Carlytics vs carVertical vs autoDNA: an Honest Founder Comparison

TL;DR: I run Carlytics. carVertical and autoDNA are the two competitors I respect most in Europe. This is the honest read on where each one wins. Short version: carVertical has the deepest brand and pays for the most data-licensing deals; autoDNA owns the German-to-Poland import lane; Carlytics is the cheapest at EUR 8.90 and the most transparent about what we don't have. Pick by use case, not by ad spend.

I'm going to violate a rule of marketing here, which is that you don't write a head-to-head when you're the smallest player. I'm writing this because the buyer who reaches this page is going to compare us anyway. They might as well read the comparison from someone who has spent two years staring at the gaps in our own data.

The point of this post is to be the post I wish I'd been able to read when I started Carlytics — the one that names the real trade-offs.

What we're comparing

The pricing differences alone don't tell the whole story. Below I'll go scam by scam through where each service wins.

Where carVertical wins

Brand and trust signal. If your buyer needs to be convinced you've done the work, a carVertical report carries weight in a way that ours doesn't yet. They have years of YouTube placement, sponsored dealer integrations, and Trustpilot reviews that compound. If you're a dealer reselling to a worried buyer, carVertical's logo on the printout is itself part of what you're selling.

Data partnerships. Their reports include some data we don't have — particularly in the Baltic states and in certain damage-claim databases. They pay for licensing deals that we can't match at our price point. If you're buying a higher-value car (above ~EUR 15,000) and the EUR 25 marginal cost is small relative to the asset, carVertical's deeper damage history is worth it.

Photos in reports. Where prior listings exist in their crawl, they surface them. This is genuinely useful — you can see what the car was advertised as in another country before it landed in front of you.

Where they're weaker: the gap between the free decode and the paid report is sometimes opaque. You don't fully know what you're getting until you've paid. Their refund process is slow when the report turns out to have less data than advertised for a specific VIN. And their pricing creeps — EUR 14.99 at the entry tier becomes EUR 34.99 by the time you've added the modules that contain the data most buyers actually want.

Where autoDNA wins

The German-to-Poland import lane. autoDNA is Polish, built originally around the highest-volume cross-border used-car flow in Europe. If you're a Polish buyer looking at a German listing, their reports have years of accumulated odometer and damage records from exactly that lane, and the Polish-language UX is native rather than translated.

Workshop-grade integrations. autoDNA has tight relationships with specific data sources in Central Europe — Polish insurance damage reports, certain dealer networks. For a Polish buyer importing from Germany, this is the deepest stack in the market.

Where they're weaker: outside Poland and Germany the data gets thinner fast. Italian or Spanish VINs return less than the German equivalents. Pricing is similar to carVertical — around EUR 25 — but with fewer modular add-ons.

Where Carlytics wins

Price. EUR 8.90 versus EUR 25–35. The math matters because the use case is "I'm looking at one car, maybe two." At their price, buyers check one VIN and skip the second-opinion. At our price, buyers check three.

The free decode is genuinely free and complete. We don't paywall the spec decode at 60%. The free check gives you the make, model, year, engine, transmission, body, drive type, country of manufacture, and any open safety recalls we have on file. That's enough to walk away from most scams without paying anyone.

Transparency. This is the one I care about most. We publish what our decode pipeline can and can't do. We tell you when we couldn't determine the year. We render a section as "data not available" instead of fabricating a plausible-looking value. carVertical and autoDNA both ship some sections that look populated even when the underlying data is thin. Our feedback policy on null data is that we'd rather show you a gap than a guess.

Pan-European parity. We don't have the depth carVertical has in the Baltics or the lane-specific knowledge autoDNA has for DE→PL. But we have roughly the same depth across all 27 EU countries plus the UK, Norway, and Switzerland, which means we're useful for the buyer in Greece looking at a Romanian car as much as the buyer in Poland looking at a German car.

Where we're weaker: our brand. Most buyers haven't heard of us. The trust signal you get from a carVertical report at resale isn't there with ours yet. And on damage history specifically, we have less than they do — we don't pay for the same insurance-claim feeds. We're closing the gap, but in May 2026, if you're buying a EUR 30,000 car and the EUR 16 saving is irrelevant, carVertical's damage data is the right call.

When you should use a competitor

I want to make this concrete because the most common mistake buyers make is using one tool and assuming the answer is final.

Use carVertical when: the car is high-value (above ~EUR 15,000), you specifically need damage-claim history depth, or the report is for resale/dealer use where their brand carries weight.

Use autoDNA when: you're a Polish buyer looking at a German listing and the absolute best data depth on that specific lane matters more than the EUR 16 saving.

Use Carlytics when: you're checking multiple cars, you want the free decode for triage, you want a transparent answer about what we did and didn't find, or you're buying in a market outside the DE↔PL lane (UK, IT, ES, NL, BE, GR, RO, BG, CZ, SK, HU, FR all have similar depth to our DE coverage).

Use all three when: the car is over EUR 25,000 and you'd be heartbroken to lose it. Run our free check first. If anything looks suspicious, escalate to a paid report — and at that point, paying for both ours and carVertical's is EUR 35 against an asset worth a thousand times more. Two perspectives on the same VIN catch what one perspective misses.

What the rankings don't capture

The thing none of the three of us shows well in a feature-table comparison is the experience of a buyer who runs into a refund case. carVertical's refund flow is slow. autoDNA's is faster but mostly handled in Polish. Ours is human-handled and we issue refunds when our decode was wrong, no questions asked — but our volume is lower, so the absolute number of cases is also lower, and the comparison isn't fair until we're at the same scale.

What I'll say is: when our decoder is wrong, the email reply comes from a human (sometimes me) within a day, and we re-run the VIN through the pipeline by hand. That's possible because we're smaller. It will stop being possible when we scale. I'm telling you about it now because it's a real advantage today and I want you to take it before it disappears.

What we're working on

To pre-empt the obvious follow-up — yes, we know where the gaps are. The Baltic data gap is closing as we ingest Estonian and Latvian registry data. Damage-history depth is the longest-running gap and the hardest to close because the underlying data is locked behind insurance-industry deals that take years. Pan-European coverage of finance/lien flags is in flight for 2026.

I'd rather tell you that now than have you find out by running our report and being disappointed.

The honest recommendation

If you came to this page because you're about to buy a car: run our free check first. It costs nothing. If the spec matches and there are no recall flags, the full report at EUR 8.90 closes the rest of the question. If you're at a price point where EUR 25 versus EUR 9 doesn't matter, run both ours and a competitor's. Two independent answers about a five-figure purchase is cheap insurance.

If you came to this page because you're researching the market: the three of us are not interchangeable. We're occupying different positions deliberately. The buyer is best served by understanding the trade-offs and picking on use case.

Related reading: Free VIN check vs paid vehicle history report · When a VIN check does not help · What a VIN actually tells you