A Looka alternative for people who need the name cleared, not the logo drawn
Looka bundles names, logos and a brand kit, and it checks social handles, which we do not. What it does not do is screen the name against trademark records. Here is the honest split.
Looka and BetterNamer are less alike than the category page suggests. Looka is a branding bundle: it generates names, checks domains, checks social handles, and then puts a logo and a full brand kit behind a paid download. BetterNamer generates names and then tries to prove you can keep them. If you want a logo at the end of the process, Looka is doing something we do not do at all.
So this comparison is a split rather than a scoreboard.
What Looka does that we do not
Two things, and both are real.
Logos and brand assets. Looka's paid product is a logo and a brand kit, priced per year for the asset downloads. BetterNamer produces none of that. If a founder wants one purchase that ends with a usable logo, we are not the alternative.
Social handle availability. Looka checks whether the handles are free, and suggests alternatives with prefixes and suffixes when they are not. BetterNamer does not check social handles today. Our social search is built but switched off, and it is not in the product you would sign up for, so we are not going to claim it. If handle availability is the deciding factor, Looka answers it and we do not.
What BetterNamer does that Looka does not
Looka does not automatically screen a name against federal or state trademark registrations. It offers a one-click route to the trademark office so you can check by hand, which is a link rather than a check. The distinction matters more than it sounds, because reading a trademark result is the hard part.
A useful trademark screen has to answer three things at once: is the mark live, pending, abandoned or cancelled; which international class does it cover; and is the name close enough in sound, appearance or meaning to be confused with yours. BetterNamer searches the register for the name and for names that sound like it, shows each match with its status, class and owner, and grades the result as no conflict, low, medium or high. Brightly and Britely are different strings and the same spoken word, and an examiner treats them as the same mark; a link to a search box does not tell you that.
BetterNamer also searches the live web for the exact name in quotes and grades what it finds, which catches the businesses that never registered anything and still hold rights where they trade. That is the check that finds the six-year-old competitor in the next state.
Side by side
| Looka | BetterNamer | |
|---|---|---|
| Name generation | Yes | Yes |
| Domain availability | Yes | Yes, across the full catalogue |
| Social handle availability | Yes | No |
| Logo and brand kit | Yes, paid | No |
| Automatic trademark screening | No, links out to check manually | Yes, on paid searches |
| Live web conflict search | No | Yes, on paid searches |
| Single score per name | No | Yes, 0 to 10 |
| Saved, organisable searches | Saved names | Yes, searches you can name, favourite and revisit |
| Buy the domain in the same session | No | Yes |
Which one you actually want
Pick Looka if the deliverable is a brand package. You are naming something, you want a logo, business card layouts and a colour palette out the other end, and you are content to do the legal clearance separately or later.
Pick BetterNamer if the deliverable is confidence in the name. You will hire a designer, or you already have one, and what you need is a shortlist where every candidate has been screened against the trademark register and the live web before anybody draws anything. Our free tier covers generation and domain checks at five searches a day; the screening is the paid part.
Plenty of people should use both, in that order: clear the name here, then take the cleared name to a logo tool. Getting it the other way round is how a founder ends up with a finished brand kit for a name that belongs to somebody else.
Checked, and dated
Everything above about Looka was checked on 22 August 2026 against their published material and independent reviews, including their own position that trademark registrations are not checked automatically. Products change. If you are reading this later, check their current feature list, and tell us if we have gone stale.