Swiss Company Data Sources Compared: Zefix vs Moneyhouse vs SHAB vs Prospex

2026-08-09

If you sell B2B in Switzerland and want to know which companies are growing, hiring, or raising capital, you have four main sources to choose from. Each one covers a different slice of the picture. None of them covers everything.

This page compares them honestly. Two are government registers, one is a commercial database, and one is Prospex. We will say what each does well and where each falls short, including ourselves.

Zefix: the federal register index

Zefix is run by the Federal Office of Justice. It is the central search interface for every company registered in any Swiss canton. You search by name or UID, and you get the legal name, legal form, registered office, date of incorporation, and a link to the cantonal register extract.

What Zefix does well

Authoritative. Zefix is the register. If a company exists in Swiss law, it is here. No commercial database can match this for completeness of registered entities.
Free. No subscription, no paywall, no login.
Fast. Updates within one business day of the cantonal register entry.
Stable. Every company has a permanent UID (CHE-xxx.xxx.xxx) that works across every government system.

What Zefix does not do

No monitoring. You cannot set up an alert for "tell me when a company in Vaud raises capital." You have to search one company at a time.
No industry data. The purpose clause is a paragraph of legal text, not a searchable sector code. Zefix does not classify companies by industry, size, or revenue.
No events over time. You see the current state of a company. To see what changed and when, you need to read the SHAB publications or the cantonal register history.

Zefix is the right tool when you already know which company you are looking at and you need official register data. It is not a prospecting tool.

SHAB / FOSC: the official gazette

The SHAB (Schweizerisches Handelsamtsblatt, known as FOSC in French) publishes every legal notice that a cantonal commercial register produces. Capital increases, new incorporations, board changes, liquidations, bankruptcy proceedings. It is published online each business day.

What SHAB does well

Real-time events. This is the only source where commercial register changes appear the day they are processed. There is no faster public record.
Legally definitive. SHAB publications have legal force. The dates are official.
Complete. Every mutation across all 26 cantons, every business day.
Free and open. The archive is searchable, and individual notices have permanent URLs.

What SHAB does not do

No filtering for sales. You get every notice in every canton. A dental practice in Appenzell changing its address appears alongside a Zurich tech company raising CHF 2 million. Separating the two is your problem.
No enrichment. The notice tells you the legal fact. It does not tell you the company's sector, its size, whether it is hiring, or what its website says. You cross-reference manually.
Dense legal text. The notices are written for lawyers, not for salespeople. Reading them takes practice.
No alerts by criteria. You can subscribe to a single company's feed. You cannot subscribe to "all capital increases in Geneva above CHF 100,000."

SHAB is the raw signal. If you are willing to read it every morning and filter it yourself, you have the same data any commercial tool has, plus legal standing. Most salespeople try it for a week and stop.

Moneyhouse: the commercial database

Moneyhouse is the largest Swiss commercial company database. It aggregates data from the commercial register, the debt enforcement offices, and published financial filings. It adds credit scores, management network graphs, and monitoring alerts.

What Moneyhouse does well

Company profiles. Rich pages with register data, financials (where filed), management, board interlocks, and related companies. The best single-company research tool available in Switzerland.
Financial data. For companies that are required to publish accounts (listed companies and larger entities), Moneyhouse has balance sheets, profit and loss, and key ratios. No other freely accessible Swiss source matches this.
Credit and risk. Creditworthiness ratings, debt enforcement records, and a payment index. Useful for credit departments and for qualifying whether a prospect can pay.
Monitoring. Set alerts on companies and get notified when their register entry changes or a new financial filing appears.

What Moneyhouse does not do

No buying signals. Moneyhouse tells you the state of a company. It does not tell you that something changed this week that makes the company worth calling. A register mutation triggers an alert, but you still have to interpret it.
No job market data. It does not track hiring, job postings, or headcount changes.
No website monitoring. It does not tell you when a company launched a new product page or rewrote its "about us."
SME financials are thin. Swiss law does not require small and medium companies (the majority of the market) to publish detailed accounts. For most SMEs, Moneyhouse has the register data and not much else.
Pricing. The useful features are behind paid tiers. Individual subscriptions start around CHF 10-20/month; business packages are priced on request and can run into the thousands.

Moneyhouse is the right tool for researching a company you already know about: checking its financial health, understanding its ownership structure, or looking up who runs it. It is a research tool, not a discovery tool.

Prospex: the signal feed

Prospex monitors Swiss public sources daily and delivers what changed as a filtered feed of sales signals. Register mutations from SHAB and Zefix, job postings from Swiss job boards, website changes from company sites, trademarks from Swissreg, and startup news from the press.

What Prospex does well

Events, not profiles. Prospex tells you what happened this week: which companies raised capital, hired a new commercial lead, registered a trademark, or rewrote their website. Each event is dated and linked to its source.
Multiple sources in one feed. A capital increase from SHAB appears next to a job posting from jobs.ch and a website change, all for the same company. The combination is often more telling than any single signal.
Filtering. By canton, by sector, by signal type, by company audience. You see the events that match your territory and customer profile.
Price. CHF 9 for the first month, CHF 99/month after. One seat, no per-query charges.

What Prospex does not do

No contact data. Prospex tells you which company to call. It does not tell you who to call or give you their email address. You look that up on LinkedIn or in your CRM.
No financials. No balance sheets, no revenue figures, no credit scores. Moneyhouse is better for that.
No historical profiles. Prospex shows what changed recently, not what a company looked like five years ago. For historical register data, use Zefix and the cantonal registers.
No international coverage. Switzerland only.
Signal classification is automated. It uses language models to categorise and summarise signals. The output is checked, but it is not hand-written. Errors happen. Every signal links to its source so you can verify.

Side by side

	Zefix	SHAB	Moneyhouse	Prospex
Primary use	Look up a company	Read legal notices	Research a company	Discover who to call
Data type	Current register state	Register events	Register + financials	Multi-source events
Update speed	~1 business day	Same day	Days to weeks	Daily
Monitoring	None	Per-company RSS	Per-company alerts	Filtered daily feed
Industry filter	No	No	Limited	Yes
Contact data	Signatories only	Signatories only	Management names	No
Financials	No	No	Where published	No
Cost	Free	Free	Free to CHF 1,000+/yr	CHF 99/month
Best for	Verification	Legal research	Due diligence	Daily prospecting

Which ones do you actually need?

They are not substitutes. They answer different questions.

If you need to verify a company's legal status, use Zefix. It is authoritative and free.

If you need financial data or a credit check, use Moneyhouse. Nothing else in Switzerland matches it for company financials.

If you need to read the original legal notice, go to shab.ch. The primary source is always the most reliable.

If you need to know which companies did something this week that makes them worth calling, that is what Prospex does. It watches the sources above (and several others) so you get the signal without the daily reading.

In practice, most B2B salespeople in Switzerland use a combination. Prospex for discovery, LinkedIn for the person to call, Zefix or Moneyhouse for verification when the deal gets serious. Each source earns its place by doing one thing well.