Thomson Reuters CLEAR is investigation software, and Thomson Reuters says so in one sentence on its own product page: “Prevent fraud, detect risk, and investigate crime with powerful online investigation software.” Every sensible comparison starts there. If the job you brought is one of those three, the alternatives are the other credentialed investigation platforms. If the job is filling a dialer with homeowners, CLEAR was never a candidate and neither are its competitors — you are shopping in the wrong category, which is a much cheaper mistake to find out now.
Disclosure: Scout Data is our product and we sell homeowner phone files to call centers. CLEAR sells investigative access to institutions, so we are adjacent rather than head to head. Treat that entry as a maker’s pitch and the rest as our honest read of published documents. We did not open an account with any vendor named here.
Who Thomson Reuters actually sells CLEAR to
The plans and pricing page is organised by buyer, not by feature, and the organisation is the answer to most questions people arrive with.
| Buyer group | Tiers published under it | Is a homeowner dialing floor in this group? |
|---|---|---|
| Law enforcement | CLEAR for Law Enforcement; CLEAR for Law Enforcement Plus | No |
| Government agencies | CLEAR for Investigations Basic; CLEAR for Investigations Advanced; CLEAR for Government Fraud | No |
| Corporations | CLEAR for Investigations Basic; CLEAR for Investigations Advanced; CLEAR for Enhanced Due Diligence | Only as a corporate investigations or due-diligence function — never as a marketing list |
Tier names are quoted from the CLEAR plans and pricing page as publicly advertised on 25 September 2026, where every tier is priced “Price varies by plan features”. Confirm current capability and pricing with the vendor, and with our sales team for Scout Data. What Thomson Reuters does publish in dollar terms is in Thomson Reuters CLEAR pricing.
The industries CLEAR names elsewhere on its own pages tell the same story from a different angle: financial services, law enforcement, retail, child and family services, manufacturing, school districts. Those are organisations that need to know whether a person is who they claim to be. They are not organisations that need ten thousand homeowners with an ageing roof.
What CLEAR is genuinely good at
The module names are the clearest description of the product on offer. CLEAR ID Confirm verifies that an identity is real and belongs to the person presenting it. CLEAR Risk Inform scores risk on a person or business. CLEAR Adverse Media searches for negative coverage before a relationship starts. CLEAR Investigate wraps AI-driven research workflows around public-records data. Underneath sits the live-gateway layer — incarceration and arrest records, motor vehicle data, licence plate recognition — that only a vetted institution gets to touch.
Every one of those is built around a subject you have already named. The product’s entire value is answering questions about a specific person or company: is this real, is this risky, what is the history. That is a superb thing to own if you are onboarding customers, investigating fraud, or running due diligence on a counterparty. It is an expensive way to do nothing at all if what you have is a market rather than a subject.
Three reasons a dialing floor is the wrong customer
- The permissible-use lists do not include you. Thomson Reuters’ Account Validation and Certification form asks applicants to certify a permissible use under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and, separately, the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act. The options cover legal compliance, consumer-authorised transactions, authorised investigations, fraud prevention, fiduciary capacity and law enforcement. Marketing to homeowners is on neither list. Applicants are also told that a commercial account may require an onsite inspection by a Thomson Reuters authorised third party — a visit law enforcement and government agencies are exempt from.
- The unit is a search, and you buy rows. CLEAR meters transactions: a search, a report, a gateway call. A dialing floor consumes files. One Bay Area solar call center Scout Data works with placed 348,858 dials on 74,913 records in the three weeks to 21 September 2026. There is no version of a per-search investigation platform that is the right instrument for that week, and CLEAR has never claimed otherwise.
- Nothing in it selects a market. Every CLEAR module starts from a named subject. Which homeowners are worth calling — the roof at the end of its service life, the system past its warranty, the house that changed hands last quarter, the street that took hail last season — is a targeting question, and targeting is upstream of contact data. No investigation platform answers it, at any price.
The alternatives, sorted by what you came for
You are replacing CLEAR for investigations. The direct substitutes are LexisNexis Accurint, TransUnion TLOxp and idiCORE. All three are credentialed, all three gate access on permissible use, and none publishes list pricing, so the evaluation has to be run on real subjects rather than on rate cards. idiCORE vs Accurint is the three-question version of that decision.
You only ever used the screening modules. If the real job was identity confirmation or adverse-media and sanctions checks, an investigation suite is a heavy way to buy them and the tier you are on probably includes a great deal you never open. Price the screening function on its own before renewing the platform.
You want phones on a list of addresses you already hold. That is a bulk append, charged per row rather than per lookup — bulk skip tracing does the economics, and skip tracing vs data append covers which operation your file condition actually calls for.
You want homeowners to call this week. That is a list purchase, not a platform subscription. The three kinds of vendor who sell into a call center — credentialed search platforms, list brokers and signal-built homeowner files — are mapped in call center data providers, and the buying checklist is in how to buy call center leads.
One thing worth keeping from the CLEAR contract
Whatever you move to, borrow the discipline the Thomson Reuters paperwork enforces. Its order form requires a subscriber to name, in writing, the purpose the data will be used for, to limit access to approved users, and to re-certify when anything changes. That is good practice whether or not the data is legally restricted, and an outbound floor has its own version of it: a dated do-not-call scrub on every delivered row, a record of which list every dial came from, and a suppression file that stops the same household being worked twice. DNC compliance for outbound solar covers the first, and building a suppression list the last.
Where Scout Data fits
Scout Data sells the product CLEAR does not: a built homeowner file. List Builder assembles audiences from live property signals and ships them with phones matched by name to the owner on title, scrubbed against the federal do-not-call registry before delivery, with dead numbers replaced. It is priced per record with no seat licence and no annual minimum, and the same graph is available per record through the API. Scout Data will not tell you whether a named person is a fraud risk — that is CLEAR’s job and CLEAR is good at it. It answers the question a dialing floor actually has, which is whose number to put in front of an agent on Monday morning.
Dial-volume figures are Scout Data’s own, quoted with their sample and window and listed on our benchmarks page. CLEAR product descriptions, tier names, access statements and credentialing language are quotations from Thomson Reuters’ published pages and from order-form documents published by Tulsa County, Oklahoma, all retrieved 25 September 2026.
Frequently asked questions
What is Thomson Reuters CLEAR used for?
Thomson Reuters describes CLEAR in one line on its own product page: “Prevent fraud, detect risk, and investigate crime with powerful online investigation software.” It is a public-records investigation platform sold in tiers to three buyer groups — law enforcement, government agencies and corporations — with named modules for identity confirmation, risk screening, adverse media and AI-assisted research. Read 25 September 2026.
What are the best Thomson Reuters CLEAR alternatives?
For the same investigative job, the direct competitors are LexisNexis Accurint, TransUnion TLOxp and idiCORE — all credentialed, all sold under permissible-use frameworks, none of them publishing list prices. For identity verification or sanctions and adverse-media screening alone, a specialist screening vendor is usually cheaper than an investigation suite. For a call center that needs homeowners to dial, none of those is the answer: Scout Data sells a built homeowner file priced per record, which is a different product from a search.
Can a solar, roofing or HVAC company use CLEAR for lead generation?
It should not plan on it. Thomson Reuters states that “access to these tools is limited to authorized, vetted professionals”, and its Account Validation and Certification form requires applicants to certify a permissible use under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act. Outbound sales prospecting appears on neither list. Thomson Reuters also states it “is not a consumer reporting agency” and that CLEAR data “may not be used as a factor in consumer debt collection decisioning; establishing a consumer’s eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, government benefits, or housing.”
Is CLEAR better than LexisNexis Accurint?
Not a question with a general answer, and the vendors have arranged things so it cannot have one: neither publishes list pricing, both quote against the buyer’s profile, and what each can show you depends on the permissible uses you are credentialed for. The comparison that works is running the same real subjects through both during evaluation and scoring what comes back. Scout Data covers the neighbouring decision in Accurint alternatives.