Comparison · Impala
Plinth vs Impala
Impala is the platform in this comparison that most overlaps with what we do, and on several measures it is ahead. It maps relationships at a scale we do not claim, refreshes far faster than we do, and does grantee monitoring we have no equivalent for. If you are evaluating on relationship data or freshness, take Impala seriously.
Every Impala figure below was read from Impala’s own pages on 12 August 2026.
In one screen
- Impala states 250,000+ foundations, 2 million+ nonprofits, 25 million+ grants, 10 million board members and over a billion mapped relationships.
- Impala's Paths finds warm-introduction routes to funders through board and staff connections — the same capability as Plinth's board interlocks, at larger stated scale.
- Impala refreshes most sources weekly and processes funding status and organizational changes within 24 hours of detection; Plinth refreshes monthly with a 12–24 month IRS filing lag.
- Impala pricing is published: Philanthropy Database Premium at $1,440 a year for the first user, with Funder Prospecting — which includes warm-intro paths — as a $2,000 a year add-on.
- Impala's public profiles show top 3 grantees, top 3 grants and 3 board members; the rest requires an account. Plinth details up to 2,000 grantees per funder page with no account.
- Plinth reads board relationships from Form 990 Part VII across the e-filed universe and publishes them free.
Where Impala is stronger
Relationship scale. Impala states 10 million board members and over a billion mapped relationships. Its Paths product finds routes to a funder through board and staff connections — materially the same capability as our board interlocks, at larger stated scale. We do not claim relationship pathfinding as something only we do.
Freshness. Most sources weekly, with funding status and organizational changes processed within 24 hours of detection. We refresh monthly against filings that are already 12 to 24 months old. For monitoring, that gap is decisive.
Grantee monitoring. Continuous health tracking with risk flags on low cash reserves and insolvency, plus reliance analysis across a portfolio. We publish the financial history; we do not watch it for you or raise alerts.
Where Plinth is different
Reading costs nothing, and pages are complete.Impala’s public profiles show top 3 grantees, top 3 grants and 3 board members before asking you to sign up. Our funder pages detail up to 2,000 grantees by value with the tail summarised, free and without an account.
Clustering without a taxonomy.Impala’s Portfolio Analysis asks you to insert your own taxonomy so you can use your own language — sensible for a funder managing named programmes. We cluster a funder’s grantees into themes computed from what they actually fund, which is the better tool when you do not already know the shape of a portfolio.
Programmatic access. We did not find a documented public API at Impala. Ours is free with a key, and adds plain-English querying over the whole corpus.
Provenance you can check.Impala states it aggregates from “verified nonprofit registries, government databases, and direct organizational partnerships”. Our board data comes from Form 990 Part VII and every figure links to the filing it came from.
Side by side
| Dimension | Plinth | Impala |
|---|---|---|
| Organizations covered | 205k funders · 327k nonprofit pages | 250k+ foundations · 2M+ nonprofits 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 | 25M+ grants source, 2026-08-12 |
| Nonprofit → funder lookup | Free public page per nonprofit | In-product; gated on public profiles 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 | Ecosystems — analyse the funders, nonprofits and grants in a landscape 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 | 10M board members · 1B+ mapped relationships; warm-intro paths in the Funder Prospecting add-on 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 | Portfolio Analysis — “Insert your own taxonomy so you can use your own language”, 20+ financial datapoints source, 2026-08-12 |
| Semantic search | Meaning-based org search over 990 mission text, in the API and the chat | Criteria-based prospect lists source, 2026-08-12 |
| Public API | Free with a key, 50 calls/month; paid plans for volume | Not publicly documented |
| 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 | Top 3 grantees, top 3 grants, 3 board members; the rest gated 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 | Regional Philanthropy Hubs 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 | Most sources weekly; funding status and organizational changes within 24 hours of detection source, 2026-08-12 |
| Entry price | Free to read; free API key | Free account; Philanthropy Database Premium $1,440/year, add-ons from $2,000/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 relationship layer running: funding clusters, how funders cluster by portfolio, or an example dossier.
Questions and answers
- Does Plinth do board relationship mapping like Impala's Paths?
- Yes, and Impala got there with more data than we have. Impala states 10 million board members and over a billion mapped relationships, and its Paths product traverses connections through board members and staff to find warm introductions. Plinth computes board interlocks from Form 990 Part VII across the e-filed universe and publishes them on free public pages. The capability is comparable; the differences are provenance, scale and price.
- Which has fresher data?
- Impala, clearly. It states that most sources refresh weekly and that funding status and organizational changes are processed within 24 hours of detection. Plinth refreshes monthly and inherits the 12 to 24 month IRS filing lag that applies to anything built on 990 data. If you need early warning about a grantee's situation, Impala is built for that and we are not.
- How much does Impala cost?
- Impala publishes its pricing. Philanthropy Database Premium is $1,440 a year for the first user with 40% off additional users. Add-ons per first user: Ecosystem Research and Due Diligence at $3,250 a year each, Portfolio Analysis and Funder Prospecting at $2,000 a year each. Bundles include Impala for Grantmakers at $8,946 a year and Impala for Fundraisers at $5,000. Free accounts provide basic organizational profiles and limited search.
- What does Plinth do that Impala does not?
- Two things we could verify. Portfolio clustering: Impala's Portfolio Analysis asks you to supply your own taxonomy, whereas we cluster a funder's grantees into themes computed from what they actually fund. And programmatic access: we did not find a documented public API at Impala, while ours is free with a key and includes a plain-English query interface over the whole corpus. We also publish complete funder pages free without an 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.