category to public buyers in a given country. We did not judge tools on bid writing, deadline alerts or document management, which matter to bidders and not to this reader.

The criteria:

• What it covers: open tenders (contract notices), awards (contract award notices), and whether contracts below the EU thresholds are included.
• Company resolution: whether the wins of one company across many notices are joined into one record.
• Licence: whether the data can be used commercially.
• Export: whether you can take the data out (files, API, CSV).
• Price: as published by the operator. Where a price is not public, we say "pricing on request".

Every fact about a third-party tool comes from its own pages, opened on 8 November 2026, except opentender.eu, which refused our requests that day (HTTP 403); for it we used the Open Contracting Partnership data registry and the DIGIWHIST repositories, both listed in the sources. Comparisons follow Directive 2006/114/EC: facts you can verify, no disparagement.

The comparison

The same tools against the four criteria that matter for finding distributors:

TED

TED is the source almost everyone else builds on. It publishes more than 3,000 notices every weekday, free, and its legal notice says procurement notices "can be freely reused, for commercial or non-commercial purposes" unless otherwise noted. Builders can download daily and monthly XML packages, with a fair-usage limit of three concurrent downloads. The limit for our reader is effort: since 14 November 2022 notices come in two schemas, eForms and the older TED forms, and TED shows notices one at a time with no view that groups a company's wins. See what TED is and how to read an award notice.

TED CSV on data.europa.eu

The CSV subset holds the most important fields of contract notices and award notices, "who bought what from whom, for how much". It is the easiest way into TED with a spreadsheet. As of 8 November 2026 it ends on 31 December 2023 and was last updated on 25 January 2024, so it misses everything published since 2024, when eForms became the norm. Licences are set per file: the European Commission reuse notice or CC BY 4.0.

opentender.eu

Built by the DIGIWHIST research project and run by the Government Transparency Institute, OpenTender combines TED with national portals for 35 jurisdictions; its datasets in the Open Contracting Partnership registry download as CSV, JSON and Excel. It is the strongest free resource for researchers. Its licence, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, excludes commercial use, so a company selling products cannot build a sales process on it without permission. Update cadence varies by country (every six months for Belgium, data to December 2024), and the registry notes that suppliers "can be repeated across contracting processes".

Open Opportunities (Spend Network)

Spend Network lists Open Opportunities as its web application, with an API for contract data. Open Opportunities says it searches over 1,050 sources in 180+ countries, updated twice a day, from £120 a month per user billed yearly, with a free trial. It is built for teams that respond to tenders. Its API tags each tender with CPV codes and shows it once. The pages we read do not describe company profiles that group awards.

Tenders Direct

Tenders Direct, operated by Proactis Tenders Ltd, covers every UK, Irish and OJEU opportunity, including below-threshold notices, and its database holds "over 7 years of contracts and awards from the UK and EU". Plans are published: Basic £1,359, Core £2,044 and Premium £2,319, with one, two or three-year terms; the page does not say whether prices are per year. Competitor tracking and export are included. It suits a UK or Irish bidder more than a manufacturer scanning continental markets.

Tendium

Tendium, based in Stockholm, monitors 28,000 sources across Europe and says it finds "both large and small procurements", with English summaries of tenders in other languages. The Light plan starts at 125 EUR a month and includes "documents, updates and awards"; Core and Scale are priced by bids per year. "Supplier insights" appears in its data section without a plan attached. It is a bidding tool first.

TenderNed and BZP: national portals

National portals are where below-threshold contracts live. TenderNed, run by RVO for the Ministry of Economic Affairs, is free for businesses (Dutch firms need eHerkenning, which costs money), and its open data, CC0, includes award notices from January 2016 to October 2026. Below the EU thresholds Dutch buyers announce only if they choose to. Poland's BZP carries notices for contracts below the EU thresholds, including result notices naming winners, and reading notices through its API needs no integration procedure, with a guaranteed limit of 30 requests a minute per IP address since 6 October 2026. Both are in their national language and show notices, not companies. More in below-threshold procurement.

Google Dataset Search

Dataset Search indexes descriptions of datasets that publishers mark up with schema.org metadata. It holds no data itself, but it is a fast route to national open procurement datasets you might not know exist. Check each result's licence on the publisher's page.

Cresques

Cresques reads TED award notices for 30 countries since November 2023: 1,604,107 awards dated since then, and 103,430 companies and 36,397 buyers in its evidence as a whole, as of 8 November 2026. It counts live notices only, counts repeats of one procedure once and keeps only awards in a concluded contract; the methodology explains the sources and the limits. Companies are joined across notices mainly by registration number. Polish below-threshold awards from the BZP come with Growth (one market) and Scale (three). It costs money: a free plan with 10 credits (one market map), then plans from €49 a month (pricing); CSV export from Growth. It does not cover the UK or open tenders, and it is not a bidding tool.

Which to use when

• You want raw data and no cost: TED XML packages, plus TenderNed open data or the BZP API for national layers.
• You research markets for a university, NGO or newsroom: opentender.eu, within its non-commercial licence.
• You want to analyse years before 2024 in a spreadsheet: the TED CSV.
• You want to bid for tenders: Open Opportunities, Tendium or, in the UK and Ireland, Tenders Direct.
• You look for national datasets in a country you do not know: Google Dataset Search, then the publisher's licence.
• You want the companies that win your category in an EU or EEA country, each tied to its notices, and you can pay: Cresques. Start with a market on the free plan.
• Your market is the UK or outside Europe: Cresques does not cover it; a UK service or the national portal does.