GrantTrove and Grants.gov, side by side
How GrantTrove and Grants.gov differ on price, coverage and what each one shows about a record. Every Grants.gov figure was checked on 2026-09-07.
What Grants.gov is genuinely good at
This section is not a formality. Grants.gov is a real product with real advantages, and a reader deciding between the two is better served by knowing them than by a page that pretends they do not exist.
- It is the primary source, not a copy of one: a federal notice is here because the agency posted it here, which is why our own federal records link back to it.
- Free, complete for federal discretionary programmes, and searchable without an account — there is no tier that hides a notice.
- A documented public API returns the same counts anyone can see in the interface, which is more transparency about coverage than any commercial product in this registry offers.
- Application submission for most agencies runs through it, so discovery and submission are one system rather than two.
Where GrantTrove is different
Where the two products actually diverge, point by point.
- Every record shows when it was last checked, against which source domain, and by which method.
- Programme pool and per-award ceiling are separate fields that are never shown under one label.
- Core fields — amounts, deadlines, eligibility, source link, verification stamp — are free without an account, permanently.
- A field the source did not state reads Not stated rather than being filled with a plausible value.
And the honest cost of that. Coverage is early. The data sources page publishes exactly which feeds are connected and which are not. If your search depends on breadth today rather than on traceability, Grants.gov has more records than we do and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Price
What each side charges, and what the free tier holds back.
GrantTrove pricing checked 2026-09-02 against our own pricing page.
Grants.gov pricing checked 2026-09-07 against Grants.gov’s own pricing page.
Field by field
Field by field, with the ones neither side publishes marked as such.
| Field | GrantTrove | Grants.gov |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A grant database where every field is traceable to one official page and carries the date we last confirmed it. | The federal government's own portal for discretionary grant opportunities, free to search without an account and authoritative for what it covers. |
| Cheapest paid entry | $19/mo · read from the price config at render | $0 · checked 2026-09-07 |
| Readable without paying | Every field of every record, permanently | Not measured |
| Coverage the product publishes | Records linked 1,734 · Verified inside the freshness window 1,160 of 1,160 | Posted opportunities 1,025 · Forecasted 561 · Closed 8,709 · Archived 73,072 |
| Shows when a record was last checked | Yes — date, source domain and method on every record | Not measured |
| Separates programme pool from award ceiling | Yes, always two fields under two labels | Not measured |
| What an empty field shows | Not stated, Not confirmed or Not linked yet — three different sentences | Not measured |
| Eligibility restrictions on who may subscribe | None stated | None stated |
“Not measured” means we have not audited that property of Grants.gov and will not guess at it. Every Grants.gov figure above comes from a page Grants.gov publishes about itself, checked 2026-09-07.
What this page does not claim
What this page does not claim, and how it was written.
We do not publish a record count of our own counting for another product, a freshness figure we have not sampled, or an accuracy rate for anyone. Doing so would require an audit with a stated method and a date, and we have not run one. Where a comparison would need such a number, the row above reads Not measured.
Use Grants.gov. If federal discretionary programmes are the whole of your search, it is the primary source, it is free, it is complete for what it covers, and nothing we add would repay the price of a subscription. Choose GrantTrove when your search crosses layers Grants.gov does not hold — state, county, city, tribal and foundation funding — or when you need to know that a record you read last month has changed since.