NewcoHunter vs Companies House

Companies House is the UK government's official register of all limited companies, LLPs, and other registered entities in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. It has existed in some form since 1844 and today holds records for roughly 5 million active companies. The service is free to use and publicly accessible - anyone can look up a company's registered address, filing history, director appointments, and shareholder structure. For verifying that a business actually exists, it is the definitive source.

NewcoHunter is a monitoring tool built on top of that same official data. We pull directly from the Companies House API, so every company you see on NewcoHunter is real, current, and officially registered. What we add is not access to the data - that is free and always will be - it is the work of watching it: a search you save once and never run again, checked every day, with the companies you have already seen filtered out.

To be clear about what Companies House already does, because plenty of comparison pages are not: its advanced search filters by SIC code, by incorporation date range, by company type and status, and by registered office address, and it will download up to 5,000 results as a spreadsheet. If you need a one-off list and you know your SIC codes, use it. It is free and it is the source we use ourselves.

Where it stops is the second time. Companies House has no memory of a search: nothing saves it, nothing re-runs it, and nothing tells you which of today's results you have already seen. Around 1,500 to 2,000 companies are added to the register every morning, so a weekly prospecting habit means re-running the search, re-downloading the spreadsheet, and reconciling it against last week's by hand. Its email alerts follow one company you already know about and tell you when it files - they cannot tell you that a company matching your criteria has just appeared.

NewcoHunter does that reconciliation for you. You pick an industry category - say, construction contractors or IT consultancies - set a geographic region like the South East or Greater Manchester, and save that search. Note the difference in both halves: you choose a sector rather than hunting down the SIC codes that make it up, and you choose a region rather than guessing which address text will match it. We check the register every day and email you only the companies that are new since your last digest. You can filter out shell companies with no employees and no trading address, export to CSV, and pass leads into your CRM or outreach tool.

Shell company detection is worth highlighting separately. A significant proportion of new registrations are holding companies, dormant vehicles, or brass-plate entities with no real trading activity. They clutter any raw list pulled from Companies House and waste prospecting time. NewcoHunter applies a set of signals - registered address type, SIC code patterns, officer appointment history - to flag likely shells so you can exclude them from your exports with one click.

So the honest test is how often you need the list. If you want to verify a supplier, check a director's appointment history, pull filed accounts, or build one list this quarter, go to Companies House directly - it is free, comprehensive, and perfectly suited to that. If you need the same search answered every week, without running it, and you only want to see what changed, that is what NewcoHunter is built for.

There is no conflict between the two. NewcoHunter is not a replacement for Companies House - it is what happens when you take the raw data and make it useful for sales and business development teams. We have a free tier with no time limit, so you can run a search today and see whether the volume and quality of leads suits your market.