Firmographic vs Technographic Data: What Each Tells You and Where to Get It Free

Firmographic data describes what a company is: industry, size, location, revenue and structure. Technographic data describes what a company runs: its CRM, cloud, analytics, payment and developer tools. You need firmographics to decide whether an account fits, and technographics to decide whether your product fits into its stack. Both can be collected free from public sources if you know where to look and what each source gets wrong.

What is firmographic data?

Firmographic data is the set of structural facts used to segment organizations, the company equivalent of demographics. Wikipedia's entry lists industry (by NAICS or SIC code), location, customer size, legal status and structure, and performance measures such as revenue and growth, plus years in business and employee count [1].

In practice, B2B teams use a short list:

• Industry and sub-industry
• Employee count or range
• Revenue or revenue range
• Headquarters and office locations
• Legal entity type and parent company
• Founding year and funding stage
• Public or private status

Firmographics change slowly, which makes them the cheapest data to keep. They are also the most commoditized: every database sells them, and they are where every competitor targeting your ICP starts.

What is technographic data?

Technographic data is the record of which technologies a company uses, how deeply, and since when. For B2B sales it usually means named products: Salesforce or HubSpot, AWS or GCP, Segment, Stripe, Snowflake, Okta, Zendesk.

It comes in three depths:

• Detected: a script, DNS record or HTTP header shows the tool on the company's public footprint.
• Stated: the company says it uses the tool in a job post, case study, integration page or review.
• Inferred: a model guesses usage from indirect evidence, such as spend data or similar companies.

Detected and stated technographics can be checked. Inferred ones cannot, so treat them as a hint, not a fact.

Firmographic vs technographic data: what is the difference?

Firmographics tell you whether a company is a market for you; technographics tell you whether it is a customer for you right now.

	Firmographic data	Technographic data
Answers	Is this company in my ICP?	Can my product plug in, replace something, or win against an incumbent?
Examples	Industry: fintech. 420 employees. HQ: Austin. Series C.	Runs Salesforce, HubSpot Marketing, Segment, Snowflake, Stripe
How often it changes	Slowly (months to years)	Faster (tools added and dropped through the year)
Typical sources	Registries, filings, company site, LinkedIn company page, Census data	Website code, DNS records, job postings, integration pages, review sites
Best use	TAM sizing, territory design, fit scoring	Competitive displacement, integration plays, fit scoring, messaging
Main accuracy risk	Wrong industry code, outdated headcount, HQ vs operating location	Leftover tags, back-office tools invisible from outside, tool trials mistaken for adoption

A worked example. You sell a revenue-data product that syncs with Salesforce. A 400-person fintech in Austin matches your firmographic ICP. Its job posts ask for "Salesforce admin" experience and its site loads HubSpot's tracking script. Now you know it fits, which CRM to mention, and that marketing and sales may run on different systems, which is a pain point you can name in the first email.

How do you use firmographic and technographic data together?

Use firmographics to filter and technographics to prioritize and personalize. Most teams do it in this order:

1. Size the market with firmographics. Count accounts by industry, size and region. Our TAM analysis guide walks through building that list bottom-up.
2. Score fit with both. Firmographics carry most of the fit weight; technographics add points for required integrations or a competitor you displace well. The ICP scoring guide shows a 100-point version that gives firmographics 40% and technographics 30%.
3. Feed the result into your lead scoring model as the fit score, kept separate from intent and engagement.
4. Personalize outreach with technographics. Naming the tool they use and the specific gap it leaves beats naming their industry.
5. Watch technographic changes as signals. A company that removes a competitor's tag, posts a job asking for migration experience, or adds a new data warehouse is in motion.

Point 5 is where technographics earn their keep. A static stack list is fit data. A change in the stack is intent.

Where can you get firmographic data for free?

Government registries and filings are the most accurate free firmographic sources, because companies are legally required to file them. The main ones:

Source	What you get	Access	Notes
SEC EDGAR APIs	Filing history, SIC code, state of incorporation, fiscal year, XBRL financials for US public companies	Free, no API key [2]	Submissions update with typical delay under a second; bulk files republished nightly [2]
UK Companies House API	Company profile, officers, filings for UK companies	Free [11]; needs an account and API key [3]; 600 requests per 5 minutes [4]	Higher limits on request [4]
Companies House Free Company Data Product	Monthly snapshot of basic data on all live UK companies (CSV)	Free download [5]	Refreshed within 5 working days of month end; unsupported [5]
US Census County Business Patterns	Establishment counts, employment and payroll by NAICS industry, county and employment size	Free tables and CSV downloads [6]	2023 is the latest reference year listed [6]; counts only, no company names
Company websites and LinkedIn company pages	Description, locations, headcount range, recent news	Free to read	Headcount on LinkedIn reflects people who list the employer, not payroll

Census data will not give you a single company name, but it is the best free check on whether your market is as big as you think. If a database claims 30,000 companies in a niche and County Business Patterns shows a fraction of that many establishments in the relevant NAICS code, the database is padding.

For a longer list, including ATS hiring feeds, patent filings and app marketplaces, see our 11 free B2B data sources.

Where can you get technographic data for free?

The free technographic sources are the company's own public footprint plus free tiers of detection tools. Ranked by how much you can trust them:

1. Job postings. When a company asks for "3+ years in Salesforce" or "experience with dbt," the tool is in use. Public ATS feeds from Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby make this easy to collect at scale.
2. DNS records. MX records show the email provider; TXT and SPF records often reveal the marketing, support and security tools allowed to send email or verify the domain. Any dig command returns them for free.
3. Website source and scripts. Tracking pixels, chat widgets, tag managers and analytics libraries show up in the page. BuiltWith is "free to use for individual site lookups forever" [7]. Wappalyzer's free plan includes 50 lookups and email verifications per month plus its browser extension [8].
4. Integration and customer pages. Vendors list customers; companies list integrations. Both are stated technographics with a date and a URL.
5. Review sites and community posts. A G2 review or a Reddit thread where an employee complains about a tool is strong evidence the tool is in use and that there is pain.

Paid technographic tools exist for scale. As of October 2026, BuiltWith's plans run $295, $495 and $995 per month [7] and Wappalyzer's paid plans start at $250 per month [8]. If you need a few hundred accounts checked, the free tiers plus job posts usually cover it.

How accurate are firmographic and technographic data?

Both are less accurate than vendors imply, and the errors are predictable. Knowing the failure modes matters more than picking a vendor.

Firmographic pitfalls:

• Industry codes lag the business. SEC EDGAR lists Apple's SIC code as 3571, "Electronic Computers" [9]. SIC and NAICS codes describe what a company was registered as, not what it sells today.
• Headcount sources disagree. Payroll headcount, LinkedIn employee counts and database ranges measure different things. Pick one definition and use it everywhere.
• HQ is not where the buyers are. A company headquartered in Delaware for legal reasons may run sales from Dublin.
• Parent and subsidiary records get merged or split. Check whether you are scoring the parent, the subsidiary, or both twice.
• Everything decays. People change jobs and companies grow, shrink and get acquired. We cover the rate in why B2B data decays.

Technographic pitfalls:

• Leftover tags. A tracking script for a tool the company cancelled can stay on the site for years.
• Invisible back office. Website scanners see marketing and front-end tools well, and ERPs, internal data warehouses and security stacks poorly. Job posts fill that gap.
• Trials counted as adoption. One page with a widget on it is not a company-wide deployment.
• No dates. A technographic record without a "first seen" and "last seen" date cannot tell you whether a change happened.

The fix for all of these is the same: keep the source URL and the date next to every field. A record you can click through and check in ten seconds is worth more than a record from a bigger database you cannot check. This is the core trade-off in waterfall enrichment vs browser intelligence.

Should you buy firmographic and technographic data or build it?

Buy when you need tens of thousands of records refreshed on a schedule; build when you need hundreds of accounts researched in depth. People Data Labs, for example, offers a free company-data tier of up to 100 records a month and a Pro plan from $100 per month as of October 2026 [10]. That is enough for testing, not for a full TAM.

Our position: for a focused ICP of a few thousand accounts, a free-source build beats a generic database on accuracy, because you can verify every field. For broad territories across many industries, buy the base layer and verify the accounts you actually work.

Drevon fits the build side of that line. It reads company sites, job boards, LinkedIn, Crunchbase and other public pages in your own browser session and returns each firmographic or technographic finding with the source link, using the AI subscription you already have.

Frequently asked questions

What are examples of firmographic data?

Industry, employee count, revenue, headquarters location, legal structure, founding year, funding stage and public or private status are the most common firmographic fields.

What are examples of technographic data?

The company's CRM, marketing automation, cloud provider, data warehouse, payment processor, analytics, support desk and security tools, ideally with when each was first and last seen.

Is technographic data the same as intent data?

No. Technographic data shows what a company uses. Intent data suggests a company is researching a purchase. A change in technographics, such as a tool being removed, can act as an intent signal.

What is the best free source of firmographic data?

For US public companies, SEC EDGAR; for UK companies, Companies House. Both are free and come from legal filings. For private US companies, combine the company site, LinkedIn and Census counts.

How do I find out what CRM a company uses for free?

Check its job postings for CRM names, look up its site in BuiltWith or Wappalyzer's free tier, and check DNS TXT records for verification entries.

Want firmographics and technographics with a source link on every field? Download Drevon or book a demo to see it research your account list.

Sources

1. Wikipedia, "Firmographics", accessed 2026-10-10.
2. U.S. SEC, "EDGAR Application Programming Interfaces", accessed 2026-10-10.
3. Companies House, "Get started" (developer documentation), accessed 2026-10-10.
4. Companies House, "Rate limiting", accessed 2026-10-10.
5. Companies House, "Free Company Data Product", accessed 2026-10-10.
6. U.S. Census Bureau, "County Business Patterns", accessed 2026-10-10.
7. BuiltWith, "Plans", accessed 2026-10-10.
8. Wappalyzer, "Pricing", accessed 2026-10-10.
9. SEC EDGAR submissions API, "Apple Inc." (CIK 0000320193), accessed 2026-10-10.
10. People Data Labs, "Company data pricing", accessed 2026-10-10.
11. GOV.UK, "Search the Companies House register", accessed 2026-10-10.