The short verdict
Choose ImportGenius if you want a self-serve trade data platform with published pricing and your work is mostly US import and export records: supplier vetting, competitor monitoring, journalism. Choose Panjiva if you need global supply chain mapping with serious entity resolution, your organisation already lives in the S&P ecosystem, and an enterprise quote is acceptable.
Both draw on the same core public record — US customs filings at bill of lading level — so for US-only questions the raw trade data overlaps heavily. Either way you are buying trade intelligence packaging on top of a public record: workflow, limits, analytics and integrations.
Pricing: published vs quote-based
ImportGenius publishes its prices. As of October 2026: USA Essentials Flex at $229/month (last 12 months of US imports, 25 searches/day, 1,000 export rows/month), USA Pro Flex at $449/month (full history back to 2006, 50 searches/day), and Global Enterprise from $1,999/month for 21+ countries. Annual plans run roughly 20% cheaper.
Panjiva does not publish pricing at all. Every engagement starts with a demo and ends in a negotiated annual contract through S&P Global. Buyers routinely report enterprise-level figures. If procurement predictability matters, that difference alone can decide the question.
Coverage and data sources
Both platforms index US bill of lading filings from Customs and Border Protection, which cover waterborne imports — not air, truck or rail, and not companies that file confidentiality requests. New US records typically surface on both platforms within weeks of a vessel's arrival. Beyond the US, ImportGenius licenses customs data from 21+ countries on its enterprise tier; Panjiva holds government customs datasets from roughly 20 countries with stronger harmonisation across them.
Neither trade data platform is strong on every lane. Russian and Kazakhstani import declarations, for example, sit outside both vendors' core sets — a reminder to verify your specific trade flows during any trial, whatever the total country count says. Journalists, compliance teams and government agencies use both; the choice there is usually procurement, not data.
Features and daily workflow
ImportGenius feels like a research tool: fast search over shipment records, saved searches with email alerts, CSV and Excel exports, HS code search, and an AI company profiler that summarises a counterparty's trading history. The self-serve caps (searches per day, export rows per month) are the main friction at daily-use intensity.
Panjiva feels like an intelligence product: dashboards and data visualization that turn global trade flows into actionable insights, and company networks you can traverse to identify the manufacturers, exporters and importers behind a brand. For a sales team that just needs lead lists, that can be more machine than needed; for market intelligence and compliance teams it is the point.
Entity resolution is the real dividing line
Raw customs data is messy: the same importer appears as a dozen spellings, abbreviations and subsidiaries across customs filings. Panjiva's machine learning entity resolution — company matching and corporate hierarchies, strengthened by S&P's reference data — is the best in the category, and it is the honest reason enterprises pay the premium. ImportGenius has narrowed the gap with its AI company profiler, but at scale — thousands of counterparties — the difference in data quality shows.
When neither fits
If your business runs trade lanes through Russia or Kazakhstan, if you want declaration-level detail (HS code, weight, declared value, consignee) rather than US-centric bills of lading, or if you simply refuse demo-gated pricing, look sideways: Stsx offers free unlimited aggregate search and a flat $1,990/year Pro over RF & KZ import declarations with importers, exporters and counterparties from 120+ countries. For casual free US supplier lookups, ImportYeti remains the easy answer. A broader shortlist lives in our ImportGenius alternatives and Panjiva alternatives guides.