One of the most important aspects of any new business is its name. It’s hard to overstate how vital the right name can be for your company’s success, as a business name is the first chance you’ll have to make an impression on potential customers.

Whether you’re incorporating your business, forming a limited liability company (LLC), or registering a doing business as (DBA) name, you need a business name that succinctly encapsulates your company’s purpose. There’s a lot of pressure to find the perfect name, but it can also be incredibly difficult!

Thankfully, there are services that can help you brainstorm: business name generators. All you need to do is input a couple of keywords or phrases that describe your company and choose from a few options — the business name generator will do the rest, producing dozens or even hundreds of options.

What’s In a Business Name?

The first step for any new company is to come up with the perfect business name for your new entity or DBA. Your business name is important because it’s your company’s best chance to make a first impression with potential customers, and you need to make an impact. Choose something memorable that also highlights the purpose of your business.

Another crucial aspect of naming your business is making sure the name you want is actually available and hasn’t already been claimed by another entrepreneur. Therefore, you should search your state’s business database to ensure that you can use your desired name. (It’s probably a good idea to come up with a few different options in case your first choice is taken!)

Of course, a great way to brainstorm new business names is to use a name generator (like our favorite from TRUiC). Why go through the effort of dreaming up options for your company’s new name when you can harness the power of artificial intelligence?

Best Business Name Generators Reviewed

TRUiC

Our top choice is TRUiC’s outstanding business name generator. The reason this one stands above the pack is simple: it introduces more variables than most competing name generators and uses that information to produce compelling options.

Using TRUiC’s business name generator starts with inputting a few keywords or phrases, just like with most competitors’ generators. From there, you also select your company’s industry, and then input the city and state where it’s located. Once you’ve filled out all of this information, the generator will produce dozens of potential business name ideas, complete with URLs for each one.

We feel that the additional information TRUiC requests helps them build a more complete picture of the company, which is reflected in the quality of results. Hardly any other business name generators ask for your location, and many of them don’t even ask for the company’s industry — TRUiC not only gathers this information but also uses it in a way that produces superior names.

Namelix

Namelix is another intriguing free online business name generator with some features we appreciate. Namelix, like TRUiC, begins with the input of keywords. From there, you’ll provide a short description of your business or products in sentence form.

Namelix then gives you the option to choose how long you want your name to be. You can select a short name of 3-6 characters, a medium-length name with 6-12 characters, a long name with 12+ letters, or a combination of the three.

The next step allows you to choose a name style, with eight different options:

  • Brandable names (like Google and Trulia)
  • Multiple words (like Facebook and Bitcoin)
  • Non-English words (like Toyota and Audi)
  • Compound words (like FedEx and Instagram)
  • Misspelled words (like Lyft and Flickr)
  • Real words (like Apple and Amazon)
  • Rhyming words (like StubHub and FireWire)
  • People’s names (like Giorgio Armani)

We will admit that some of these options work better than others. For instance, the “people’s names” option produces some bizarre names that we doubt any business is rushing out to use. However, for the most part, these categories produce name ideas that at least get us thinking about new directions and options. Isn’t that what using a business name generator is all about?

Looka

Like our first two options, Looka begins by asking you to enter a few keywords that describe your business. Next, you’ll have an opportunity to use Looka’s name length slider, which enables you to narrow down the results to names that use anywhere from one to 20+ characters.

From there, Looka pumps out name ideas in various categories. You can dig through invented names, which Looka describes as “dynamic, innovative, and edgy.” You could take a look at compound names, adding words together in a way that Looka says gives your business a “descriptive, modern, and effective” name.

The company’s multiword name category is quite similar to the compound name category, with the only real difference being that these names separate the words rather than combining them into one. Finally, Looka suggests “real-word” names, which it warns can be “expensive to brand” but can give your business a powerful name with staying power.

In Conclusion

We reviewed dozens of business name generators while researching this article, and nearly all of them were entirely worthless. Some generators simply pair your keywords with randomly chosen words, creating names that are barely even worth flipping through. Others include names of existing brands, which obviously can’t be used at all.

In short, TRUiC, Namelix, and Looka are the only three business name generators we could find online that are worth using in any way. While these tools are also far from perfect, they provide useful enough names to get your brainstorming session off to a productive start.

Disclaimer: The content on this page is for information purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or accounting advice. If you have specific questions about any of these topics, seek the counsel of a licensed professional.

zenbusiness logo

Written by Team ZenBusiness

Start Your LLC Today