Swiss company research tools in 2026

There is no single best tool for Swiss company research, and any ranking that names one is answering a different question from yours. The sources divide cleanly by job. Official registers establish legal facts. The gazette records what changed and when. Cross-border aggregators help when a company's structure does not sit in one jurisdiction. B2B directories help when you are selling to a company rather than checking it. Graph tools exist to make the relationships between all of that legible. What follows is what each is good for, and where each one stops.

Start from the question, not the tool

Almost all Swiss company research is one of four questions.

• Does this entity exist, in what legal form, and who can sign for it? An official register answers this, and nothing else answers it authoritatively.
• What changed, and when? The gazette.
• How is it connected to other companies, people and addresses? Aggregation, then a graph.
• Is it worth selling to or buying from? Commercial directories and credit data — a different discipline from legal verification, and routinely confused with it.

Working out which question you are actually asking saves more time than any tool does.

The official Swiss sources

Zefix

Zefix is the central index of business names across the cantonal commercial registers. Search a name and you get the registered legal name, legal form, seat, UID and status, with links onward to the cantonal register entry and to the associated gazette publications.

It is the right first stop and an authoritative one. It is also a lookup by design: you arrive with a name or a number and leave with that entity. Questions that run sideways — every company at one address, every mandate held by one person — are a different shape of search, and that is where research usually goes next.

The UID register

The UID is the enterprise identification number, the CHE number on a register extract, maintained by the Federal Statistical Office. Every registered Swiss enterprise has one.

Its value in due diligence is unglamorous and large: it is stable. Legal names change, seats move between municipalities and cantons, and Swiss company names repeat across the country with small variations. The number does not change, so a search that starts from the identifier survives a rebranding that a search by name does not. Put the UID in your file, not the name.

SHAB / SOGC

The Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce is where register mutations become public: formations, changes of officers and signature authority, domicile moves, capital changes and dissolutions, alongside debt-enforcement, bankruptcy and court notices under their own rubrics. It publishes on business days.

This is the source most often skipped, and the one that most often changes a conclusion. A register extract is a snapshot of today; the gazette is the sequence that produced it, and the order and spacing of the notices usually carries more information than the current state does. Reading a single notice properly is a skill worth acquiring, and the archive runs back to the nineteenth century.

Aggregators and cross-border databases

When a Swiss company has a foreign parent, a branch abroad, or a group structure spread across jurisdictions, the Swiss record alone will not close the question.

OpenCorporates is an open database that collects company records from official registers in a large number of jurisdictions and lets you search across them by company or by officer name. Its use here is the cross-border view rather than the Swiss detail.

North Data aggregates company information drawn from official registers, gazettes and company filings, with a European focus, and presents it in a structured form.

Both are copies of primary records, and that is the thing to hold on to. Coverage, refresh intervals and terms differ by jurisdiction and change over time, so check what a service currently holds for the jurisdictions you care about, and confirm anything decision-relevant against the register of origin before you rely on it. That is not a criticism of either service. It is how any aggregation should be treated, this one included.

Commercial directories

Kompass is a B2B directory that classifies companies by industry, product category and location. It is built for prospecting, supplier discovery and market mapping.

That is a genuinely different job from legal verification, and the error is not using it — it is citing it. A directory profile tells you what a company says it sells. It does not tell you whether the entity is registered, active, or represented by the person who answered your email.

Where graph tools fit

The official sources answer questions about one entity at a time. The work that takes longest is the work between entities: the same person on four boards, the same c/o address behind a dozen companies, a domicile that moved in the same publication as the board.

Graph platforms, this one included, exist for that step. Ours reads the register and gazette record and renders it as something you can walk — companies, officers, signatories and addresses as connected nodes instead of as separate extracts, a person's mandates across every entity they are entered in, the publication history behind the current picture, and a set of companies kept under watch so the next notice finds you rather than the other way round.

The claim to be careful about

No tool built on the Swiss commercial register can show you ultimate beneficial ownership, and any tool that claims to is overselling, because the register does not record it. For an AG, shareholders are not entered at all. For a GmbH, quotaholders are entered by name at the immediate level — which is genuinely useful, and one of several reasons the legal form is the first thing to read on an extract — but an entered corporate quotaholder is still not a natural person at the end of a chain.

What a graph over the public record does show is registered officers and their signature authority, domiciles and shared addresses, and the publication history of both. From those you can build a defensible view of control and label it as inference. That is a narrower and more honest claim than ownership, and the distinction between the two is worth getting precise before it appears in a file with your name on it.

What none of these tools certify

Worth saying once, plainly: the commercial register records legal facts and nothing beyond them. It does not certify that a company pays its invoices, delivers on its contracts, or is solvent. Payment experience, credit files and financial condition live outside the register entirely, and a clean register history sits comfortably alongside a poor payment record.

That limit travels with the data. An aggregator does not add assurance to a register entry by copying it, and a graph does not add assurance by drawing it. Both make the same facts easier to find, which is worth a great deal and is not the same as verification.

In practice

Pick the source that answers your question, then confirm anything that matters against the register of origin. If you want the connected version of that habit, searching by name or UID is a reasonable place to start — a company opens onto its officers, its publication history and the network around it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Zefix and a cantonal commercial register?

Zefix is the central index of business names across all the cantonal registers: it tells you which register holds an entity, and returns the legal name, legal form, seat, UID and status. The legally authoritative record is the cantonal register entry itself, which Zefix links onward to and from which a certified extract is ordered. For most research the index is enough. When something has to be relied on, follow the link to the cantonal entry.

Do I need a paid tool for Swiss company research?

For a single entity — does it exist, in what legal form, who can sign for it — the official federal sources answer the question and are publicly accessible. Paid tools earn their place at the second step, when the question runs between entities rather than about one: the same person across several boards, the same address behind many companies, or a change you would rather be told about than go looking for. If you need to confirm one company once, start with the official sources and stay there.

How do I find every company at one address, or every mandate held by one person?

Not through the register index, which is built as a lookup: you arrive with a name or a UID and leave with that one entity. Sideways questions need the same data reorganised around people and addresses rather than around companies, which is what a graph over the register and gazette record is for — a person's mandates across every entity they are entered in, or companies, officers and addresses as connected nodes. Treat any hit as a lead to verify rather than a finding: a shared address is very often just a shared fiduciary or a business centre.

Which source should I cite in a due diligence file?

The register of origin, and the gazette notice with its publication date. An aggregator or a graph is a good way to find something and a poor thing to cite, because both are copies or renderings of a primary record. Record the UID rather than the company name, since the number survives a rebranding that the name does not. Where a conclusion rests on a change, cite the publication that recorded it rather than the current state.

How current is the data in a cross-border aggregator?

Coverage, refresh intervals and terms of use differ by jurisdiction and change over time, so the honest answer is that you have to check what a given service currently holds for the jurisdictions you care about. Their value is the cross-border view — one search across many registers — rather than Swiss depth. Confirm anything decision-relevant against the register of origin before relying on it. That is how any aggregation should be treated, this platform included.

How do I tell whether a Swiss company is still active?

The register entry carries a status, and that is the direct answer. The more informative one is the sequence behind it: new registrations, dissolutions, liquidations and deletions are all published as dated gazette notices, so the gazette shows when a company entered liquidation and what happened in the months before. Note the limit as well — a company can be registered and in good standing while doing no business at all, because the register records legal facts and not trading activity.