BODACC.io vs Societe.com 2026: An Honest Comparison
Societe.com and BODACC.io do not provide the same service. The first is an online business directory running since 1999, which sells digitized documents, scores and prospecting files; the second reads the Official Bulletin of Civil and Commercial Announcements as it is published and republishes it for free. This comparison takes seven concrete situations — verifying a client, monitoring a company, detecting a difficulty, building a product, paying, acknowledging our weaknesses — and, for each, gives what each site displays, at what frequency, at what price and under what terms of use. Every factual claim links to the page where it was verified.
Verifying a client before signing: who really answers the question
On Societe.com, the answer is already very complete for a free account. The "ESSENTIELLE" offer gives access to official documents "free and unlimited (PDF deeds, PDF articles of association)", to the mapping of directors and their companies, to 25 monitored companies or directors and to 30 AI-assisted searches, without advertising, according to the pricing page. On a real profile, that of the publisher itself, one finds the SIREN, the SIRET of the head office, the VAT number, the creation date, the legal form, the address, the current and former directors, the open and closed establishments, the registry observations, the SIRENE situation notice, the RNE extract and a Kbis extract, with a mention of sources and dated update. For a credit decision, density matters less than freshness, and on this point Societe.com's public documents say three different things. The terms and conditions announce an update of registrations, modifications and removals from the RNCS "weekly, every Monday", a monthly update for INSEE data, and a weekly Monday refresh for the key figures of annual accounts. The API Pro page answers, in its FAQ, that "data is updated once a day from official databases (INSEE, INPI, BODACC)", and the API v1 documentation confirms: "updated daily from the SIRENE, INPI and BODACC directories". The About page finally speaks of "real-time economic information", a phrase repeated at the top of the API page. Three formulations that do not say the same thing to the hurried reader, and it is the hurried reader who decides whether or not to grant thirty days of payment. At BODACC.io, we answer with two objects and a simple constraint: the company profile and the announcement itself, published as soon as they appear in the Official Bulletin, without an account and without a key, with the publication date in plain text. Our profiles and our announcement engine show what the Bulletin says about a SIREN and allow scanning a family of events by city or department. We do not digitize deeds filed with the registry and we do not display the director's phone number: that is not our business. To prepare a decision, our guide on verifying a client details the five signals to look at in the Official Bulletin, and the glossary recalls the difference between a signal and a proof, for example with cessation of payments.
Monitoring a company over time: what each one keeps
This is where Societe.com is strongest, and it comes from its age. The site claims a creation in 1999, a date repeated both in the legal notices ("Site creation date: 1999") and in the T&Cs, where it presents itself as "a service for rebroadcasting information on companies" that has become "No. 1 in legal and financial information online". Its history is documented in its own blog: created in 1999 under the impetus of Xavier Niel, bought in 2006 by Adverline, moved into the La Poste group in 2013, taken over in 2022 by Guillaume Berthault and his associates, according to a story published on September 11, 2024, before a merger announced in 2025 with the Reverse Vision group, which brings it compliance, carbon footprint and expense analysis components. This seniority can be measured concretely: on its publisher's profile, the history goes back to the minutes of a general meeting from 1999 and 28 digitized official documents. On live monitoring, its proposal revolves around surveillance: 25 companies or directors monitored in the free offer, 500 in the PLUS offer, 2,000 in the PRO offer, according to the pricing page, and the monitoring page announces "+1M alerts sent every week", five notification channels (email, SMS, WhatsApp, API, CRM) and information "from 8:30 a.m." in case of failure or collective procedure — in other words a daily bulk send after opening, rather than an alert by the second. The same page promises "3 weeks ahead on certain procedures" and a solvency score from a partnership with CreditSafe, two elements that we do not know how to produce and which we return to below. Our approach to monitoring is narrower, but it does not count lines: the chronology of announcements for a SIREN, updated with each publication, and free alerts that you set yourself on a company or a director from your personal space. We do not keep digitized archives from 1999 and we do not send SMS. What we do keep is the link between the announcements of the same company, so that a judgment is not read as an isolated event: by linking a transfer to an approved transfer plan, or a judgment to the judicial administrator in charge of it.
Detecting difficulties: what the BODACC publishes before others
Two philosophies face each other, and neither is dishonest. Societe.com seeks to be ahead: its monitoring page promises "3 weeks ahead on certain procedures" and relies on a solvency score provided by CreditSafe, on solvency studies sold per unit or unlimited depending on the subscription, and on reports detailing "debts, guarantees, privileges and financial registrations certified by clerks", as seen on a real company profile. This is economic intelligence: one calculates, rates, anticipates. We do none of that, and we will not pretend otherwise: we produce neither a rating, nor a probability, nor a forecast. Our position is different: we publish the act, at its date, with its source. The Official Bulletin of Civil and Commercial Announcements is the journal through which the administration makes public the decisions affecting a company — opening judgments, conversions, plans, closures, removals, sales, filing of accounts. Our work consists of making it readable and complete: each announcement arrives with its type, its publication date, its city, its department and the SIREN concerned, and the counters are public. As of October 15, 2026, our database contains 51,043,403 announcements, 30,032,566 companies, of which 16,951,077 are active, and 4,935,692 people, figures queryable by anyone, without a key, at the same address. The advantage of this method is that it does not make mistakes: a cessation of payments date published in the BODACC is a fact, not an estimate, and it is usable in a file, a reminder, a declaration of claim. Its limit is symmetrical: we will not see a default coming that has not yet given rise to any publication, and we will never say whether a company is solvent or not. A company that files its accounts late, changes directors twice, transfers its head office and then sells a branch tells something to the attentive reader — but it is up to the reader to read it, and our role stops there.
Building a product: which API, with what limits
This is the section where the two offers are most similar in intention and least similar in terms. Societe.com offers a documented API Pro, with a root https://api.societe.com/api/v1, JSON responses by default and XML on request, and authentication by token passed as a parameter or in an X-Authorization header. Its v1 documentation imposes three clear constraints: only GET requests are accepted, access is possible only from IP addresses declared to the account, and "calls to the PRO API are limited by default to 60 requests / minute", with a paid "Highrate" option to go higher. The commercial page displays "Up to 2,000 calls/min", which corresponds to this option and not to the default setting. The API is consumed in credits, billed per endpoint: 0.1 credit for a search, 0.5 for legal information or a scoring, 2 for directors, balance sheets, collective procedures or mapping, 5 for downloading an official document. The routes have existed since version 1.0 of November 10, 2021, the current version as of March 18, 2026 being 1.20, and the documentation announces 12 million companies covered. Our API starts from an opposite principle: it is open without a key on all public data. The BODACC documentation specifies its bounds: 60 requests per minute and 10,000 requests per day without a key, 600 and 100,000 with a key, limit capped at 500, offset at 10,000, a 429 code accompanied by a Retry-After, and an edge cache that absorbs repeated calls, with data refreshed after each publication of the Official Bulletin. No credits, no endpoint billed per unit, no IP address to declare. On licenses, the positions diverge frankly, and this is a point to read before writing a line of code: Societe.com's T&Cs prohibit "the reproduction, rebroadcasting or automatic extraction by any means of information appearing on Societe.com", recall that the data is protected by the law of July 1, 1998 on databases, limit the use of purchased data to "personal use" and refer reuse to the API Pro or the purchase of files. Two different models, not a good and a bad one: one protects a base it has built, the other opens a flow it has not produced.
What it really costs, in use
Let us take the public grids, without interpreting them. At Societe.com, the ESSENTIELLE offer is free (unlimited official documents, 25 monitors, 30 AI searches), the PLUS offer is €19.90 excl. VAT per month without commitment or €16.90 excl. VAT per month with a 12-month commitment, and the PRO offer at €49.90 excl. VAT or €39.90 excl. VAT per month depending on the same choice, with "2 months free" on the annual, subscriptions renewed automatically and cancellable up to four days before the due date, payable by credit card, according to the pricing page. The API is sold in credit packs: 5,000 credits for €99, 20,000 for €290, 75,000 for €890, 200,000 for €1,990, 600,000 for €3,990 and 2,000,000 for €8,890, still according to the API page, with purchased credits not expiring. Company files are billed per line: "€0.19 excl. VAT per line for basic data", €0.09 for phones, €0.04 for financial data, decreasing from 5,000 lines, with a minimum order of €25 excl. VAT and a mandatory passage through the sales department beyond €1,500 excl. VAT, according to the files FAQ. At our place, consultation is free and without an account, and our prices fit on one page: Pro offer at €9 per month (€97 per year), Enterprise offer at €29 per month (€313 per year), and a one-time payment of €499 for the LIFE offer. The API is open without a key within the limits recalled above, without billing per endpoint. Comparing these grids requires starting from a use case, not from a displayed price. A developer who verifies 1,000 SIREN per month to enrich a CRM pays nothing at our place and consumed at Societe.com the equivalent of 500 to 2,000 credits depending on the routes called, i.e., at the price of the 5,000-credit pack, a few dozen euros per year. A service that must archive deeds filed with the registry, obtain a solvency rating and reconstruct a list of shareholders will find at Societe.com what we do not sell at all, at amounts that are calculated per company and per volume. Low price is not an argument in itself: it is only if the offer covers the need, and on several needs it does not cover it.
What BODACC.io does less well than Societe.com
We must start with the most obvious: seniority and reputation. Societe.com has been online since 1999, claims "millions of monthly users" on its About page, and its departmental directory displays counters that, added together, exceed twenty-seven million companies (directory by department). We opened in 2026. A site known for twenty-five years reassures, is passed between colleagues and appears everywhere in habits: that cannot be copied, and we do not measure up on that ground. Second point, more operational: official documents. Societe.com hosts and resells digitized registry deeds, articles of association, Kbis extracts, annual accounts, reports, shareholder lists and beneficial owners — on its own publisher's profile, there are 28 downloadable official documents, and access to the beneficial owners register has been regulated since July 31, 2024, which the company explains in a dedicated authorization form. We do not host any PDF deeds: if your work consists of retrieving a legal document, we are not the tool, and no trick will circumvent this lack. Third point: everything related to calculation and scoring. Solvency score backed by CreditSafe, solvency studies per unit or unlimited, statement of debts and registrations, valuation, sovereignty score, impact report and carbon footprint, director compliance: this analytical layer is a full part of their offer, described on the monitoring page and in the reports offered on each profile, whereas we publish dated facts and never a rating. Fourth point: commercial prospecting. Their files claim up to 13.5 million active company data, 5.8 million directors and phone numbers with more than one hundred targeting criteria on the export page, and 4 million numbers announced on the files side; we sell neither contacts, nor emails, nor phones, because our base is made of legal announcements and not call lists. Fifth point finally, the ecosystem: Zapier, Make and Odoo connectors to more than 7,000 applications, CRM integrations, director directory, interactive map, a glossary of nearly two hundred entries, an editorial blog signed by identified authors, and a legal announcement publication service whose publication certificate is announced in ten minutes on each company profile. On this product and editorial side, they have a head start that we do not have.
Our sources, verifiable line by line
This page does not ask the reader to believe us. Every claim about Societe.com refers to one of its public pages, and the links are deliberately direct rather than summarized: the T&Cs and GTC for the creation date, update frequencies and the prohibition of extraction; the pricing page for prices and the content of the free offer; the API Pro page for credit packs, cost per endpoint and the declared refresh frequency; the API v1 documentation for technical limits and announced coverage; the version history for the birth date of the routes; the monitoring page and the export page for volumes and alert channels; the files FAQ for per-line pricing; the blog for the company's history; and a real company profile to see with one's own eyes what is displayed and what is sold. Our own figures follow the same rule: they are public, queryable without a key, and they move with each publication of the Official Bulletin. On the day this comparison was written, October 15, 2026, they displayed 51,043,403 announcements, 30,032,566 companies and 4,935,692 people — the counters cited above, at the same address. Our primary sources are public and named: the BODACC published by the Direction de l'information légale et administrative, the national business register kept by the INPI, and the registries of the commercial courts, whose Bulletin is precisely the publicity channel. When we are wrong or when we lack information, we prefer to be told: the report is made from the site and it is treated as a correction, not as a complaint. A comparison between two services has value only if the reader can retrace the path alone: that is the only thing this page tries to make possible.