Comparison · Cause IQ
Plinth vs Cause IQ
Cause IQ is the closest competitor to a specific thing we do, and it is worth being precise about the difference rather than blurring it. It also serves an audience we do not: companies selling services to nonprofits, alongside nonprofits looking for funders.
Every Cause IQ figure below was read from Cause IQ’s own pages on 12 August 2026.
In one screen
- Cause IQ covers 2 million+ nonprofits and foundations, with a free tier offering 8 search filters and limited historical grants.
- Cause IQ mines grant data from Schedule I of the Form 990 and, in its own wording, Part XIV of the Form 990-PF.
- Cause IQ layers federal award data from USAspending and Single Audit detail, including prime and sub-awards, for awards since 1 January 2020.
- Cause IQ's funding tool shows which foundations gave to a peer segment with grant counts, averages and size ranges; no funder-to-funder relationship strength measure is documented.
- Plinth computes overlap strength between pairs of funders directly, and adds state checkbook data from nine states alongside federal awards.
- Cause IQ paid plans run $199–349 a month for Core and $4,488–5,988 a year for Pro, with API access on Pro and Enterprise. Plinth's API is free with a key.
Where Cause IQ is stronger
Breadth of filtering. 450+ search filters across 2 million+ organizations, built for segmenting a market. If your job is to build a targeted list by revenue band, geography, NTEE type and a dozen other axes, that is what the product is for.
Federal funding depth. Cause IQ pulls USAspending plus Single Audit detail, covers prime and sub-awards including block grants passing through state agencies, and shows awards since 2020 with agency and CFDA detail on the organization profile. We carry federal USAspending data too, but their sub-award handling goes further than ours.
Serving the vendor side. Executive compensation benchmarking, Salesforce integration and prospecting for companies selling into the sector. We do none of this.
Where Plinth is different
Funder-to-funder overlap.This is the distinction that matters. Cause IQ answers “which foundations fund organizations like mine?” — a peer-segment aggregation with grant counts, averages and size ranges. We answer “which two funders genuinely travel together?”, measuring overlap strength between a pair of funders and discounting thin evidence. Both are useful and they are not the same question.
State government funding.We add checkbook data from nine states alongside federal awards, which we did not find in Cause IQ’s materials.
Free reading, and a free API.Cause IQ’s free tier is real but bounded — 8 filters, limited historical grants, and profile lists that truncate with a prompt to subscribe. Our pages are free without an account, and the API is free with a key rather than requiring a Pro subscription.
Side by side
| Dimension | Plinth | Cause IQ |
|---|---|---|
| Organizations covered | 205k funders · 327k nonprofit pages | 2M+ nonprofits and foundations 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 | From “Schedule I of the Form 990 and Part XIV of the Form 990-PF” source, 2026-08-12 |
| Nonprofit → funder lookup | Free public page per nonprofit | In-product, on the organization profile 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 | Which foundations fund a peer segment — grant count, average, sum, smallest, largest. No funder-to-funder strength measure documented. source, 2026-08-12 |
| 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 | Contacts on the organization profile source, 2026-08-12 |
| 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 | 450+ search filters source, 2026-08-12 |
| Public API | Free with a key, 50 calls/month; paid plans for volume | Pro and Enterprise subscriptions 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 | Profile public with financials and sample grants; lists truncate to “…and 60 more grants received” source, 2026-08-12 |
| Government funding | Federal (USAspending) plus 9 state checkbooks, joined to the same organizations | USAspending plus Single Audit detail, prime and sub-awards, awards since 1 January 2020 source, 2026-08-12 |
| Geographic mapping | Service area resolved to counties, joined to community need data | Location filters 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 | Not publicly documented |
| Entry price | Free to read; free API key | Free tier with 8 filters; Core $199–349/month; Pro $4,488–5,988/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.
Where to start
See the co-funder layer running on real data in the named funding clusters, or look up who funds a given nonprofit. The methodology explains how the graph is built.
Questions and answers
- Does Cause IQ show which funders fund organizations like mine?
- Yes. Cause IQ's funding tool lets you build a peer segment — by criteria or an explicit peer list — and see which foundations gave to organizations in it, with the number of grants each made, the average grant size, the sum, and the smallest and largest amounts, plus the top 25 largest grants. It is a well-built answer to the peer-funder question.
- How is Plinth's co-funder analysis different?
- It answers a different question. Cause IQ tells you which funders gave to organizations like yours. Plinth measures how strongly two funders overlap in the organizations they both back, discounting pairs where the evidence is thin, so you can see which funders genuinely travel together rather than which merely appear in the same list. Both are useful; they are not substitutes. We found no documented funder-to-funder strength measure in Cause IQ's own materials.
- Does Cause IQ include government funding data?
- Yes, and more thoroughly than most people expect. Cause IQ pulls federal grant and contract data from USAspending.gov and from Single Audit details, includes both prime and sub-awards, and shows awards since 1 January 2020 on organization profiles with agency and CFDA detail. Plinth also carries federal USAspending data and adds checkbook data from nine states, which we did not find at Cause IQ.
- Does Cause IQ have a free tier?
- Yes — a free plan with 8 search filters including location, revenue size and NTEE type, limited access to basic descriptive and Form 990 information, and limited historical grants. Paid plans are Core at $349 a month, or $199 a month for 501(c)(3) nonprofits, and Pro at $5,988 a year, or $4,488 for 501(c)(3)s. Plinth is free to read with no filter limits and no account.
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.