The Lens is a global open patent/scholarly search engine. UKDataAPI aggregates UK patents + grants into a company-level intelligence API.
The Lens (lens.org) is a unique open platform that links patent data with scholarly publications — over 300 million patents and 260 million scholarly works from global sources. It's free for individual researchers, with institutional and commercial licences for heavy usage. The Lens excels at discovery: finding prior art, tracking citation networks, and exploring the intersection of academic research and commercial patents. UKDataAPI's Innovation endpoint takes a different approach — it aggregates UK-specific data (IPO patents, UKRI grants, Innovate UK awards) at the company level, delivering a unified view of a company's innovation activity with a proprietary Innovation Score. The Lens is for researchers exploring the knowledge graph. UKDataAPI is for developers building company intelligence tools.
| Feature | UKDataAPI | The Lens |
|---|---|---|
| UK patent data (IPO) | Company-level counts and trends | Full text search across UK patents |
| Global patent coverage | UK IPO only | ✓300M+ patent records globally |
| Scholarly publication data | Not included | ✓260M+ scholarly records linked to patents |
| Patent-scholarly citation linking | Not included | ✓Unique patent-to-paper citation mapping |
| UKRI research grants | ✓Included — active projects and funding amounts | Not included |
| Innovate UK awards | ✓Included with project details | Not included |
| Innovation Score | ✓0-100 composite with factor breakdown | No equivalent scoring |
| Company-level aggregation | ✓All innovation data in one company lookup | Search-based — requires manual aggregation |
| Output format | Structured JSON API | Web interface + JSON API + data export |
| Free tier | 200 free credits/month | Free for individual researchers |
| Batch processing | ✓Up to 500 req/min | API access on institutional plans |
| AI agent access (MCP/x402) | ✓Native support | Not available |
UKDataAPI
From £0.005/call (summary) to £0.025/call (full). Pay-as-you-go. Free tier: 200 credits/month.
The Lens
Free for individual use. Institutional licences from ~$2,000/year. Commercial API pricing by negotiation.
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \ "https://www.ukdatapi.com/api/v1/innovation/00445790?depth=full" # Returns: patent filings, UKRI grants, Innovate UK awards, # Innovation Score (0-100) with detailed factor breakdown # Cost: 24 credits (£0.05)
200 free credits. No contract. No credit card.
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