As a grant coordinator working with healthcare clients across the country, I spend a lot of time prospecting and building tailored grant lists. What goes on these lists is so important because even the best grant writers can’t out-write a poorly fit funding opportunity.
Recently, I was looking for funding opportunities for a rural health center in Tennessee focused on chronic disease and blood pressure management. I decided to use both Instrumentl and GrantWatch to see how each tool could support me in my search.
While both platforms offered more than a simple Google search, only one was able to streamline my entire workflow and match me with relevant, good-fit grants at the pace I need to maintain a good workflow for my clients.
Bottom Line: My Top Choice for a Grant Platform
After running the same search through both platforms, my clear top choice is Instrumentl.
Instrumentl not only helps me discover grants, but it also supports the full grant lifecycle—from refining searches, to evaluating opportunities with funder insights, to managing and tracking applications in one place. GrantWatch can be useful for basic discovery, but Instrumentl consistently saves me more time and provides the strategy layer I need to support clients effectively.
Instrumentl and GrantWatch Feature Comparison Table
Setting Up a Search Is Easier With Instrumentl
Instrumentl’s setup process made it simple to define my project.
Key steps I used in Instrumentl
- Enter a description of the program and watch the tool generate suggested keywords.
- Specify nonprofit hospital clinic as the organization type.
- Filter for funders, including state and local government, corporate, private, and associations.
- Set a minimum grant amount of $5,000 to match project costs.
- Tag project goals such as education, capacity building, and healthcare access.
This made my search both broad enough to capture opportunities and refined enough to be relevant. By contrast, setting up the search on GrantWatch required more manual work. While I could paste in a description and select a broad category like “health and medical,” the tool offered fewer refinements and lacked automated keyword suggestions.
As I understand it, the keywords are the backbone of how Instrumentl matches grants to a project. And even if you don't have exact keywords, you can type in what you do, who you serve, and intended outcomes/impact and it will generate keywords for you. This helps you flesh out your project, even if briefly, to ensure you will get the most relevant matches.
With GrantWatch, there is an AI Grant Finder as well, where you can type in what you are looking for, and it will research for you and then generate grant options. However, I found that I didn’t get many results this way, and prefer Instrumentl’s keyword generator to find relevant results.
Filtering and Assessing Results Is Faster With Instrumentl
When results came back, Instrumentl’s layout made it easy to move quickly:
Why Instrumentl Felt More Efficient
- Results are displayed in a dual-pane layout (similar to an email inbox) with a scrollable list and detailed summaries.
- Keywords I had entered were highlighted in green, helping me instantly spot relevant matches.
- I could save promising grants with one click or hide irrelevant ones to keep my list clean.
On GrantWatch, results appeared in a less organized single-page list. I often had to open new tabs to view details, slowing down the process and making it harder to evaluate opportunities at a glance. This may feel minor to some, but when I am searching for grants for 5+ clients every month, every spare minute counts, and any hindrances slow down my workflow.
When researching for multiple clients, it’s important to be able to move quickly. There are so many grant opportunities out there that it can become overwhelming quickly. When I see a grant with multiple keywords in green when I go through my matches in Instrumentl, I can easily identify it as an opportunity I’d like to look into further.
Instrumentl also does a good job at filtering out opportunities that may not be relevant. I love that I can select the most pressing filters and apply geographic restrictions to narrow down my search and prioritize items on my prospect list.
For example, if a funder has a history of giving where my project is located, this opportunity is likely to be prioritized over another.
I had to keep my keywords really broad in GrantWatch to generate results, so I just used “Healthcare” and set my location preference to Tennessee. There are technically filters, but they are much more cumbersome to use vs. checking and unchecking boxes in Instrumentl.
Evaluating Relevance and Saving Grants Is Easier With Instrumentl
To build my shortlist, I always look at eligibility, geographic focus, funding amount, past giving, and deadlines. Instrumentl made this process much clearer.
What Instrumentl Provided That Helped Me Decide
- 990 insights summarizing past giving, average and median award sizes, and trends by issue area.
- A geographic giving map showing where a funder focuses support.
- A tracker where I could label each grant as “Planned” or “Researching”.
GrantWatch provided some high-level insights and links to RFPs, but lacked detailed breakdowns by geography or program area. Saving a grant also required adding it manually to a calendar.
When it comes to diving deeper into opportunities to decipher whether they are worth pursuing, there is no match for Instrumentl’s 990 insights. Instrumentl provides the detail needed to efficiently deduce if a particular grant opportunity and funder will be a good fit for my client.
When evaluating a funder in Instrumentl, the first thing I am typically drawn to is the map of past giving.
Even if the grant looks to be perfectly aligned, is it really worth pursuing if they have never funded Tennessee in the past? Probably not.
When you visit “990 Report” in GrantWatch, it simply provides a total of grant dollars awarded and received each year. While it is interesting to see how much grant money they awarded in a year, it is not as helpful as Instrumentl’s median award amount, past giving by NTEE code, and past giving geographically.
When I feel as though I have fleshed out an opportunity enough in Instrumentl, I save it to my “Tracker.” I like how instead of having to remember whether I wanted to for sure pursue this one or keep researching, I can use Instrumentl’s “Status” column to organize my saved grants further.
With GrantWatch, I could save opportunities similarly, and they were then added to a calendar. You can also select statuses here, but I didn’t find these to be as helpful for what I use them for, which is organizing a prospect list.
Instrumentl Delivers More Speed, Depth, and Strategy
After testing both tools, the differences were clear. Instrumentl helped me create a prospect list that was both comprehensive and organized—without wasting time.
My Overall Conclusion
- Both tools support grant discovery
- Instrumentl streamlines the workflow and helps me move from search to strategy
- Instrumentl’s depth of insights makes it easier to prioritize and approach funders confidently
GrantWatch can be a good entry point for basic searches, but as someone who creates prospect lists for diverse healthcare clients, I need a grant strategy tool. Instrumentl helps me move from discovery to action with clarity and speed.
In the end, both tools can help you deliver a detailed grant prospect list. Instrumentl just gets you there faster and more efficiently.
