Search for software to help you buy a business and you get a list of products with no organising principle — a marketplace, a data platform for private equity, and a CRM, all presented as alternatives to each other. They aren't. They do different jobs, at different stages, for buyers of different sizes.
This is what each category actually does, what the companies themselves say they cost, and — because we aggregate these sources and can measure them — what the listings on them actually contain.
Everything below about another company is taken from that company's own website, read on 7 September 2026. Where a company doesn't publish a price, this says so rather than guessing.
First, what's actually in a listing
This is the part no vendor page will tell you, and it decides which tools are worth paying for.
We continuously scrape eleven sources. As of 7 September 2026 that is 18,384 active listings, first seen between 9 June and 7 September 2026. Here is how often each source publishes a cash-flow or SDE figure alongside the asking price:
| Source | Active listings | Publishes earnings |
|---|---|---|
| Flippa | 11,321 | 52% |
| BizBuySell | 4,102 | 51% |
| Broker sites (aggregated) | 1,440 | 67% |
| BusinessesForSale | 884 | 63% |
| Empire Flippers | 298 | 91% |
| QuietLight | 140 | 94% |
| BizQuest | 77 | 5% |
| WebsiteClosers | 69 | 99% |
| LoopNet | 11 | 73% |
| All sources | 18,384 | 54% |
Two things fall out of this.
Nearly half of all listings price a business without disclosing what it earns. On those, the asking price is the only number you have, and a price without earnings is not a valuation — it's a hope. You cannot screen on multiple, because there is no multiple.
Curation is the variable that matters, not size. WebsiteClosers has 69 listings and publishes earnings on 68 of them. BizQuest has 77 and publishes earnings on four. A marketplace with a hundred thousand listings and no disclosure requirement is a worse starting point than a curated one with two hundred.
Category 1 — Marketplaces: where listings originate
These are the primary sources. A business is listed here first, and everything else in this article is downstream of them.
Flippa describes itself as "the world's #1 platform for online business transactions," covering websites, apps, domains, SaaS, ecommerce and other digital assets. It reports 1.9M+ buyers globally and offers valuation tools, deal rooms and escrow. It does not state buyer pricing on its homepage. It is by far the largest source in our corpus, and about half its listings carry an earnings figure.
BizBuySell is the largest general US marketplace for main-street businesses and the biggest brick-and-mortar source we track (4,102 active listings, 51% with earnings). Its site blocks automated reading, so unlike every other entry here we can't quote its own description of itself — the figures above are our measurements, not its claims.
Empire Flippers is a curated marketplace for online businesses, reporting $600M+ sold and 182 current listings, with "done for you migrations" handling the technical transfer after purchase. It does not state buyer-side fees. Its listings are among the most complete we see.
Acquire.com calls itself "the largest marketplace to buy and sell profitable online businesses" — SaaS, ecommerce, agencies, content, newsletters, apps — and claims 500k+ entrepreneurs. Sellers list free and escrow is free; buyer plans exist but are not priced on the landing page.
Investors Club is a curated marketplace for profitable online businesses that charges neither side: "0% success fee. Free to buy and sell. No hidden costs." Each listing comes with a due-diligence report covering financials and traffic.
Category 2 — Aggregators: one feed across many sources
Listings are scattered across marketplaces and hundreds of individual broker sites. These tools pull them into one searchable feed with alerts.
Kumo aggregates "100,000+ listings from brokers and marketplaces — powered by AI, data, and analytics," with saved searches, deal alerts and AI listing summaries. It names search funds, private equity, holding companies, family offices, corporate M&A and independent sponsors as its users. There's a free tier; prices are not shown on the landing page.
Searcher OS aggregates 350+ broker websites and adds a pipeline CRM, an SBA loan calculator with DSCR modelling, broker relationship tracking, and AI that "extracts key metrics from every CIM." It targets acquisitions in the $800K–$8M range. Pricing is public and unusually clear: free, $79/mo, or $149/mo.
Acquire Scout — us — aggregates the eleven sources in the table above, matches them against a buyer profile, and then recomputes SDE from the seller's uploaded P&L and tax returns. Free ($0), Standard ($39/mo), Premium ($99/mo) — current prices are always on our pricing page.
Category 3 — Off-market: owners who never listed
The best-known businesses for sale are the most competed-for. These tools go after owners who haven't listed at all.
Grata is a private-markets intelligence platform with AI search across 22M+ private companies, 800K+ historical transactions, 8M+ verified executive contacts, CRM integrations, and "seller intent signals" it says identify companies likely to transact 6–12 months ahead. It is aimed at private equity, investment banking, corporate development and private credit. No public pricing.
Axial connects buyers to deal flow from boutique investment banks, M&A advisors and brokers in the lower middle market — over 10,000 deals a year — with digital NDAs, messaging and CRM-style pipeline tracking. It charges buy-side members a success fee on close rather than a subscription.
Rejigg sits between the two categories: it sources businesses directly from owners and vets buyers, explicitly "not a broker or listing board," typically $500K–$10M in revenue. It is free for owners; buyers pay a monthly subscription plus a success fee at close, neither of which it publishes.
Category 4 — Diligence: checking whether it's real
DueDilio is a marketplace of vetted M&A service providers — due diligence, legal review, valuations, post-acquisition support. You post a project and receive proposals. Browsing is free; $149 one-time buys unlimited project posting with no per-project fee.
This is the category buyers reach for last and need most. Which brings us back to the table at the top: on 46% of listings there is no earnings figure to check, and on the rest the figure is the seller's own.
How to choose
Decide digital or physical first
It eliminates most of the list immediately. Flippa, Acquire.com, Empire Flippers, Investors Club and WebsiteClosers are digital. BizBuySell and the broker sites are where main-street businesses live.
Check the eligibility bar before the feature list
Axial's $5M / accredited / FINRA requirement rules it out for most individual buyers, and no amount of feature comparison changes that.
Buy breadth only if breadth is your bottleneck
If you are not short of listings to look at, a bigger feed does not help. Most buyers are short of verified listings, which is a different problem and a different tool.
Assume you will pay for diligence separately
None of the sourcing tools, ours included, is a substitute for an accountant on the deal you actually go after.
Where we fit, plainly
Acquire Scout is in category 2 with a category 4 habit. We aggregate less than the biggest aggregators do, and we don't do off-market sourcing at all — if you want proprietary deal flow, Grata and Axial are built for it and we are not.
What we do that this list otherwise doesn't: take the seller's P&L and tax returns and recompute SDE from them, so you can see the gap between what the listing claims and what the documents support. Given that only 54% of listings publish an earnings figure and every one of those is the seller's own arithmetic, that gap is where the money is.
You can run the free analyzer on a deal without an account.