Top company formation services compared

About Top company formation services compared

Company formation is where a new business first commits money to a legal entity, so this ranking puts entry price and renewal price in front of everything else. It covers 159 brands and asks each one the same questions: what a package costs when a founder signs up, what that package costs when it renews, and what the fee covers, including the state fee. The main trade-off is rarely speed. It sits between a low opening price that quietly leaves the government charge outside the package and one that bundles it, and between a service that forms companies in a single market and one that covers a long list of them. Package prices in this category run €0 to €1,495, and the median package price among the brands scored is €78.49. Support and audience matter just as much: some brands answer by email alone, others run a phone line, a chat and a help centre. Every entry below says where a brand can file and what its fee includes, so a reader can add up the real first year cost before choosing.

How we picked

Our scores rest on three signals: cost at 40%, offer at 40%, and trust at 20%. Cost and offer carry the same weight, so a cheap entry price cannot rescue a thin package and a rich package cannot excuse an expensive start. Trust is what separates services that look alike on price once the ranking gets close. Each signal is built from the fields this category turns on: package entry price, whether the state fee sits inside the package, the model offered, the support channels listed, and the audience served. The median package price among the brands scored here is €78.49, and the state fee is left outside the package by 62.2% of them, which is why that line carries so much weight. Sources are the published pricing, coverage and support pages of each provider, alongside site data on prices, models and support channels. Partners are listed first, and the brands after them follow in score order. Nothing gets blended: an entry price stays an entry price, a renewal price stays a renewal price, and where a package bundles a fee, the entry says so.

What to look for

The opening fee

Package fees are the first thing a founder compares, and the median here is €78.49. The lower quartile sits at €4.34 and the upper quartile at €304.29, so anything far outside that band is either a stripped entry tier or a fuller package. Read the entry fee as the start of a bill, not the bill itself.

State fee inside or outside

A formation price means little until you know whether the government charge is inside it. Here 37.8% of the brands include the state fee and 62.2% leave it out, so a headline package price is rarely the whole figure. This is the clearest way to separate two quotes that look almost identical on the surface.

Free plan or free trial

Two shapes of low cost entry appear on the list: a free plan that stays free and a free trial that ends. Free plans appear on 70.4% and free trials on 33.3%, with the median free trial running 30. A free plan tells you what entry will cost for good, while a trial only tells you how long you can look before paying.

Support after you pay

A phone line matters most when a filing is refused, and 72.7% of the brands offer one. Help centres appear on 40.9%, email on 64.5% and chat on 30%. Read the list as a routing decision, since a service answering by email alone suits a straightforward filing and not much else.

Who the service is built for

Small businesses dominate the category, appearing on 95.9% of the brands here, with beginners on 52.6% and enterprise on 15.5%. A brand serving both is usually the safer choice for a first entity, because the guidance is written for someone doing this for the first time rather than for a finance team.

Frequently asked questions

Top company formation services compared by country

• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• China
• France
• Germany
• India
• Ireland
• Italy
• Japan
• Mexico
• South Korea
• Spain
• United Kingdom
• United States

The data behind this ranking

All data and the CSV