2026-10-26, News · Fundamentals

Best adverse media screening tools for 2027: data and prices

Adverse media screening tools differ on three things: where the negative news comes from (curated risk profiles, live news classified by machine, or both), what comes bundled with it (sanctions, PEP and enforcement lists, entity matching, ongoing monitoring), and how you pay. Most enterprise vendors publish no price. This guide compares ten vendors and a build-your-own data layer for teams setting 2027 budgets; every fact is as of October 2026.

Facts about each vendor come from its own pages, linked and checked on 2026-10-26; “not published” means not found on those pages on that date. Coverage figures are each vendor’s own claims, measured in different units (sources, articles, profiles), so they do not compare directly. This article is not legal advice.

Comparison

Two terms used below:

• Curated profile: a record about a person or company built from news and other sources, with categories and identifiers, that a screen matches names against.
• Entity resolution: deciding whether an article or profile is about your customer or someone with the same name. It is where most false positives are won or lost.

What to decide first

1. Who reviews the hits? If analysts work in the vendor’s case manager, compare workflow. If hits flow into your own system, compare the API and the data.
2. Profiles or live news? Curated profiles give fewer, reviewed hits; live news catches events sooner and needs more triage. Ask each vendor how often its media data updates.
3. Which languages and countries? Match the vendor’s languages to your customer book, not to its headline count.
4. What is bundled? Sanctions and PEP lists usually come in the same contract. If you already license lists, you may only need the news layer.
5. How is price counted? Per monitored entity, per verification, or by contract. Ongoing monitoring of a book of 100,000 customers prices very differently on each.

The options

ComplyAdvantage

ComplyAdvantage’s pricing lists Starter Essentials and Starter Agentic from $99 a month for 100 monitored entities, and Enterprise on application. Essentials includes adverse media, sanctions, PEPs and RCAs, and ongoing monitoring, and the page says all functionality is available through the API. Its financial crime risk intelligence page describes AI/ML classification of live news into 34 financial crime categories mapped to EU and FATF predicate crimes.

It is the only enterprise-grade vendor here with a published entry price, and its screening also powers Sumsub’s AML checks.

Fits fintechs and smaller regulated firms that want lists and adverse media through one API at a known starting price.

LSEG World-Check One with Media Check

LSEG’s Media Check fact sheet describes screening against 13,000+ print and web sources in 24 languages, with AI/ML using a KYC/AML media taxonomy, deduplication and event clustering, and ongoing screening. Media Check is an optional add-on, available through the World-Check One API. Price is not published.

Fits banks already screening on World-Check that want adverse media in the same workflow.

Dow Jones Risk & Compliance

News Corp’s 2026 investor briefing, filed with the SEC on 2026-03-16, says Dow Jones Risk & Compliance covers 1M+ people with adverse media, 300K+ companies and 2M+ politicians and associates, researched by 375+ in-house experts in 54 languages across 240+ jurisdictions. Price is not published.

Fits institutions that want human-researched profiles on a large book of politically exposed and high-risk customers.

LexisNexis Bridger Insight XG

Bridger Insight XG lists news sources across 59 languages, 8m+ curated risk profiles, 180 sanctions lists, 1,700 enforcement lists and 3.4M+ PEP profiles, with automatic rescreening, in batch or by API. Price is not published.

Fits compliance teams that want lists, enforcement data and news in one screening product with batch rescreening.

Moody’s Grid

Grid lists 31M+ risk profiles, 13,500+ adverse media sources, 1,900+ monitored lists, 7M+ PEPs, 200+ countries and 50+ risk categories. Price is not published.

Fits teams that want curated risk profiles across many countries, often next to Moody’s company data.

Sanctions.io

Sanctions.io lists 75+ sanctions and watchlists from 30+ jurisdictions, 1M+ PEP records and adverse media from 60,000 news sources in 100+ countries, with lists updated every 60 minutes, an API and a free trial. Its site published no price on 2026-10-26.

Fits developers who want list screening first, with adverse media in the same API.

Castellum.AI

Castellum.AI’s adverse media product lists 200,000+ media sources, 220+ countries, 20 languages, 100+ adverse media categories, 250,000 records added daily, AI summaries and entity resolution. Its pricing page lists no prices.

Fits teams that want AI summaries of hits to cut reviewer reading time.

Ripjar

Ripjar’s adverse media screening works over 6 billion+ news articles, about 6 million new a day, with NLP in 22+ languages and entity recognition in 50; media profiles update twice a day. Price is not published.

Fits large institutions that want live news classified by machine at high volume.

Napier AI

Napier’s client screening screens against sanctions, PEPs and adverse media from partner data, with fuzzy matching in 20+ languages. Price is not published.

Fits firms that already run Napier for transaction monitoring and want screening in the same platform.

Sumsub

Sumsub’s pricing lists Basic at $1.35 per verification with a $149 minimum, without AML, and Compliance at $1.85 per verification with a $299 minimum, which includes AML screening and ongoing AML monitoring. A 14-day trial includes 50 checks. Its AML screening docs say screening is powered by ComplyAdvantage and runs through the API.

Fits onboarding flows where identity verification and AML screening are bought together, per customer.

AnswerLine as a news and search data layer

AnswerLine returns raw data: Google News and Google Search results for a query, as JSON. Sanctions and PEP lists, curated profiles, entity resolution, risk categories and case management are left to you; you build those or buy them from a vendor above.

What it returns: POST /v1/monitor/google/news gives newsResults[] with position, title, link, snippet, source and date, from Google News editions in 71 countries, chosen by country and hl. POST /v1/monitor/google gives organicResults[], which also surface court-reporting sites and regulator pages, and, with include.aioverview, Google’s AI Overview with its sources.

curl -X POST https://api.answerline.dev/v1/monitor/google/news \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "query": "\"Jane Example\" (fraud OR bribery OR indicted)", "country": "GB", "hl": "en" }'

A Google News request costs $0.0002 at the Starter tier ($0.14–$0.20 per 1,000 across tiers); extra pages are free. A Google Search request is $0.00103 on every tier. A new account gets 100 free requests, failed requests are not charged, and tiers are on /pricing. Batches take up to 500 tasks with idempotency keys and signed webhooks.

The query templates, delta screening and audit trail are in perpetual KYC and adverse media; the vendor-side version is third-party risk monitoring.

Fits compliance platforms adding their own open-web layer, and teams that license lists elsewhere and want news screening they control.

How to choose

1. Buy a screening product when analysts need matching, categories, lists and case management on day one. Build on data when screening is part of your own product.
2. Ask each vendor for a test on 50 of your own customers, including common names and non-English names. Count true hits, false positives and misses.
3. Ask how media data updates: Ripjar says twice a day for profiles, Sanctions.io says hourly for lists. Detection lag is that interval plus your screening cadence.
4. Ask what one monitored entity, one verification or one rescreen costs at your book size, in writing.
5. Check the API for ongoing monitoring: do alerts arrive by webhook, or do you poll?

Cost example

100 customers monitored, each screened weekly with two news queries (about 800 checks a month). List prices checked 2026-10-26, before taxes:

The data line is the smallest one; reviewer time and the parts you would build dominate the cost of a build-your-own screen.

Pitfalls

• Comparing coverage numbers across units. Sources, articles and profiles are different counts.
• Treating no hits as clean. A screen finds only what was published, indexed and matched; small companies and non-English names get less coverage.
• English-only screening for customers covered in other languages.
• Auto-dismissing on name mismatch. Transliterations and middle names break exact matching.
• Acting on a summary. Read the underlying article before a hit changes a rating.

See the adverse media screening use case and the Google News engine page to start.

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