TED alternatives: easier ways to track EU tenders

Our pipeline pulls roughly 2,700 notices a day out of TED that match live, open competitions. That's the filtered number — after we drop award notices, corrections, and expired calls. Nobody reads 2,700 notices a day. So the real question isn't “should I use TED?” — it's “what layer do I put between TED and my inbox?”

Option 1: TED's own tools

TED is free and official, and its expert search is genuinely powerful once you learn the query syntax. You can save searches and get email or RSS updates when new notices match.

The catch is that saved searches are keyword machines. A search for “cloud migration” will not find a German notice titled “Modernisierung der IT-Infrastruktur”, even though that tender might be exactly your business. You either write increasingly baroque queries in multiple languages, or you accept that you're missing things. We wrote a step-by-step TED guide if you want to go this route — for some companies it's the right call.

Being honest about it: if you bid once or twice a year, in one country, in your own language, you don't need any tool. A TED saved search and a calendar reminder will do.

Option 2: go straight to national portals

TED only carries contracts above the EU thresholds (€140,000+ for central-government supply and service contracts as of 2026 — see our threshold guide for the full table). Below those values, tenders live only on national portals: EKR in Hungary, VVZ in Czechia, BZP in Poland, and so on.

From running ingestion against six national systems daily (plus TED): they are all different. Different search interfaces, different data quality, different languages, and a few quirks you only discover by operating them — Poland's BZP alone publishes around 178 tenders a day, more than some countries' entire annual below-threshold volume. If your market is one country, learn its portal well. If it's three, this stops being a Tuesday-morning routine and becomes a part-time job.

Option 3: commercial monitoring tools

This is the category BidScout is in, so read this section knowing who wrote it.

Monitoring tools do three things you can't easily replicate with saved searches: they aggregate multiple sources into one feed, they translate, and — the newer generation — they match tenders against what your company actually does rather than against keywords. BidScout embeds your company profile and every incoming tender in the same vector space, so that German IT-Infrastruktur notice surfaces for a cloud consultancy without either side sharing a keyword.

What a tool won't do is write your bid or make a bad-fit tender winnable. If a platform promises it will “win contracts for you”, close the tab.

How to choose

Three questions do most of the work:

1. Where do you sell? One home-market country → the national portal plus a saved search may be enough. Several countries → you want aggregation and translation.

2. Above or below the thresholds? If your contracts are small, TED literally cannot show them to you — whatever you pick must cover national portals. Most of what we ingest daily never appears on TED.

3. Keyword or capability? If your services are named the same way everywhere (“scaffolding rental”), keywords work. If they're described twenty different ways in five languages, you'll miss real matches without semantic matching.

BidScout's free plan covers EU-wide TED matching with AI summaries and a daily digest; the six national portals we monitor (Hungary, Czechia, Poland, Austria, Germany, Finland) are part of Pro at €49/month. If TED alone is your market, the free plan is genuinely useful — full TED-wide matching with a monthly viewing allowance, enough to know whether the matches are worth paying for.