CommunityForce vs ResearchMaster Enterprise

CommunityForce is a web-based awards management platform for grants, scholarships, fellowships, and research funding. It supports programs from funding discovery and applications through review, awards, disbursement, compliance, reporting, and closeout. Application tools include conditional forms, eligibility screening, shared applications across opportunities, and applicant dashboards. Reviewers can collaborate using scoring and rubrics, while administrators can manage bulk awards, renewals, and post-award requirements. Phoenix searches Grants.gov, IRS Form 990 filings, and a curated list for opportunities matching an organisation’s funding profile. Its AI features can summarize applications, suggest reviewer scores, flag AI-written essays, and answer questions using live platform data. The platform provides ad hoc reports, dashboards, exports, and embedded Microsoft Power BI dashboards. Integrations include Salesforce, DocuSign, Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, SMTP email, and Google Translate. The company says each organisation has a separate database and file storage in a private Microsoft Azure environment. It states that it is FedRAMP certified and SOC 2 Type II, and supports Section 508, FERPA, and PCI-DSS requirements. Pricing is available on request; the product pages direct prospective buyers to request a demo or speak with an expert.

ResearchMaster Enterprise is an organisation-wide system for organising, administering, reviewing and overseeing research from inception through completion. Its suite covers grants, ethics, higher degree research, outputs and contracts. Grants Management tracks work from notice of intent to project completion and includes ARC and NHMRC integration and reporting. Ethics Management handles human, animal and biosafety applications, reviews, approvals and renewals, with configurable routing and committee meeting tools. Configurable online forms support mandatory fields, notifications, comments, reminders, escalations and automated workflows, and are described as compatible with mobile devices. Dashboards, external researcher profiles, built-in reports and scheduled reporting support oversight. Integration options include a REST API, provider-agnostic feeders for university Finance, Student, HR and repository systems, plus ARC Grants, NHMRC Grants, NHMRC HREA and ORCID connections. The product is available through web, API and self-hosted platforms. The vendor offers implementation, migration, configuration and integration services, alongside a dedicated Engagement Manager, help desk and ongoing training. Pricing is on request; a quality assessment tool is listed as coming soon.