Chimnie and Confused.com serve different sides of the UK home insurance market. Confused.com is a price comparison website - the UK's first, in fact - that helps consumers compare insurance quotes. It also provides data and distribution services to the insurers who list on its platform. Chimnie is a property data bureau that supplies the underlying property intelligence insurers use to price those quotes accurately.
This comparison looks at what each platform actually delivers to the insurance industry, where they overlap, and which type of buyer each one serves.
Who is Confused.com?
Confused.com launched in 2002 as the UK's first insurance price comparison website. Originally owned by Admiral Group, it was sold to RVU (part of the ZPG/Zoopla group) in 2021 for £508 million. RVU also owns Uswitch, Money.co.uk, Mojo Mortgages, and Tempcover, creating a portfolio of consumer financial comparison brands.
The core business is consumer-facing: customers enter their details, Confused.com sends those details to panel insurers, and the customer sees quotes side by side. Confused.com handles around 15 million customer relationships and generates revenue from the insurers who pay for leads and policy sales through the platform.
For insurers, Confused.com offers more than just distribution. The platform pre-populates quote forms with data it holds or sources about the customer and their property, reducing the number of questions consumers need to answer. This data enrichment at point of quote helps insurers get more complete risk information and reduces drop-off during the quote journey. Confused.com also provides market intelligence and pricing analytics to its insurer partners, drawing on the volume of quotes processed across its platform.
The property-specific data Confused.com uses in its home insurance journey includes address lookup, property type classification, and some basic property attributes. But Confused.com is not a property data supplier - it's a distribution and comparison platform that uses property data as an input.
Confused.com website homepage screenshot
Who is Chimnie?
Chimnie was founded by Jon Francis, formerly of Google's innovation team, to make UK property data more transparent and accessible. The company operates chimnie.com as a B2B property data bureau for insurers, lenders, and proptech firms, and chimnie.co.uk as a free consumer property research site with over 150,000 users.
Chimnie's REST API covers 35 million UK residential properties and returns over 500 attributes per property, including EPC data, flood risk, subsidence indicators, conservation areas, listed buildings, rebuild cost estimates, automated valuations, and structural characteristics. The company is completing a two-year ingestion of planning permission data from every UK local authority, launching imminently.
Pricing is published: residential lookups from £0.05 to £0.15 per property, commercial at £0.45, with volume discounts through a ratecard.
Different positions in the insurance chain
The key distinction is that Confused.com is a distribution channel and Chimnie is a data supplier. They sit at different points in the insurance value chain and serve different buyer needs.
Quote journey and distribution
Confused.com owns the consumer relationship. When someone needs home insurance, they go to Confused.com, enter their postcode and basic details, and receive quotes from multiple insurers. The platform optimises this journey for conversion - pre-filling fields, simplifying questions, and showing results quickly.
Insurers pay Confused.com for access to this customer flow. The value is in distribution: reaching consumers who are actively shopping for insurance, at the moment they're ready to buy.
Chimnie doesn't interact with consumers in the insurance buying process. It supplies data to insurers (and potentially to aggregators like Confused.com) that feeds into the risk assessment and pricing that happen behind the scenes when a quote is generated.
Property data enrichment
Confused.com uses property data to pre-fill quote forms - property type, number of bedrooms, construction type, and similar fields that reduce the questions a consumer needs to answer. This improves conversion rates and helps insurers receive more complete risk profiles.
Chimnie provides much deeper property data. Over 500 attributes per property means insurers can enrich their pricing models with flood risk at multiple levels, subsidence exposure, rebuild cost estimates with confidence intervals, EPC data, planning history, satellite-derived roof condition, solar panel presence, conservation area status, and listed building flags. This data feeds directly into underwriting and pricing engines rather than consumer-facing quote forms.
Market intelligence
Confused.com sees millions of quotes across the UK home insurance market. This gives it a unique view of pricing trends, market positioning, and competitive dynamics. Insurer partners can access market analytics that show where their pricing sits relative to competitors and where there are opportunities to win or retain customers.
Chimnie doesn't offer market intelligence or pricing benchmarks. Its data is about properties, not about insurance market dynamics. The insights it provides are at the individual property level - risk, value, condition - rather than at the market level.
Where Confused.com is stronger
As a distribution channel, Confused.com is hard to replicate. Access to 15 million consumer relationships and the volume of quotes its platform generates make it the single largest source of home insurance leads in the UK market. For insurers seeking volume, Confused.com's position alongside other major aggregators (Compare the Market, GoCompare, MoneySupermarket) is central to their distribution strategy.
The market intelligence Confused.com can offer - competitive positioning, pricing elasticity, consumer behaviour patterns - comes from a dataset that no property data provider can generate. If you want to know where your pricing sits relative to the rest of the market at a postcode level, that's an aggregator insight, not a property data product.
Confused.com's investment in reducing friction in the quote journey - pre-population, simplified forms, smart questioning - also has genuine value for insurers who measure success partly by conversion rate. The easier the quote process, the more consumers complete it, and the more policies get sold.
Where Chimnie is stronger
For the actual task of understanding and pricing property risk, Chimnie's data goes far deeper than what Confused.com provides. Over 500 property attributes per lookup versus the handful of fields Confused.com pre-populates for quote forms is a different order of magnitude.
The free AVM gives insurers a property valuation at zero cost per lookup. Rebuild cost estimates with confidence intervals and finish-quality segmentation help price buildings cover more accurately. The planning permission dataset - completing a two-year national ingestion - captures property modifications that affect risk but don't show up in standard data sources.
Chimnie's data can feed into an insurer's pricing engine regardless of which distribution channel the quote comes from. Whether a customer arrives via Confused.com, a direct website, a broker, or another aggregator, the property data enrichment from Chimnie applies equally. Confused.com's value is channel-specific; Chimnie's value is channel-agnostic.
The published pricing (£0.05 to £0.15 per residential lookup) and the API-first delivery mean any insurer or MGA can integrate property data without a complex commercial negotiation. You can be enriching quotes with 500+ property attributes within days of signing up.
The consumer platform at chimnie.co.uk, with over 150,000 users, provides ground-truth data validation that pure B2B data suppliers lack. Homeowners checking and flagging their own property details creates a feedback loop that improves the underlying dataset.
Chimnie website homepage screenshot
Who should choose which
These are not either/or products for most insurers.
Confused.com is a distribution channel. If you write home insurance and want access to consumers actively comparing quotes, you need to be on aggregator panels - Confused.com among them. The decision to use Confused.com is a distribution strategy decision, not a data procurement decision.
Chimnie is a data supplier. If you want to price property risk more accurately - better flood scoring, rebuild cost estimates, planning history, satellite-derived property characteristics, automated valuations - Chimnie feeds that data into your pricing engine regardless of which channel your quotes come through.
Most home insurers will use an aggregator like Confused.com for distribution and a property data provider like Chimnie for underwriting enrichment. They solve different problems at different points in the insurance workflow.
Conclusion
Confused.com and Chimnie serve fundamentally different functions in the UK home insurance market. Confused.com connects insurers with consumers and provides distribution, market intelligence, and some basic property data pre-population. Chimnie provides deep property intelligence - 500+ attributes, valuations, rebuild costs, planning data, risk scoring - that feeds into the underwriting and pricing engines behind those quotes.
For insurers, the practical question isn't which one to use - it's recognising that they address different needs. Confused.com gets you in front of customers. Chimnie helps you price the risk accurately once they arrive.
