Contracts Finder vs Find a Tender vs Sell2Wales: What's the Difference?

One of the more confusing things about UK public procurement is that there is no single website listing every contract opportunity. Instead there are several, each with a different scope, and missing one of them means missing real opportunities. Here's how the main ones split up.

Find a Tender (FTS)

The UK's replacement for the EU's OJEU/TED system, used for higher-value, above-threshold contracts across the whole of the UK. If a contract is large enough to be legally required to run a full open competitive process, it's very likely to appear here.

Contracts Finder

Covers a much wider range of contract values for English public bodies (and UK-wide central government), including a large volume of lower-value opportunities that never reach Find a Tender's thresholds at all. In practice, most of the day-to-day volume of opportunities - especially for small and medium-sized suppliers - shows up here rather than on Find a Tender.

Public Contracts Scotland

Scotland runs its own separate procurement regime and its own publishing platform. A contract for a Scottish public body - a council, health board, or the Scottish Government itself - is generally published here rather than on Contracts Finder, even though the buyer might be functionally similar to an English equivalent.

Sell2Wales

The Welsh equivalent - the primary platform for opportunities from Welsh public bodies, again run separately from the England-focused Contracts Finder.

Why this matters practically

A business that only checks Contracts Finder is, by design, missing every Scotland- and Wales-specific opportunity, and possibly some higher-value England/UK-wide ones that only reached Find a Tender. A business that only checks Find a Tender is missing the much larger volume of lower-value work that never crosses that threshold. Checking all four by hand, every day, isn't realistic for most small teams - which is exactly the gap Contract Scanner is built to close: it watches all of them continuously and surfaces only the notices that match rules you've actually set, rather than requiring you to remember to check four separate websites.