Dun & Bradstreet is a business-data company founded in 1841. It runs three different businesses under one brand: credit and risk, sales prospecting (D&B Hoovers), and licensed data.
Most people don't realize that, and conflating the three is why a procurement conversation drags from six weeks to six months: you think you're buying one product and get quoted three.
This page sorts D&B into its three businesses, says what each is good at, and flags where sales teams should look elsewhere.
The three aspects of Dun & Bradstreet
Each business is sold to a different buyer, priced differently, and competes with a different set of vendors.
Knowing which one you're dealing with is what keeps an evaluation clean.
1. D&B for business credit (the original business, still dominant)
The credit business is where D&B started 185 years ago and where it's still the category leader. The D-U-N-S Number, the PAYDEX score, the credit reports that banks and insurers run before lending to a company — these are all the credit-and-risk business. If you sell into financial services, government, or large enterprises with formal vendor-onboarding requirements, this is the part of D&B you interact with.
Most of the negative reviews D&B picks up on Trustpilot (1.1 out of 5, last we checked) are from small businesses bumping into the credit business: confusion about how a credit profile is built, frustration with paid monitoring products, opaque pricing on credit reports. The credit business is dominant because nobody else has D&B's depth of payment-history data, not because it's beloved.
2. D&B for sales prospecting (the Hoovers product)
D&B Hoovers is the sales-prospecting database, D&B's direct answer to ZoomInfo. It uses the same underlying business records that power the credit business, but layers in sales-led search and segmentation. Reps use it to build lead lists, research accounts, and find contact information.
Hoovers is firmographic-strong because it inherits D&B's company-level data. It's contact-data-thin because that's not the dataset the company was built on. Sales teams running outbound on Hoovers consistently report the same pattern: company data is fine, direct dials are sparse, verified work emails are inconsistent. For teams where contact reach is the primary bottleneck, the gap between firmographic-first databases and purpose-built outbound sales platforms becomes hard to ignore.
This is the part of D&B that most directly competes with modern sales-data platforms, and where most sales teams find the gap painful enough to switch. The D&B Hoovers vs ZoomInfo comparison breaks down exactly where.
3. D&B for licensed data (WorldBase, Optimizer, Connect)
The third business is data licensing. D&B sells the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud, around 500 million business records, to other companies that build products on top of it. LexisNexis uses it for risk products. Yext uses it for business listings. Salesforce's own Data Cloud integrates it.
D&B Connect for Salesforce and D&B Optimizer are the licensed-data business sold back into enterprises, plumbed into Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. The most common touchpoint for sales teams is the Salesforce DUNS Number field on the Account object, which D&B Connect populates and keeps in sync. This part of D&B is invisible to most end-buyers because it sits behind other products. If you're evaluating a tool that promises "powered by Dun & Bradstreet data," the source is this licensed-data business.
Which D&B do you actually need?
Match the job to the right part of D&B before evaluating alternatives:
Checking a customer's credit before extending payment terms: the credit business. D&B is still the standard, though Experian and Equifax compete.
Finding decision-makers at target companies and running outbound: Hoovers, the sales-prospecting business. This is where modern sales-intelligence platforms genuinely compete.
Enriching Salesforce or Marketo accounts with firmographic data: Optimizer or Connect, the licensed-data business. Again, where modern enrichment vendors compete.
KYC/AML compliance, insurance vendor onboarding, or supplier portals that mandate a DUNS: the credit business.
Building a global parent-subsidiary view of an enterprise customer: the credit business has the deepest corporate-linkage data, period.
What D&B is actually good at
Three things, and they're worth being honest about:
Corporate hierarchy. Multi-level parent-subsidiary mapping at global scale. Nobody else comes close.
Credit and risk data. PAYDEX scores, payment history, and supplier risk, all built on nearly two centuries of compounding data.
Coverage of small private companies that don't appear in modern sales-led databases because they don't have a website worth crawling.
Where D&B falls short
These are the gaps that send most teams searching for D&B Hoovers alternatives. The four below are the ones that show up most often in evaluations against modern sales-led platforms like ZoomInfo.
Contact-level data is firmographic-dominant
The product is built on company data, not people data. Sales teams running outbound from a D&B-enriched CRM consistently find the same pattern. Direct-dial coverage, mobile numbers, and verified-email coverage are materially lower than what sales-led data platforms deliver. This is the single most common reason teams evaluate alternatives.
Intent data is largely repackaged
D&B's intent product combines its own intent topics with Bombora's taxonomy. Bombora is a legitimate intent dataset, but layering a third-party feed on top of an in-house one creates a stitched-together signal layer rather than a native one. The gap shows up in how the signals are scored: a repackaged feed can tell you an account is researching a topic, but it can't connect that signal natively to your CRM history or your own win patterns the way a first-party signal layer can.
Technographic data is shallow
Tech-stack data, meaning what software a company runs, isn't where D&B's business was built. It's an add-on dataset rather than a primary one, and the depth and refresh cadence reflect that.
Pricing and packaging is opaque
D&B sells through a quote-and-contract motion that bundles products and gates seats. Only the entry-level Essentials plan publishes a price. Every enterprise tier is custom-quoted, and intent data, Audience Builder, and additional credits all carry separate unpublished pricing on top. Mid-market buyers regularly report being quoted six-figure annual minimums for what they thought was a per-seat enrichment add-in.
See the full breakdown of D&B Hoovers pricing for what each tier actually includes.
When ZoomInfo is the better fit
If the job is sales-led, meaning finding the right buyer at the right company at the right moment and then running outbound that actually connects, ZoomInfo's GTM Platform is built for the job D&B isn't. The platform rests on four things D&B's stack doesn't combine:
Verified contact data, included by default
The dataset ships with the core ZoomInfo Sales product rather than as an upsell tier:
500M+ professional profiles and 100M+ company records
300M+ verified business emails
135M+ direct-dial numbers
Maintained by continuous AI verification and human research, with 1.5B+ data points processed daily
Native intent and signal data, not resold
ZoomInfo Intent surfaces accounts actively researching your category before they raise their hand, and the signals are first-party rather than licensed from a third party.
Forrester named ZoomInfo a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Intent Data Providers for B2B, Q1 2025, with the highest possible score across eight criteria.
Guided Intent, exclusive to ZoomInfo, identifies topics historically correlated with deal success rather than requiring manual topic selection.
CRM integration in the standard package
D&B gates Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and HubSpot connectors behind its mid-tier and above. ZoomInfo includes CRM integration from the standard tier onward, and ZoomInfo for Salesforce installs from the AppExchange without a separate SKU negotiation.
An intelligence layer, not just a database
ZoomInfo's GTM Context Graph fuses third-party data with your CRM records, conversation transcripts from Chorus, and behavioural signals into a single graph. As ZoomInfo's CPO Dominik Facher writes:
"The CRM recorded the state change. It has no record of why it happened."
The graph captures the why. That's the layer D&B's stack doesn't have, and it's the reason "GPT on my CRM" experiments tend to fail.
When D&B is still the right call
There are scenarios where D&B is the right answer. The pattern is consistent: credit, risk, regulatory, or forensic corporate hierarchy.
KYC/AML compliance in financial services.
Insurance vendor onboarding, or anywhere the DUNS is a regulatory requirement.
Forensic parent-subsidiary mapping of multinational enterprises.
Lending or credit decisioning where decades of payment history matter.
Outside those, the value of D&B's brand recognition tends to fade once the procurement conversation hits the actual data delivery, and the alternatives start looking serious.
Next step
The trick with D&B is matching the job to the right one of its three businesses. If that job is sales-led, contact data is where it falls short, so that's the case worth testing.
See how ZoomInfo compares on your own accounts.
Frequently asked questions
Is Dun & Bradstreet a credit bureau or a data vendor?
Both. The credit business is the original and largest, but D&B sells across three categories: credit and risk, sales prospecting (via Hoovers), and licensed business data (via the Data Cloud, Optimizer, and Connect).
Who owns Dun & Bradstreet?
Clearlake Capital Group. The acquisition was announced in March 2025 and closed on 26 August 2025, taking the company private and delisting it from the New York Stock Exchange.
Is D&B Hoovers the same as Dun & Bradstreet?
Hoovers is a product within Dun & Bradstreet, focused on sales prospecting. The brand was acquired by D&B in 2003 and re-branded D&B Hoovers in 2017. The data behind it comes from D&B's wider Data Cloud.
How accurate is Dun & Bradstreet's data?
Company-level firmographic data is broadly accurate because it's been compounding for nearly two centuries. Contact-level data (direct dials, verified emails, current job titles) is materially less complete than what sales-led data platforms deliver. Most buyer complaints about D&B's accuracy refer to contact-level data, not company-level.
Is Dun & Bradstreet free?
Getting a DUNS Number is free. Looking up basic company information through some D&B endpoints is free. Anything past that (credit reports, enrichment subscriptions, Hoovers seats, Optimizer or Connect contracts) is paid.
What does "Dun & Bradstreet" mean? Why the ampersand?
The company is named after Robert Graham Dun and John M. Bradstreet, whose firms (founded in 1841 and 1849) merged in 1933 to form the modern Dun & Bradstreet. The ampersand has stuck through every rebrand since.
What replaced the DUNS Number for federal contracting?
SAM.gov replaced the DUNS Number with the UEI (Unique Entity Identifier) on 4 April 2022. If you're registering to do business with the US federal government, the UEI is what you need now. It's issued for free directly through SAM.gov as part of entity registration.
