AwardSpring vs Common Grant Application

AwardSpring is a paid platform for higher-education offices managing scholarships, donors, and funds through web and API access. Scholarship Management covers applications, review, scoring and rubrics, award decisions, notifications, disbursement scheduling, documentation, reviewer collaboration, applicant access, workflow automation, and reporting. A universal application can be matched automatically with funds a student qualifies for. Donor Management stores donor profiles, supports email campaigns and automated stewardship journeys, and provides reporting dashboards. Fund Management tracks gifts through awards, monitors balances, flags underused funds, and forecasts utilization; the product is marked Fall '26 on the platform page. Connections to Banner, Colleague, and Workday support enrollment verification, disbursement coordination, and financial reconciliation. A REST API uses an institution secret key. AwardSpring states that records are encrypted in transit and at rest, access points are logged, and its SOC 2 Type II audit is renewed annually. Pricing is by contacting sales; the listed plan has unlimited applicants, reviewers, and admins without per-seat Scholarship Management fees.

Common Grant Application is a customizable web system for managing grant and scholarship lifecycles, including online and paper-based applications. Grantmakers can create reusable forms for applications, recommendations and reports with text, document and media fields. Review workflows support evaluation steps, reviewer groups, scoring or ranking, notes and controls over evaluation visibility. Grantmakers can manage agreements, reports and payment amounts, then export payment information to a spreadsheet. Each application can contain up to two grant agreements and eight grant reports. Applicants pay nothing; grantmakers pay a monthly subscription starting at $175 a month. The Low Complexity plan covers one to two administrative users and 1–50 applications annually. Medium Complexity costs 250.00 USD monthly, and High Complexity costs 450.00 USD monthly. The browser-based service requires no installation and supports Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. Setup, support and training are included.