Choosing a service
Free and paid tender alerts, honestly compared
Including the case for paying nothing at all, which is the right answer for more businesses than any vendor will tell you.
Where Tender Radar differs
A scored daily digest with a value ceiling as well as a floor, contract end dates and an AI connector, in one plan at £30 a month or £300 a year.
- 10
- services compared, the free portals included
- 8
- capabilities checked in public materials
- 5 of 8
- other services publish their prices
What paid services actually sell
Almost all of them do some combination of four things. It is worth knowing which you are paying for, because the prices vary by more than an order of magnitude for overlapping capability.
Where every notice starts, free to everyone
- Find a Tender
- Contracts Finder
- Public Contracts Scotland
- Sell2Wales
What you pay a service for
- Aggregation
- One search across portals that classify things differently and spell buyer names inconsistently.
- Filtering
- Turning several hundred notices a week into the handful you could win.
- Market intelligence
- Award history, incumbents, contract end dates, competitor activity.
- Bid support
- Templates, response libraries, or people who write with you.
No paid service has access to anything the portals do not publish, because there is no private feed to have access to.
At a glance: what each one does
Every service we compare, on what it costs to start and the eight things that separate them.
Swipe the table sideways to see all 9 services.
| Service | Tender RadarStart free trial | Official portals(free) | Supply2Gov | BidStats | Stotles | PSIP | Tussell | Tenders Direct | Tracker Intelligence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Published pricewhere plans start | £30/mo or £300/yr | Free | Free local tier; paid from £25/mo | Free tier; paid from £35 per user a month | Free tier; Basic from £75/mo | From £199/mo (£166 billed annually) | Not published | From £1,359/yr | Not published |
| Alerts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Below thresholdlower-value notices | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not found | Yes | Yes | Not found | Yes | Not found |
| Award history | Yes | Yes | Not found | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| End dateswhen contracts come up for renewal | Yes | Not found | Not found | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Value ceilinga maximum contract value, not just a minimum | Yes | Not found | Not found | Not found | Not found | Yes | Not found | Not found | Not found |
| AI scoring | Yes | Not found | Not found | Not found | Yes | Yes | Not found | Not found | Yes |
| Bid management | Soon | Not found | Not found | Not found | Yes | Yes | Not found | Yes | Not found |
| AI connectorClaude or ChatGPT can query it | Yes | Not found | Not found | Not found | Yes | Not found | Not found | Not found | Not found |
Yes means the provider publicly offers it. Not found means we could not find it in their public materials on 1 November 2026, which is not the same as it being absent. Soon is our bid management, which exists but is not yet launched publicly. If we have marked something wrongly, tell us and we will correct it.
AI connector means Claude or ChatGPT can query the service directly (an MCP connector), checked 5 October 2026: Stotles offers one to paid accounts; Tender Radar includes it in the free trial and the £30 subscription.
End dates are no longer the rare column
Several services now sell them, mostly on a higher tier, so the question is what you pay to see them rather than who has them.
A value ceiling still is
What almost nobody offers is a maximum contract value, so a small firm keeps being shown frameworks it cannot bid for.
Roughly what things cost
Only some providers publish prices. Those below are taken from public pricing pages, checked 1 November 2026 and re-checked on the 1st of every month. Providers change them, and several do not publish them at all: where a provider does not publish, it is listed as not published rather than guessed at.
- Official portalsPrice:FreeNotices and free alerts, no filtering or award intelligence
- Price:Free local tier; £25/mo or £270/yr single country; £80/mo or £499/yr UK; £95/mo or £899/yr UK and IrelandAlerting by area and keyword
- Tender RadarPrice:£30/mo or £300/yr; agencies £1,200/yr for 5 client accounts, £2,000 for 10Scored daily digest, renewal dates, market intelligence, a team tracker with re-tender alerts, and a route into bid management. Agency plans add one combined morning email across every client account
- Price:Free tier; Standard £35 per user a month or £350 a year; Pro £80 a month or £800 a year, three seats included; extra users £150 each plus VAT. Insights priced separatelyTender search with awarded contracts and an expiring-contract pipeline. History reaches back two years on Standard, five on Pro. Spend data, frameworks and decision-maker contacts are Insights only
- Price:Free tier; Basic from £75/mo; Growth from £475/mo; Expert on application. Bid Studio priced separately, from £990/moSales platform. Expiring-contract alerts start on the Basic tier
- Price:Essential £199/mo (£166 billed annually); Growth £599/mo (£499); Professional £1,199/mo (£992); Bid Agency and Enterprise on application. All exclude VATContract intelligence with buyer spend analysis and a contract expiry tracker on every plan. Competitor tracking and AI bid drafting start on Growth
- TussellPrice:Not published on the website; listed on G-Cloud at enterprise ratesMarket intelligence: tender alerts, renewals, spend and competitor data, aimed at medium and large suppliers
- Price:Basic £1,359/yr; Core £2,044/yr; Premium £2,319/yr, with a 7-day free trialAlerts with human-reviewed classification, expiry alerts up to 18 months ahead, and bid support
- Price:Not published: plans are quoted after a demo, with a 3-day free trialProcurement intelligence from the BiP Group: tender and smart alerts, award data, renewal and expiry reminders, frameworks, spend analysis and buyer contacts
- Price:Not published: packages are quoted per applicationContract search and alerts, including Northern Ireland
The spread is real. Tools aimed at enterprise sales teams cost multiples of tools aimed at a small firm that wants to know what to bid for on a Tuesday morning, and they are solving different problems.
Where we fit, and where we do not
We would rather you bought the right thing than bought ours.
Tender Radar is a good fit if
- You have no bid team and no time to triage notices.
- You want the contracts you could realistically win, which usually means a value ceiling as well as a floor.
- You care about contract end dates, because getting in before the re-tender is the only way to beat an incumbent.
- You want finding the work and bidding for it to sit in one place, rather than exporting a list into a spreadsheet and starting again.
- You want to see your market, your competitors and your team's pipeline together, without an enterprise contract or a sales call.
Something else is a better fit if
- Look at: an enterprise sales platformYou need a full sales platform with CRM integration and pipeline reporting across a large sales team. Tender Radar's tracker is built for a bid team, not a sales operation, and that is what the enterprise tools are for.
- Look at: a bid-writing serviceYou want a full outsourced bid-writing service, where somebody else owns the response and delivers it for you.
- Look at: the free portalsYou only sell to two or three buyers you already know. Free portal alerts will cover you.
- Look at: a specialistYou need deep coverage outside the UK. We include EU and US federal notices, but a specialist will do it better.
What Tender Radar adds beyond the table
Tender Radar also includes market intelligence on your buyers and competitors, a pipeline ordered by when you can act, a tracker your whole team shares with an alert when tracked work comes back out to tender, and short briefings on competitors and buyers with the facts printed beside them. All of it is in the same £30 plan. See how it works.
We have not added rows to the table for these. Marking other providers against them would need the same check of their public materials as the rest of the table, and we would rather leave a row out than guess about a named company.
Start with the free option, properly
Every UK public sector notice above the publication thresholds is free to search, on official government portals, with free email alerts.
- Contracts FinderEngland and UK-wide central government, including below-threshold work from £12,000.
- Find a TenderHigher-value UK notices.
- Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2WalesDown at source since June 2026For the devolved nations.
If you sell to two or three named buyers, or in one narrow category, saved searches on those portals will do the job. Set them up before you pay anyone anything.
How to test any of them, including us
Do not buy on a coverage claim. Run a two-week trial against the free portals and count.
- Step 1
Pick five contracts you would have wanted in the last year. Check the service would have shown you all five, early enough to bid.
- Step 2
Count what arrives in a fortnight. How many were genuinely relevant? How many did you have to read to find them?
- Step 3
Check the lead time. An alert three days before the deadline is not an alert.
- Step 4
Test one buyer you know well. If the award history is wrong or missing for a buyer you can verify, treat every other figure with the same suspicion.
A claim worth checking on any provider, ours included
Be sceptical of “complete coverage”, “all opportunities” or percentages above one hundred. No service sees a notice a buyer never published, and none of them can promise a buyer classified a contract the way you would have. Ask what is missing, not what is included.
The honest summary
The free portals contain the same notices as every paid service. What you pay for is having them filtered, enriched with award history, and delivered in a form you will actually read. If that saves you an hour a week, most of these tools pay for themselves. If it does not, the portals are free and you should use them.
You can see the award history we hold on our buyer and supplier pages without paying us anything, which is the best test of whether the data underneath is any good.
Common questions
Do I have to pay for tender alerts?
No. Every UK public sector notice is published free on the government portals: Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales. All of them offer free saved searches with email alerts. A paid service sells filtering, award history and a digest you will actually read, not access to notices nobody else can see.
What is the difference between Find a Tender and Contracts Finder?
Find a Tender is where new UK procurements under the Procurement Act 2023 are published: since 24 February 2025 that includes below-threshold work from £12,000 (central government) or £30,000 (other public bodies), not only the large contracts. Contracts Finder carries procurements for England and UK-wide central government begun under the old 2015 rules. Watching only one of them, or neither of Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales, still misses work.
How much do UK tender alert services cost?
Several services have a free tier, and published paid plans start from about £25 a month, rising to several thousand pounds a year for market intelligence platforms. Most providers in this market do not publish a price at all and quote after a sales call, so a like-for-like comparison is only possible for the ones that do.
How do I judge whether a tender alert service is any good?
Give it a real profile rather than a generic one, then read a fortnight of digests and count how many opportunities you would genuinely have bid for. A service that sends fifty notices a day has not filtered anything, and one that sends nothing has filtered too hard. Ask to see the award history behind the alerts before paying.
Is there a free way to search all four UK tender portals at once?
Yes. Tender Radar's tender finder searches the open tenders from Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, Public Contracts Scotland and Sell2Wales together, free and with no sign-up, sorted by closing date with a link to each official notice. The paid digest adds scoring against your profile, renewals and incumbents.
Do I still need to register on the buyer's own system?
Usually, yes. Alert services and the national portals tell you a tender exists, but most buyers run the bidding on their own e-tendering system, such as Proactis, In-Tend, Jaggaer or Atamis, and you register there to download the documents and submit. Tenders under the Procurement Act 2023 also ask for your supplier information from Find a Tender.