MCGrantz vs Instrumentl

Written August 2026 · we check competitor pricing before publishing it, and we link to their page so you can too

Both tools help you find grants. They disagree about what makes a grant worth your week — and that difference is the only reason to read further.

We're the new one. Instrumentl is the established product in this category with a much larger funder database and years of customer reviews. We have neither. If this page reads like a sales pitch that pretends otherwise, we've failed at the one thing MCGrantz is supposed to be good at. There's a section below on when you should pick them instead, and we mean it.

The actual difference

Most grant tools rank opportunities by fit: your focus area, your location, your budget size, matched against what the funder says they want. That's useful, and MCGrantz does it too.

MCGrantz then asks a second question that changes the answer: who has actually won this exact program before, and do they look anything like you? We pull the public federal award record from USASpending.gov — real recipients, real amounts, real counts — and score you against the organizations that actually got funded.

Why that matters

A program can be a perfect thematic fit and still have funded nothing but $2M university consortia for nine straight years. Fit-based matching shows it to you. Award history tells you not to spend three weeks on it. Every score on MCGrantz opens up to show the winners behind it, so you can check the reasoning rather than trust it.

Side by side

	MCGrantz	Instrumentl
Starting price	$79/month or $790/year	From $299/month billed annually ($349 monthly)
Free tier	Yes — search and scoring free forever, no card	Free trial, then paid
Try without an account	Yes — enter an EIN and see real scored results	Sign-up required
Scored against real past winners	Yes — public USASpending award history, shown to you	Matching is fit-based
Funder database size	Live Grants.gov + IRS 990 foundations	Substantially larger — 450k+ funder profiles
AI drafting in your own voice	Yes, on Pro	Yes, on higher tiers
Track record	New product, no review corpus yet	Established, years of public reviews
SOC 2	Not certified	Check with them

Instrumentl pricing and funder count as published in August 2026; plans and prices change, so confirm on their pricing page before deciding. We don't quote a competitor's number we haven't checked, and we won't leave a stale one here. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Instrumentl; names are their owners' trademarks.

When you should pick Instrumentl

You work primarily on private foundation grants. Their funder database is far larger than ours, and breadth matters more than award-history scoring when the awards aren't public.
You're running 20+ concurrent applications and need mature pipeline and reporting tooling built for a development team.
Your board or funder requires a vendor with a long track record and published reviews. We're new. That's a legitimate reason to wait.
You need SOC 2 today. We aren't certified.

When MCGrantz is the better call

You pursue federal money, where the award record is public and knowing who won before is the single most useful signal available.
$299/month is not in your budget — most small nonprofits' grant tooling line is smaller than one month of it.
You want to check the reasoning rather than trust a score. Ours opens up to the underlying awards, and every grant links to the funder's own page.
You're a consultant managing many client organizations — Agency is $199/month for unlimited clients and unlimited drafts.
You want to evaluate it before paying anything. There's no card and no account required to see real scored results.

What we won't claim

We have no customer testimonials on this site yet, because we have no customers whose stories we can verify. When we do, they'll appear with real names and real results. We'd rather show placeholders than invent a quote — which is the same reason MCGrantz marks anything it can't verify as [INSERT] instead of writing a plausible number into your application.

See your scored grants free Where our data comes from

No account, no card. Enter an EIN and see real results in about a minute.