20 Awesome Sources of Free Data

Everyone loves free things right?

You’ll find plenty of free information of varying quality and accuracy online, but these twenty (+) sources are widely considered to be quite reputable.

If you’re after solid data to help support your digital marketing and content goals, look no further.

1. Google Dataset Search

This enables you to search available datasets that have been marked up properly according to the schema.org standard.

While this could be viewed as a one-stop-shop for datasets that include data from sources like NASA and ProPublica, there are many niche datasets that may be better for certain purposes of course.

You’re shown the results and each one is clickable to tell you the name of the dataset, when it was last updated, and a description.

With certain results, you get more information, such as the formats in which the dataset is available.

2. Google Trends

With this tool, you can search for keywords and see a variety of information about them, including interest over time, interest by region, related topics, and related queries.

You can select options including which country (or worldwide) you want to see, narrow it down to categories, or confine your search to all of the web, images, news, shopping, or YouTube.

You can also compare your search to another topic.

Screenshot from Trends.google.com, August 2021

3. U.S. Census Bureau

This site allows you to get information related to population, the economy, and geography. You can browse by topic or search.

It’s a great tool if you need statistics to increase the quality of your content.

They have some great visualizations you can embed within your content, too. It’s also very cool to see the world population updates.

Screenshot from Census.gov, August 2021

4. The Official Portal for European Data

Available data includes geography, finance, statistics, election results, legal acts, and information on crime, transport, health, the environment, and science research.

This platform is searchable and browseable.

Screenshot from Europa.eu, August 2021

5. Data.gov U.S.

The home of the U.S. government’s open data, this site allows access to information about a variety of topics provided by federal, state, local, and tribal governments.

Screenshot from Data.gov, August 2021

6. Data.gov U.K.

Similar to the U.S.’s Data.gov, this site allows access to U.K. data on a variety of topics.

Data is provided by central government, local authorities, and public bodies.

Screenshot from Data.gov.uk, August 2021

7. Health Data

Searchable topics include issues such as public health (especially good for COVID data), medical devices, environmental health, substance abuse, mental health, and others.

Screenshot from Healthdata.gov, August 2021

8. The World Factbook

Containing information on 267 world entities, this is a treasure trove of data that is updated weekly with information about the world.

You can select a country to view and then click on whatever topic you like (such as Economy or Transportation, for example). The site is also searchable.

Screenshot from TheWorldFactbook, CIA.gov, August 2021

9. Altmetric

Altmetric does offer some paid plans but they have a useful set of the top 100 most mentioned articles across 20 disciplines that have been published in a year, too.

2020 is the latest but there are sets going back to 2013. They also offer a few free tools.

Screenshot from Altmetric.com,  August 2021

10. Open Corporates

The largest open database of companies in the world, Open Corporates gives you access to information about close to 200 million companies.

You can search by companies or officers and limit your jurisdiction if you need to.

They also offer an API and bulk data plan.

Screenshot from Opencorporates.com, August 2021

11. National Center for Environmental Information

This covers geophysical, atmospheric, and oceanic data. They are currently the world’s largest provider of climate and weather information.

They also provide links to older tools that may not currently be available on the website but reside elsewhere.

Screenshot from Ncdc.noaa.gov, August 2021

12. Data Sets SubReddit

You do have to sign up but it’s free. Here, you can search for datasets and find people giving information and requesting it.

Reddit, in general, is also a great place to look for information and see what’s trending.

Screenshot from Reddit.com/r/datasets, August 2021

13. Kaggle Data Sets

Kaggle currently has over 100,000 datasets.

You can find data on anything from famous iconic women to Los Angeles parking citations.

Screenshot from Kaggle.com, August 2021

14. Earth Data by NASA

The Earth Observing System Data and Information System contains NASA’s earth observation data, which includes facts such as land surface temperature in a specific area and carbon flux.

Screenshot from Earthdata.nasa.gov, August 2021

15. Pew Internet

If you’re looking for sociological data, Pew Research is a great source. There are some interesting articles that you can find by browsing around, too.

You do need to sign up to view and download datasets but it’s free.

Screenshot from Pewresearch.org/internet/datasets, August 2021

16. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Covering health topics listed in the image below, this site gives you access to an incredible amount of data that is browseable and searchable.

You can even create your own filtered datasets through various topic-related portals.

Screenshot from CDC.gov/datastatistics, August 2021

17. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Here, you can find data about labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in our economy.

Screenshot from Bls.gov, August 2021

18. FiveThirtyEight

They have data on politics, sports, science and health, economics, and culture.

This site also encourages you to create stories and visualizations using their data.

Screenshot from Data.fivethirtyeight.com, August 2021

19. Group Lens

Group Lens has several available datasets (listed below in the image) that are useful for more niche projects. Some datasets are over a decade old.

You can get a lot of information on books and films here.

Screenshot from Grouplens.org, August 2021

20. GitHub’s BuzzFeed News

This one gives you data from Buzzfeed. If you want information about the election cycle or fake news, this one’s for you.

Screenshot from Github.com/BuzzFeedNews, August 2021

Last but not least…

I’d like to give an honorable mention to a great list of 41 sources for free images to go along with all this data, so definitely check that out.

More Resources:

Featured image: hanss/Shutterstock