OpenSanctions vs yente

OpenSanctions provides a structured database of sanctions, politically exposed persons, and other public-interest information assembled from hundreds of sources. It deduplicates entities across sources and models links such as ownership, family ties, political roles, and sanctions designations. The hosted API supports entity matching, full-text search, and full-record retrieval. Its /match endpoint returns ranked candidates for screening details such as names, birth dates, nationality, or tax identifiers. Users can download the full dataset; commercial license customers can run the matching API on their own infrastructure, keeping customer personally identifiable information in their environment. OpenSanctions says data points are traceable to source material and its data pipeline is open source. API access is listed at €0.10 per query, with a 30-day trial; commercial screening and reseller licenses are quoted. The company says it holds ISO 27001:2022 certification and operates under a 99.8% uptime SLA. It supplies data and matching technology, not an end-user compliance application with alert review, case management, and approval workflows. Its data collection is licensed as a complete collection rather than selected parts.

Yente is an open-source API for searching, retrieving, and matching people, companies, and other entities against watchlists. It uses OpenSanctions data by default and can work with company registries or custom watchlists. Operators can add datasets, choose which OpenSanctions data to index, and set scopes in a manifest; custom datasets must be line-based JSON feeds of FollowTheMoney entities. By default, Yente checks for updated OpenSanctions data hourly and reindexes when a new build is available. It can run on premises, keeping customer query data within the deployment context, and supports Elasticsearch and OpenSearch. The project provides Docker containers and example Docker Compose and Kubernetes configurations. Documentation estimates 800 MB of memory per Python service, plus 4–16 GB of memory and 10–30 GB of disk for the Elasticsearch index. Default matching limits are 100 entities per batch and 500 results per query. Yente is released under the MIT License. Commercial use of OpenSanctions data requires a data license subscription; non-commercial and exempt users may access the civic manifest. It provides health endpoints and supports OpenTelemetry metrics and traces. The project welcomes issue reports and contributions on GitHub.