Comparison · Candid
Plinth vs Candid
Candid is the reference source for US nonprofit data and has been for decades. It states a larger corpus than ours on every measure that counts records, it enriches IRS filings with data collected directly from nonprofits and grantmakers, and its research is cited by national press. If you are choosing between us on breadth, choose Candid.
Plinth is a different shape: the same public filings resolved into a funding network that is free to read, free to query, and open to a search engine. This page sets out where each one wins, with every Candid figure cited to Candid’s own pages as read on 12 August 2026.
In one screen
- Candid Search unified Foundation Directory and GuideStar into a single platform, fully launched in January 2026; Candid is transitioning legacy Foundation Directory, Foundation Maps and 990 Finder users onto it.
- Candid states 1.9 million nonprofit profiles, 304,000 funder profiles and 29 million grants — a larger corpus than Plinth's 205,000 funders and 17.9 million grants.
- Candid Search costs $219 a month, $2,199 a year for Premium, or $2,499 a year for Ultimate. Plinth's funder and nonprofit pages are free to read without an account.
- Candid's grant data APIs are paid — the Grants API starts at $6,000 a year — with a 30-day free trial on request; its Demographics and Taxonomy APIs are listed at no fee.
- Plinth's API is free with a key at 50 calls a month and traverses funder to grantee and grantee to funder, as Candid's Grants API also does.
- Candid publishes open-access research on Issue Lab and has been cited by the Associated Press, the Washington Post and Stanford Social Innovation Review.
What changed with Candid Search
Candid merged Foundation Directory and GuideStar into a single platform, Candid Search, announced as fully launched in January 2026 after introducing core capabilities for GuideStar users in September 2025. Candid has said it will begin transitioning legacy Foundation Directory users — including Foundation Maps and 990 Finder users — onto it.
If you are re-evaluating tools because of that transition, the honest advice is that Candid Search is the continuation of the product you were using, and most of what you had is still there. What follows is where a free, open corpus does a job Candid charges for, not a claim that you should leave.
Where Candid is stronger
Scale. Candid states 1.9 million nonprofit profiles, 304,000 funder profiles and 29 million grants. We hold 205,000 funders and 17.9 million grants across fiscal years 2017 to 2025. Any claim that we have more data than Candid would be false.
Enrichment beyond the filings. Candid collects data directly from nonprofits and grantmakers through Seals of Transparency and profile claiming. We read filings; we do not run a data-collection programme, so anything an organization tells Candid and not the IRS is not in our corpus.
Compliance tooling. Charity Check produces time-stamped documentation for audit records — a regulated workflow we do not serve.
Geographic mapping. Foundation Maps shows area served at state, county and city level and states weekly updates. We resolve service areas to counties and join them to community need data, which is a different analysis, but Candid got to geographic mapping long before us.
Published research. Candid publishes open-access reports on Issue Lab and runs the Candid insights publication. We publish derived analysis from our own corpus, but we are not the citation source Candid is.
Where Plinth is different
Reading a page costs nothing. Our funder and nonprofit pages are public and indexable, with up to 2,000 grantees detailed per funder and the tail summarised. Candid Search starts at $219 a month.
The API is free with a key.Candid’s grant and nonprofit data APIs are paid — Grants from $6,000 a year, Essentials from $4,800, Premier from $9,900 — with a 30-day trial available on request, and its Demographics and Taxonomy APIs listed at no fee. Ours is free at 50 calls a month, with paid plans only for volume. See the API comparison for endpoint-level detail.
Plain-English querying.You can ask a question of the whole corpus and get a sourced answer with the query that produced it, or hit a SQL endpoint directly. We did not find an equivalent on Candid’s developer portal.
Co-funder strength. We compute how strongly two funders overlap in the organizations they back, discounting thin evidence. This is a funder-to-funder measure rather than a list of who funds your peers.
Side by side
| Dimension | Plinth | Candid |
|---|---|---|
| Organizations covered | 205k funders · 327k nonprofit pages | 1.9M+ nonprofit profiles · 304k+ funder profiles 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 |
| Nonprofit → funder lookup | Free public page per nonprofit | Grants API /recipients and /transactions (paid tier) 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Semantic search | Meaning-based org search over 990 mission text, in the API and the chat | 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 |
| Natural-language querying | Ask a question in plain English; it writes and runs the query | 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 |
| Government funding | Federal (USAspending) plus 9 state checkbooks, joined to the same organizations | 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 |
| 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 |
| Entry price | Free to read; free API key | Premium $219/month, or $2,199/year. Ultimate $2,499/year. source, 2026-08-12 |
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.
Using both
These are not mutually exclusive, and for a lot of research teams the sensible answer is both: Candid for profile breadth, compliance checks and the enriched record; Plinth for network questions, free public pages you can link to, and programmatic access without a contract. Start with what our data is, an example funder dossier, or the API docs.
Questions and answers
- What replaced Foundation Directory Online?
- Candid Search. Candid merged Foundation Directory and GuideStar into one platform, announced as fully launched in January 2026, having introduced core capabilities for GuideStar users in September 2025. Candid has said it will begin transitioning legacy Foundation Directory users — including Foundation Maps and 990 Finder users — to Candid Search. Candid Search costs $219 a month or $2,199 a year for Premium, and $2,499 a year for Ultimate.
- Is Plinth a replacement for Candid?
- For some jobs, not all. If you need the widest set of nonprofit profiles, compliance and charity-check tooling, Seals of Transparency, or the sector-standard reference source, Candid is that and Plinth is not. If you need to research funder–grantee relationships across the whole 990 corpus, read pages without an account, or query grant data through a free API, Plinth covers that ground at no cost. Many people will reasonably use both.
- Is there a free alternative to Candid?
- Plinth is free to read — around 205,000 funder pages and 327,000 nonprofit pages with no account — and offers a free API key. Grantmakers.io is free and open source for 990-PF filings, and ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer is free for Form 990 summaries. Candid also has free routes of its own: free registration, two APIs at no fee, and a free year of Candid Premium for nonprofits under $1 million in revenue that earn a Gold Seal of Transparency.
- Does Candid have more data than Plinth?
- On volume, yes. Candid states 29 million grants and 304,000 funder profiles against Plinth's 17.9 million grants and 205,000 funders, and Candid's 1.9 million organization profiles far exceed our nonprofit page count. Candid also enriches IRS data with information collected directly from nonprofits and grantmakers, which we do not do. Plinth's difference is access and structure — free public pages, a free API, and the filings resolved into a queryable network — not size.
- Which is better for developers?
- It depends on budget and on what you need. Candid offers ten APIs including compliance-grade Charity Check and enriched Premier profiles, at $2,750 to $9,900 a year per product with a 30-day trial. Plinth's API is free with a key at 50 calls a month, uses similar parameter vocabulary, and adds a SQL endpoint and a plain-English query interface over the whole corpus. If you need verified compliance data for regulated workflows, Candid is built for that. See our Candid API alternative page for the endpoint mapping.
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.