French company data API: export the SIRENE register by activity, area and size

Every company in France has a SIREN number and an entry in the national register: activity code (NAF), head office address, headcount range, creation date, legal form and directors. The data is public, free and updated daily. Getting it out as a clean list is the hard part: the official search API answers one query at a time and stops at 10,000 results, the bulk files are large and raw, and none of them tells you a company’s website or how to reach it.

This guide compares the options honestly and shows where the French Companies Scraper fits. It is an unofficial tool that runs on Apify and reads the official open data. A French version of this page is at /fr/entreprises.

The options for French company data

• The official Recherche d’entreprises API (run by the French government’s digital agency). Free, no key, and the same data the public directory annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr shows. Ideal to look up a known SIREN or run a small search. Each search stops at 10,000 results, and you handle pagination, rate limits and the cleaning of codes yourself.
• The INSEE SIRENE API and bulk files. Authoritative and free, with an account for the API. The bulk files contain every company and establishment, but you download and process large files, then join them with other sources for directors or finances.
• Commercial company databases. Subscription services built on the same registers, with a polished interface, financial filings and exports. A good fit when you need their extras and use them every day.
• The French Companies Scraper on Apify. One input with filters (NAF codes or a keyword, departments, postal codes, regions, headcount, revenue, creation date, legal form, official labels), one clean record per company. When a search would pass the 10,000-result cap, it splits it by department, headcount and activity on its own, so you can export a whole sector. You pay per company, with no subscription.

Use the official API when you need one company or a small free query. Use the scraper when you need a list for sales, market mapping or supplier checks, in a spreadsheet or straight into your CRM.

By sector, with real counts from the register: plumbers and electricians, with the RGE label · restaurants · software companies.

What a record contains

SIREN, name, status, creation date and company age, legal form, company category (SME, mid-size, large), NAF code with its label, headcount range with numeric bounds, head office with SIRET, address, department, region and coordinates, the establishments that matched your area, latest revenue and net income when published (confidential accounts come back as null, not 0), the EU VAT number, official labels such as RGE, collective agreements, and links to the public directory. Directors are included when the register lists them.

Three options add what the register does not give:

• Website and contacts. The Actor looks for the company’s own website and keeps it as verified_siren only when the company’s SIREN is printed on the site, which French law requires on every business website. It then reads emails, phones and social links from the home, legal notice and contact pages.
• Insolvency check (BODACC). A company in liquidation still shows as active in SIRENE until it is struck off. The check adds safeguard, receivership, liquidation and court plans with dates and a link to the official notice, so you can drop them from a prospect list or keep only them for a risk watch.
• Company check (KYB). The VAT number is validated in VIES, the European Commission’s register, and a riskFlags list states plain facts: ceased, head office closed, under court proceedings, VAT number not valid, created less than six months ago, net loss, no accounts for three years.

A real example

From a run on 29 September 2026, one record, shortened. The register changes daily: these values are valid for that run only.

{
  "siren": "501542021",
  "name": "SYSTEMES SOLAIRES",
  "status": "active",
  "createdAt": "2007-12-07",
  "legalForm": { "code": "5599", "label": "SA à conseil d'administration (s.a.i.)" },
  "companyCategory": "PME",
  "nafCode": "43.22B",
  "nafLabel": "Travaux d’installation d’équipements thermiques et de climatisation",
  "employees": { "code": "12", "label": "20 à 49 salariés", "min": 20, "max": 49, "year": 2023 },
  "openEstablishmentsCount": 251,
  "headquarters": { "siret": "50154202100057", "city": "COURNON-D'AUVERGNE", "department": "63", "regionName": "Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes" },
  "latestFinances": { "year": 2024, "revenue": 36754436, "netIncome": 9196836 },
  "vatNumber": "FR02501542021",
  "labels": ["RGE"]
}

And what a few runs can tell you: on 2 November 2026, six runs on NAF code 10.71C (bakeries) found that about one bakery in ten in six large départements was created after 1 January 2025, from 7.7 % in Gironde to 11.7 % in Bouches-du-Rhône, most of them set up as an SAS. Each run took 21 to 70 seconds. More numbers like these are in the articles.

The input

Every plumbing company (NAF 43.22A) with 10 to 49 employees in Isère, with its website and contacts:

{
  "nafCodes": ["43.22A"],
  "departments": ["38"],
  "employeeRanges": ["11", "12"],
  "maxItems": 100,
  "findContacts": true
}

The example page has this input with a real output file. Schedule the same search weekly with a monitor name and you get only new companies and companies whose key data changed (status, directors, address, activity, headcount or legal form), with alerts on Telegram, Discord, Slack or a webhook.

Pricing

$4 per 1,000 companies, plus $25 per 1,000 companies only when a website and contacts are found, and $0.003 per run start. The insolvency and VAT checks cost nothing extra. There is no subscription: a list of 500 companies without contacts costs about $2.

FAQ

Is French company data legal to use? SIRENE and RNE data is public open data under the Licence Ouverte. Director names are personal data: use them in line with the GDPR, for example for B2B prospecting with a legitimate interest and an opt-out. Companies that asked not to be published are not returned.

Can I get more than 10,000 companies? Yes. When a search would pass the official cap, the Actor splits it by department, headcount and activity and merges the results.

How fresh is the data? The official API is updated daily from INSEE and INPI, and each run reads it live.

Can an AI agent call it? Yes. Add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=euroscrape/france-companies to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client, or call POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/euroscrape~france-companies/run-sync-get-dataset-items from your code.

Data source: API Recherche d’entreprises (DINUM), Licence Ouverte 2.0. Not affiliated with INSEE, INPI or any company database.

Need to check the VAT numbers of a supplier list? See bulk VAT number check against VIES.