Datasets:

stackscan
/

lets-encrypt

pretty_name: Let's Encrypt Adoption Among 5,000 Large Companies and Organizations
license: cc-by-4.0
tags:
  - cybersecurity
  - web-technologies
  - technographics
  - ssl
  - tls
  - lets-encrypt
  - technology-adoption
  - company-data
  - business
  - websites
task_categories:
  - tabular-classification
  - tabular-regression
language:
  - en
size_categories:
  - 10K<n<100K
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: Lets-Encrypt.csv
  - config_name: commercial-ca-comparison
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: Commercial-CA-Comparison.csv

Let's Encrypt Adoption Among 5,000 Large Companies and Organizations

Overview

This dataset lists 5,050 large companies and organizations whose websites were found to use SSL/TLS certificates issued by Let's Encrypt. Each row carries firmographic context: industry, employee band, country, locality, founding year and LinkedIn profile.

Rows are ordered by website popularity rank, and the file covers the most popular slice of a larger pool of large organizations found to use Let's Encrypt. It is not a list of the world's largest or most popular organizations, and the rank is a property of the website rather than a measure of the organization's size or importance.

Collected in August 2026. Certificate choices change, so treat the data as a snapshot of that month rather than a current state.

It is intended for technology research, cybersecurity analysis, technographic research, competitive intelligence, market analysis and data science.

Full Let's Encrypt statistics, including the global heatmap, usage by country and by industry, and the top websites, are published at StackScan.

Dataset Highlights

Collected in August 2026
5,050 organizations, one row each, with no repeated domains
Every organization in the file uses Let's Encrypt, so there is no adoption column. Adoption is the selection criterion
Every organization has 5,001 or more employees
142 industries and 140 countries represented
Not only private companies: 1,120 rows (22%) are government bodies, universities, schools, non-profits and similar institutions

What is Let's Encrypt?

Let's Encrypt is a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority that provides SSL/TLS certificates. It enables websites to deploy HTTPS without purchasing certificates from traditional commercial certificate authorities.

Dataset Fields

The adopter data is in Lets-Encrypt.csv: 5,050 rows, 15 columns. Coverage is the share of rows where the field is populated.

Column	Type	Coverage	Description
`Popularity Rank`	int64	100%	Website popularity rank, lower being more popular. Ranges from 5 to 1,959,064. Rows are stored in ascending rank order
`Domain`	string	100%	Primary website domain. Unique across the file
`Company Name`	string	100%	Company or organization name, lowercased
`Company Size`	string	100%	Employee band. Two values: `5001-10000` (2,245 rows) and `10001+` (2,805 rows)
`Year Founded`	float64	73.4%	Founding year
`Industry`	string	99.7%	Industry label, lowercased. 142 distinct values
`LinkedIn URL`	string	100%	Company LinkedIn profile path
`Locality`	string	85.1%	City or region, where available
`Country`	string	100%	Organization or website country. 140 distinct values
`TLD`	string	100%	Top-level domain. 355 distinct values
`Language`	string	0.6%	Detected site language
`Instagram`	string	0.4%	Instagram handle
`Twitter`	string	0.2%	Twitter handle
`YouTube`	string	0.2%	YouTube channel
`TikTok`	string	0.1%	TikTok handle

The language and social columns are populated for fewer than 1% of rows.

Comparison Group

Commercial-CA-Comparison.csv holds 7,138 large organizations that were found using a commercial certificate authority and were not found using Let's Encrypt. It is there so the adopter file can be measured against something rather than read on its own.

It was built with the same filters as the adopter file: 5,001 or more employees, company information required, collected August 2026. It is also restricted to the same website popularity range, so neither file is truncated against the other. The two files share no domains.

Columns are the 15 above plus Certificate Authority, naming the authority or authorities detected. 833 organizations were detected with more than one, written pipe separated.

Certificate authority	Organizations	Share
DigiCert	3,484	48.8%
GlobalSign	2,691	37.7%
Sectigo	1,445	20.2%
GoDaddy SSL	385	5.4%

Load it with load_dataset("stackscan/lets-encrypt", "commercial-ca-comparison"). The default config remains the Let's Encrypt file.

What the comparison supports

It supports asking how Let's Encrypt adopters differ from large organizations that buy commercial certificates, across industry, country, size and founding year.

It does not give an adoption rate. That would need a denominator of all large organizations, which neither file provides. Any percentage computed by dividing one file by the other is meaningless.

Organizations can use more than one certificate authority. Those found with both Let's Encrypt and a commercial authority were removed from the comparison file, so the two groups stay separate at the cost of not representing mixed estates.

Methodology

Websites were analyzed for technical fingerprints associated with Let's Encrypt. An organization is considered a Let's Encrypt adopter when the relevant certificate or technology footprint is detected on its associated website.

Technology detection represents an observation made in August 2026 and should not be interpreted as confirmation of an organization's complete infrastructure.

Use Cases

This dataset can be used for:

Technographic research
Cybersecurity research
SSL/TLS infrastructure analysis
Market research
Competitive intelligence
Data science and machine learning
Technology adoption analysis
Academic research

Important Notes

Technology detection is based on publicly observable website signals.
A detected Let's Encrypt certificate does not necessarily mean that Let's Encrypt is used across all of an organization's domains or infrastructure.
Website infrastructure can change over time.
Results represent observations made in August 2026.
The dataset should not be interpreted as an official statement from any company regarding its technology stack.
Every row of Lets-Encrypt.csv is an adopter. Commercial-CA-Comparison.csv provides a matched group that does not use Let's Encrypt, which supports comparison between the two but still does not support an adoption rate.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please credit StackScan and link to the source page.

Plain text:

StackScan. (2026). Let's Encrypt Adoption Among 5,000 Large Companies and Organizations (data collected August 2026) [Data set]. StackScan. https://www.stackscan.com/technology/lets-encrypt

BibTeX:

@misc{stackscan_lets_encrypt_2026,
  author       = {{StackScan}},
  title        = {Let's Encrypt Adoption Among 5,000 Large Companies and Organizations},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {aug},
  publisher    = {StackScan},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.stackscan.com/technology/lets-encrypt}},
  note         = {Data collected August 2026. Dataset: \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/stackscan/lets-encrypt}}
}

Source page: Let's Encrypt usage statistics.

License

Released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the data, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit.

Attribution must name StackScan and link to the source page:

Data from StackScan, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

For academic or published work, use the citation above.