Comparison
US nonprofit and foundation databases, compared
Six platforms hold most of the US nonprofit and foundation data market: Candid, Instrumentl, Cause IQ, Impala, Grantmakers.io and Plinth. They are not substitutes for one another — they answer different questions, and the useful comparison is which one answers yours.
We build one of them, so treat the recommendation accordingly. What we can offer instead of neutrality is evidence: every figure below was read from the vendor’s own pages on 12 August 2026 and links to its source, and where we could not confirm something the table says so rather than guessing. Several rows here favour a competitor, and the section on where Plinth is the wrong tool is not a formality.
In one screen
- Candid is the sector's reference database, stating 1.9 million nonprofit profiles, 304,000 funder profiles and 29 million grants; Candid Search replaced Foundation Directory and GuideStar in January 2026.
- Instrumentl is grant-pipeline software rather than a reference database: 36,000 active RFPs, deadline tracking, no free tier, from $299 a month billed annually.
- Cause IQ serves both fundraisers and companies selling to nonprofits, has a free tier with 8 search filters, and layers federal award data from USAspending onto nonprofit profiles.
- Impala maps relationships at scale — 10 million board members and over a billion mapped relationships — and refreshes most sources weekly.
- Grantmakers.io is free and open source, covers 990-PF filings only, and requires no login; it is the closest free comparator for foundation grant data.
- Plinth is free to read and covers 205,000 funders and 17.9 million grants from IRS 990 filings, with a free API key and plain-English querying over the whole corpus.
Which one, for which job
The single most useful thing this page can tell you is when to stop reading it. Three of the six jobs below are better served by someone else.
Find funders who might fund my nonprofit
Instrumentl, or Cause IQ
Both are built around prospecting with live opportunities and deadlines. Plinth shows who funded organizations like yours historically, which is a research question, not a pipeline.
Track deadlines and manage applications
Instrumentl
Grant-lifecycle workflow is its core product. Plinth has none of this and is not trying to.
Monitor the financial health of grantees I already fund
Impala
Continuous monitoring with risk flags on cash reserves and insolvency, refreshed weekly. Our filing-lagged corpus is the wrong shape for early warning.
Look up one nonprofit's basic filings, free
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, or Candid
Fast, free, authoritative for the filing itself. ProPublica's API is free but carries no grant-level records.
Research who funds whom across the whole sector, free
Plinth, or Grantmakers.io
Both are free and public. Grantmakers.io works from 990-PF filings; Plinth resolves 990, 990-EZ and 990-PF grants into a network with co-funders and board relationships, and adds an API.
Query grant data programmatically without an enterprise contract
Plinth
A free API key covers funders, recipients and grant rows in both directions, plus plain-English querying. The paid alternatives start in the thousands per year.
The full comparison
Each cell links to the vendor page it came from, with the date we read it. Cells reading “not publicly documented” mean we could not confirm the capability from that vendor’s own documentation — not that it is missing.
| Dimension | Plinth | Candid | Instrumentl | Cause IQ | Impala | Grantmakers.io |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organizations covered | 205k funders · 327k nonprofit pages | 1.9M+ nonprofit profiles · 304k+ funder profiles source, 2026-08-12 | 450k+ funder profiles source, 2026-08-12 | 2M+ nonprofits and foundations source, 2026-08-12 | 250k+ foundations · 2M+ nonprofits source, 2026-08-12 | 990-PF filers only source, 2026-08-12 |
| Grant recordsCandid and Impala both publish larger cumulative grant counts than ours. We do not compete on volume. | 17.9M grants, FY2017–2025 | 29M+ grants (also states 3M annual grant transactions) source, 2026-08-12 | 36k+ active RFPs (opportunities, not historical awards) source, 2026-08-12 | From “Schedule I of the Form 990 and Part XIV of the Form 990-PF” source, 2026-08-12 | 25M+ grants source, 2026-08-12 | The public IRS 990-PF dataset source, 2026-08-12 |
| Nonprofit → funder lookup | Free public page per nonprofit | Grants API /recipients and /transactions (paid tier) source, 2026-08-12 | In-product source, 2026-08-12 | In-product, on the organization profile source, 2026-08-12 | In-product; gated on public profiles source, 2026-08-12 | Free grantee search source, 2026-08-12 |
| Co-funder analysisThe nearest competitor feature aggregates funders over a peer segment. It is a different question, not a weaker version of the same one. | Funder-to-funder overlap strength, thin evidence discounted | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented | Which foundations fund a peer segment — grant count, average, sum, smallest, largest. No funder-to-funder strength measure documented. source, 2026-08-12 | Ecosystems — analyse the funders, nonprofits and grants in a landscape source, 2026-08-12 | Not publicly documented |
| Board / governance relationshipsNot a Plinth-only capability. Impala's relationship graph is larger than anything we claim. | From Form 990 Part VII, on free public pages | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented | Contacts on the organization profile source, 2026-08-12 | 10M board members · 1B+ mapped relationships; warm-intro paths in the Funder Prospecting add-on source, 2026-08-12 | Not publicly documented |
| Portfolio clusteringOurs is unsupervised — themes emerge from what a funder actually funds. The nearest competitor product asks the user to supply the taxonomy. | Unsupervised clustering over org text embeddings | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented | Portfolio Analysis — “Insert your own taxonomy so you can use your own language”, 20+ financial datapoints source, 2026-08-12 | Not publicly documented |
| Semantic search | Meaning-based org search over 990 mission text, in the API and the chat | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented | 450+ search filters source, 2026-08-12 | Criteria-based prospect lists source, 2026-08-12 | Not publicly documented |
| Public API | Free with a key, 50 calls/month; paid plans for volume | 10 APIs. Grants from $6,000/yr, Essentials from $4,800/yr, Premier from $9,900/yr. Demographics and Taxonomy listed at no fee. 30-day free trial on request. source, 2026-08-12 | Pricing page lists API access on Enterprise only; the help centre says Full Lifecycle, Enterprise and University. The vendor's own sources disagree. source, 2026-08-12 | Pro and Enterprise subscriptions source, 2026-08-12 | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented |
| Natural-language querying | Ask a question in plain English; it writes and runs the query | Not publicly documented | Claude connector source, 2026-08-12 | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented |
| Reading a page without an accountEvery platform here publishes something. What differs is how much before the prompt to sign up. | Up to 2,000 grantees detailed per funder page, tail summarised | Profiles are public and indexed; free registration offered source, 2026-08-12 | Grant listing pages, “27 of 8,000+ results” source, 2026-08-12 | Profile public with financials and sample grants; lists truncate to “…and 60 more grants received” source, 2026-08-12 | Top 3 grantees, top 3 grants, 3 board members; the rest gated source, 2026-08-12 | Fully free — “No login, no lock up” source, 2026-08-12 |
| Government funding | Federal (USAspending) plus 9 state checkbooks, joined to the same organizations | Not publicly documented | Federal and state funding opportunities source, 2026-08-12 | USAspending plus Single Audit detail, prime and sub-awards, awards since 1 January 2020 source, 2026-08-12 | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented |
| Geographic mapping | Service area resolved to counties, joined to community need data | Foundation Maps — area served at state, county and city level; 3M+ grants, 38k foundations, updated weekly source, 2026-08-12 | Grants by state and city source, 2026-08-12 | Location filters source, 2026-08-12 | Regional Philanthropy Hubs source, 2026-08-12 | Not publicly documented |
| Data freshnessA dimension we lose. We are a depth-and-completeness corpus, not a real-time monitor. | Monthly refresh, 12–24 month IRS filing lag | Foundation Maps: new data added weekly source, 2026-08-12 | Active RFP and deadline tracking source, 2026-08-12 | Not publicly documented | Most sources weekly; funding status and organizational changes within 24 hours of detection source, 2026-08-12 | Not publicly documented |
| Entry price | Free to read; free API key | Premium $219/month, or $2,199/year. Ultimate $2,499/year. source, 2026-08-12 | Discover from $299/month billed annually. No free tier; 14-day trial. source, 2026-08-12 | Free tier with 8 filters; Core $199–349/month; Pro $4,488–5,988/year source, 2026-08-12 | Free account; Philanthropy Database Premium $1,440/year, add-ons from $2,000/year source, 2026-08-12 | Free source, 2026-08-12 |
The individual comparisons
Longer, one platform at a time — what each is for, where it beats us, and where we would pick it over Plinth.
- Plinth vs Candid — The incumbent. Foundation Center and GuideStar merged; Candid Search unified Foundation Directory and GuideStar in January 2026.
- Plinth vs Instrumentl — Prospecting and grant-pipeline workflow — deadlines, active RFPs, application tracking.
- Plinth vs Cause IQ — Nonprofit market intelligence, serving both fundraisers and companies selling to nonprofits.
- Plinth vs Impala — Philanthropy data platform with relationship mapping, grantee monitoring and regional hubs.
- Candid API alternative — for developers: the endpoint mapping, what is equivalent and what is not.
The free options, honestly
A comparison page that omits the free tools is an advertisement. There are three worth knowing about, and one of them is closer to our posture than any paid platform here.
Grantmakers.io is free, open source and works directly from the public 990-PF dataset, with no login. If your question is only about private foundation grants, it may be all you need, and it got there years before we did. ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer is free with a free API, and is the fastest way to read a specific organization’s Form 990 — but it returns filing summaries, not grant-level records. Zeffy’s Grant Finder is free with no trial limits and includes 990-based funder insights.
Candid also has free routes that get overlooked: free registration, two APIs listed at no fee (Demographics and Taxonomy, neither carrying grant data), and a free year of Candid Premium for nonprofits under $1 million in revenue that earn a Gold Seal of Transparency.
Where Plinth is the wrong tool
- The IRS filing lag is 12 to 24 months. For what a foundation is funding this quarter, a platform that tracks live opportunities will beat us — Instrumentl tracks active RFPs and deadlines, and Impala refreshes most sources weekly.
- We cover electronic filers. Organizations that file on paper, and those too small to file a full return, are absent or thin.
- Entity resolution is deterministic and tuned to drop rather than guess, so the graph is high-precision and knowingly incomplete. A grant we cannot confidently resolve to an EIN is left out rather than attached to the wrong organization.
- Funder pages detail the top 2,000 grantees by value and summarise the tail. For a donor-advised fund sponsor with 100,000 grantees, the page is a summary, not the full ledger.
- We do not do grant-pipeline management: no deadline tracking, no application workflow, no reporting calendar. If that is the job, Instrumentl is built for it and we are not.
- Candid and Impala both publish larger cumulative grant counts than ours, and Candid has been the sector's reference source since long before we existed.
Where Plinth fits
We are a research corpus, not a workflow tool. The whole IRS 990 grant graph — 205,000 funders, 17.9 million grants — resolved into a network you can read for free, browse without an account, and query through a free API or in plain English. That is a good fit for research, due diligence, prospect discovery from funding history, and anything you want to build on programmatically. It is a poor fit for managing a grant pipeline or watching a portfolio in real time.
More on what the data is and how it is built: US nonprofit and foundation data and our methodology.
Questions and answers
- What is the best US nonprofit and foundation database?
- It depends on the job. For breadth of nonprofit profiles and sector-standard reference data, Candid is the incumbent and states the largest corpus. For finding live funding opportunities and managing deadlines and applications, Instrumentl is built for that and Plinth is not. For grantee monitoring and relationship mapping with weekly refreshes, Impala is strongest. For free access to foundation grant data with no account, Grantmakers.io and Plinth are the two options. For querying the whole funding graph programmatically without paying for an API, Plinth is currently the only one with a free key.
- Is there a free alternative to Candid?
- Yes, several, with real limits. Grantmakers.io is free and open source but covers only 990-PF filings from private foundations. ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer is free with a free API, but returns Form 990 summary data and no grant-level records. Plinth is free to read, covers 990, 990-EZ and 990-PF grants, and offers a free API key with 50 calls a month. Candid itself offers free registration, a free year of Candid Premium to nonprofits under $1 million in revenue that earn a Gold Seal of Transparency, and two of its APIs at no fee.
- Which of these has a free API?
- Plinth's API is free with a key at 50 calls a month, covering funders, recipients and individual grant rows. Candid lists its Demographics and Taxonomy APIs at no fee, but its grant and nonprofit data APIs are paid — the Grants API starts at $6,000 a year — with a 30-day free trial available on request. ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer API is free but carries no grant-level data. Cause IQ's API requires a Pro or Enterprise subscription. Instrumentl's own sources disagree on which plans include API access.
- Which database has every 990-PF grant?
- No single one, and any tool claiming otherwise is overstating. Grantmakers.io works directly from the public 990-PF dataset. Candid states 29 million grants across its corpus. Plinth covers 17.9 million grants across fiscal years 2017 to 2025 from 990, 990-EZ and 990-PF e-filings. All of these inherit the same constraints: the IRS filing lag runs 12 to 24 months, and paper filers are absent from e-file data.
- How current is the data in these platforms?
- Anything built on IRS filings inherits a 12 to 24 month lag, including Plinth, which refreshes monthly. Impala states that most sources update weekly with funding status and organizational changes processed within 24 hours of detection. Candid's Foundation Maps states new data is added weekly. Instrumentl tracks live RFPs and deadlines, which is a different data type — forward-looking opportunities rather than historical awards.
- How was this comparison put together?
- Every figure attributed to another company was read from that company's own public pages on 12 August 2026, and each cell in the table links to the source page. Software directories, review sites and comparison blogs were not used. Where a capability could not be confirmed from a vendor's own documentation, the cell reads "not publicly documented" rather than asserting the feature is missing.
How this comparison was made.Every figure attributed to another company was read from that company’s own public pages on 12 August 2026, and each cell links to the page it came from. Review sites, software directories and comparison blogs were not used as sources. Where we could not confirm a capability from a vendor’s own documentation, the cell reads “not publicly documented” — that means we did not find it, not that it is absent. Pricing is the published list price and excludes discounts and custom terms. Product names are used only to identify the products compared. Tell us if something here is wrong and we will correct it.