Stonewake vs Sayari
Stonewake vs Sayari is a comparison between two different tool classes. Sayari is a risk intelligence platform built around corporate ownership data and sanctions exposure at global scale. Stonewake is a newer monitoring platform purpose-built for bank export finance, project finance and commercial real estate desks. Most institutions that shortlist both discover they are buying for two different jobs, and the honest answer is that the products can sit side by side rather than replace each other.
What Sayari does
Sayari describes its platform as risk intelligence grounded in commercial data. Its public site states coverage of more than 1.5 billion resolved entities across more than 250 jurisdictions, built up over eleven years of commercial intelligence work. The Graph product is presented as handling the full arc of complex investigations, from initial entity lookup to documented, source-linked evidence packages ready for legal review.
The published capability claims are substantial. Sayari Graph states more than 500 million resolved companies, more than 12 billion primary-source records and more than 1.8 billion trade records, with sanctions-related data updated within four hours of every sanctions list change. Automated traversals are described as surfacing beneficial owners and subsidiaries even when corporate structures span many shell companies across multiple jurisdictions, and every connection is source-linked so that compliance teams can assemble evidence packages with primary source citations.
The stated audiences are compliance teams screening for regulatory exposure across borders, government analysts, and procurement and legal teams, across verticals that include financial services, energy, manufacturing and aerospace.
What Stonewake does
Stonewake positions itself for a neighbouring but distinct job: it finds the deals, screens the counterparties and monitors the risk for bank EF, PF and CRE desks. Stonewake Monitoring publishes short verified briefs built from public filings and registers, recording corporate and market events across export finance, project finance and commercial real estate. Each stated fact in a brief must trace to a cited source record, and a brief that fails that verification pass is held back from publication.
The country layer covers 245 countries, with pages that state which export credit agency covers a market, whether the company register and beneficial ownership register are open, and where a country stands on sanctions programmes and the FATF and EU AML lists. Every datum names its source. Subjects are organisations, markets and jurisdictions; Stonewake does not publish personal data.
Stonewake is the newcomer in this pairing and says so plainly. Its scope is deliberately narrow: public-record intelligence for bank desks, not a general-purpose risk graph.
Stonewake vs Sayari as a category decision
The clean split in a Stonewake vs Sayari evaluation is ownership investigation against desk monitoring. Sayari's centre of gravity is the entity graph: who owns whom, what a UBO chain looks like across borders, and whether sanctions exposure attaches through ownership. Stonewake's centre of gravity is the desk file: what has happened to a counterparty or market according to public filings, and what the country context is for a financing decision.
There is a genuine overlap at the screening layer, since both products speak to counterparty risk from public records. The overlap is thinner than it first appears. Sanctions screening against official lists remains a regulated bank control that neither vendor's marketing replaces, and ownership questions answered from registers such as the UK PSC register still end in a bank's own due diligence process. Tools inform that process; the bank owns the decision.
When Sayari is the better choice
Sayari is the better choice when the primary need is ownership and sanctions risk investigation. Teams whose backlog is dominated by multi-hop beneficial ownership questions, sanctions exposure through corporate structures, or trade-network analysis will find that Sayari's published capabilities target exactly that work: automated ownership traversal, rapid updates after sanctions list changes, and source-linked evidence packages for legal and compliance review.
Sayari also fits buyers well beyond bank credit desks, including government and supply-chain teams, and its jurisdictional and entity coverage figures are published at a scale Stonewake does not claim. An institution buying a system of record for ownership investigation should evaluate Sayari and its direct peers on that ground.
When Stonewake is the better choice
Stonewake is the better choice when the job is ongoing monitoring for bank EF, PF and CRE desks: verified event briefs from public filings and registers, country intelligence with cited sources for 245 jurisdictions, and adverse media screening of organisations rather than persons. Desks that need a public-record briefing layer attached to origination and credit work, rather than an investigation graph, are in Stonewake's lane.
The two products can also coexist in one stack, with Sayari answering ownership and exposure questions and Stonewake supplying the desk-facing monitoring layer. Neither vendor publishes a claim that it replaces the other's category.
Pricing and procurement
Neither company publishes pricing on its public site. Sayari's site offers demo requests rather than rates, and Stonewake is sold through direct contact. Procurement teams should therefore compare the two on category fit and evidence standards rather than on list price, and should expect quotes arranged per institution in both cases.
The practical evaluation questions are factual ones. For Sayari: whether the ownership graph covers the jurisdictions in the bank's book at the depth the compliance team needs. For Stonewake: whether the verified briefs and country pages cover the markets and counterparties the desk actually monitors. Both vendors publish enough on their public sites to start that assessment before a demo.
Vendor figures in this page are as published on the vendors' own sites, accessed 11 August 2026.