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pretty_name: Let's Encrypt Adoption Among the Top 5,000 Companies
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:
  - 1K<n<10K

Let's Encrypt Adoption Among the Top 5,000 Companies

Overview

This dataset analyzes Let's Encrypt adoption across the world's top 5,000 companies.

It identifies companies whose websites use Let's Encrypt issued SSL/TLS certificates, providing a snapshot of Let's Encrypt adoption among large organizations.

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

Source and full statistics: Let's Encrypt usage statistics on StackScan — global heatmap, usage by country and industry, top websites and companies, and the full list.

Dataset Highlights

  • 5,050 large companies, one row per company, no duplicate domains
  • Every company in the file is a Let's Encrypt adopter — adoption is the selection criterion, not a column
  • Every company has 5,001 or more employees
  • Firmographic context included: industry, headcount band, country, locality, founding year, LinkedIn profile
  • Suitable for research, visualization, segmentation, and machine learning projects

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.

Files

File Rows Notes
Lets-Encrypt.csv 5,050 Same content as the spreadsheet; this is the file the dataset viewer reads
Lets-Encrypt.xlsx 5,050 Excel copy for manual analysis

Dataset Fields

15 columns. Coverage is the share of the 5,050 rows where the field is populated.

Column Type Coverage Description
Popularity Rank int64 100% Website popularity rank; lower is more popular. Ranges from 5 to 1,959,064
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 only: 5001-10000 (2,245) and 10001+ (2,805)
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% Company or website country. 140 distinct values
TLD string 100% Top-level domain. 355 distinct values
Language string 0.6% Detected site language. Largely empty
Instagram string 0.4% Instagram handle. Largely empty
Twitter string 0.2% Twitter handle. Largely empty
YouTube string 0.2% YouTube channel. Largely empty
TikTok string 0.1% TikTok handle. Largely empty

The five social and language columns are present for schema compatibility with other StackScan exports and are populated for fewer than 1% of rows. Treat them as optional.

Methodology

Websites were analyzed for technical fingerprints associated with Let's Encrypt. A company 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 at the time of collection 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 from the dataset's collection period.
  • The dataset should not be interpreted as an official statement from any company regarding its technology stack.
  • Because every row is an adopter, this file supports questions of the form "what do Let's Encrypt adopters look like?" It cannot on its own answer "what share of large companies use Let's Encrypt?", which needs a comparable non-adopter sample.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite it and link back to the source page.

Plain text

StackScan. (2026). Let's Encrypt Adoption Among the Top 5,000 Companies [Data set]. StackScan. https://www.stackscan.com/technology/lets-encrypt

BibTeX

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

Source page: Let's Encrypt usage statistics — global heatmap, usage by country and industry, top websites and companies, and the full list.

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 instead.