Research offices and individual investigators looking for funding rarely start from a blank search engine query. In practice they work through a small, mixed set of tools — some free and government-run, some institutionally licensed, some built for foundation and nonprofit funding rather than federal grants — and each one answers a different question. This guide is a landscape overview of the databases and platforms actually used to discover open funding opportunities, how they differ, and how they typically fit together in a research office’s workflow.
It is deliberately scoped to opportunity discovery, which is a different task from two things this site covers elsewhere: looking up what has already been funded (see Research Funding Data for the analytics angle, and the NIH- and NSF-specific past-award lookup tools discussed below), and vetting a single solicitation you’ve already found (see Call for Researchers: What It Means and How to Vet One).
Three different jobs, one confusing name
“Funding database” gets used loosely for at least three genuinely different tools, and mixing them up wastes time:
- Opportunity discovery — searching for currently open or upcoming solicitations you could apply to. This is what this guide covers: Grants.gov, Pivot-RP, GrantForward, Candid, and agency-specific portals.
- Past-award lookup — searching what a funder has already awarded, to gauge competitiveness, find comparable projects, or identify who else works in an area. NIH RePORTER and NSF’s Award Search are the two most-used US examples; neither one lists open solicitations.
- Solicitation vetting — once you have a specific opportunity in hand, assessing whether it’s legitimate and worth the effort to apply to. That’s a distinct evaluation step, not a database at all.
A single search session often needs all three in sequence: discover an open opportunity, check the funder’s past-award history to see whether your project fits their actual funding pattern, then vet the specific solicitation before committing staff time to a proposal.
Grants.gov: the free, authoritative source for US federal opportunities
Grants.gov is the US government’s single portal for discretionary federal grant opportunities across essentially every federal grant-making agency, and it is free to search and free to use — no institutional subscription required. Anyone can browse and search open opportunities without an account; an account and organizational registration (via SAM.gov, using your institution’s Unique Entity Identifier) are only needed to actually submit an application through Grants.gov Workspace. See Grants.gov Registration for what that setup involves.
Each listing is built around a Funding Opportunity Announcement / Notice of Funding Opportunity, and federal agencies are required to post their funding opportunities on Grants.gov, which is why it functions as the closest thing to a single comprehensive index of open US federal funding — agencies still maintain their own program pages, but Grants.gov is the cross-agency aggregator. Because it is free and comprehensive for federal opportunities specifically, most institutions treat Grants.gov as a baseline every research office uses, whether or not they also pay for a broader discovery platform.
Agency-specific portals, and why the NIH Guide is becoming less central
Beyond Grants.gov, individual federal agencies maintain their own search tools that sometimes carry information Grants.gov’s listing doesn’t surface as clearly — program-specific context, related notices, and agency-side application guidance. The NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts historically served this role for NIH, but NIH’s own FY2026 policy change (NOT-OD-25-143) discontinued posting new NOFOs in the Guide, making Grants.gov the sole official source for NIH funding-opportunity postings going forward while the Guide continues to carry other Notice types. NSF runs comparable dedicated tools for its own program solicitations and Dear Colleague Letters, which cross-post to Grants.gov as well; see NSF Funding Search for how that specific agency’s discovery tools work. The older Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbering that used to index federal assistance programs has likewise been folded into Grants.gov’s own Assistance Listings.
The practical implication: for federal opportunities, Grants.gov is the required baseline, but a research office chasing a specific agency (NIH, NSF, DOE, DoD, etc.) often still checks that agency’s own portal for context Grants.gov’s listing doesn’t carry.
Institutional-subscription discovery platforms: Pivot-RP and GrantForward
Grants.gov only covers federal opportunities. For a search that spans federal, foundation, and other sponsor types in one interface, most research-intensive institutions license one of two commercial platforms built specifically for the academic research community, made available to faculty and staff through the sponsored-programs or research-development office rather than purchased individually:
- Pivot-RP (a ProQuest product, ProQuest being part of Clarivate) indexes funding opportunities across federal, foundation, and other sponsor types, alongside researcher-profile and past-award data in the same interface, so a user can move between “what’s currently open” and “who has been funded in this area before” without switching tools. Access is institutional — a university or research organization licenses it, and affiliated researchers then search under that license, typically after creating an individual profile.
- GrantForward is built on the same institutional-subscription model, indexing tens of thousands of sponsors and opportunities updated on an ongoing basis, with faculty-profile-based recommendation matching and the ability for a research office to curate and share specific opportunities with relevant investigators or departments. Like Pivot-RP, individual researchers access it through their institution’s subscription, not a personal account they purchase separately.
[REPORTED tier — exact current sponsor/opportunity counts for both platforms change frequently and are marketed differently across sources; treat any specific figure as approximate and check each vendor’s own current materials rather than citing a fixed number.] The functional distinction that matters for choosing between them is less about raw counts and more about workflow fit: Pivot-RP’s combined opportunity-and-profile design suits offices that also want researcher-networking and past-funding-history features in the same tool, while GrantForward’s design leans toward opportunity alerting and office-to-faculty curation. Institutions with an active research-development function (see Research Development Manager) often build regular funding-alert workflows around whichever platform they license.
Foundation and nonprofit funder discovery: Candid
Neither Grants.gov nor the academic-research platforms above cover private foundations comprehensively, since foundation funding isn’t centrally posted the way federal opportunities are. Candid — formed from the 2019 merger of Foundation Center and GuideStar — is the standard tool for this gap, built substantially on IRS Form 990 data along with funders’ own submitted profiles, covering a far larger set of US foundations and their giving history than any federal or academic-specific tool. Its foundation-search product was long known as Foundation Directory Online (FDO); institutions and library guides across the sector still commonly refer to it by that name.
[REPORTED tier, time-sensitive — verify directly against candid.org before citing specifics]: Candid has been consolidating its separate legacy tools (Foundation Directory Online and GuideStar/Candid’s nonprofit-profile search) into a unified “Candid Search” platform, with the older Foundation Directory Online interface reported as being retired in favor of the combined platform. Given how recently and actively this transition is happening, confirm current product naming, access model, and pricing directly on candid.org before relying on this guide (or any other source written before the transition) for exact current details. Access is subscription-based, typically licensed by a library, foundation, or research office, with some free tiers and Funding Information Network partner-library access available for more limited lookups. For the broader landscape of private research funders this tool is used to search, see Private and Nonprofit Medical Research Funders.
Past-award lookup tools: a different job, not a discovery database
Two widely used US tools are frequently mentioned alongside opportunity-discovery databases but serve a different purpose — searching what has already been awarded, not what’s currently open for application:
- NIH RePORTER lets you search NIH’s own database of funded projects by institute, investigator, institution, or keyword — useful for gauging how competitive a program area has been, finding comparable funded projects to model a proposal on, or identifying potential collaborators or reviewers, but it does not list open solicitations.
- NSF Award Search plays the equivalent role for NSF-funded projects.
Research development offices typically use these as a complement to opportunity discovery, not a substitute for it: after finding an open opportunity through Grants.gov, Pivot-RP, or GrantForward, checking that same funder’s past-award record helps calibrate whether a proposal idea actually fits what the program has historically funded.
How research offices typically combine these tools
No single database covers federal, foundation, and international funding with equal depth, so most established research offices work with a deliberate combination rather than one tool:
- Grants.gov as the free baseline for all US federal opportunities, checked directly or via the agency’s own portal when more program-specific detail is needed.
- An institutional-subscription platform (Pivot-RP or GrantForward, rarely both) for cross-sponsor discovery, faculty-matching alerts, and internal opportunity curation.
- Candid (or an equivalent foundation-focused tool) specifically when a project’s likely funders are philanthropic rather than federal.
- Past-award lookup tools (NIH RePORTER, NSF Award Search, or the equivalent for a non-US funder) used to sanity-check a proposal idea against a funder’s actual funding history before investing proposal-development effort.
Research development professionals — a specialty distinct from research administration, see Research Development Manager — are frequently the staff who run this combined search on behalf of faculty, particularly for the recurring alert-and-curation workflow that a one-off manual search doesn’t replicate well.
Choosing among them: what actually differs
For an institution deciding what to license (rather than a researcher choosing which free tool to check first), the real differences are access model and coverage breadth, not raw feature lists:
- Cost and access model — Grants.gov is free and open to anyone; Pivot-RP, GrantForward, and Candid’s foundation-search product are institutional subscriptions, meaning an individual researcher’s access depends entirely on whether their institution currently licenses one.
- Sponsor-type coverage — Grants.gov is federal-only; Pivot-RP and GrantForward both aim for broad federal-plus-foundation-plus-other coverage but differ in depth by discipline and sponsor type; Candid is the deepest source specifically for US private foundations.
- Workflow features — faculty-profile matching, saved-search alerts, and internal opportunity-sharing vary by platform and matter more for a research-development office running proactive outreach than for a single investigator doing an occasional manual search.
- International coverage — all of the tools above are strongest for US funding; institutions working internationally typically add the relevant national funder’s own portal (for example, the UK’s UKRI Funding Service or the EU’s CORDIS/Horizon Europe portal) rather than relying on a US-centric aggregator for non-US opportunities.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best database for finding grant funding opportunities?
There isn’t one single best option, because no tool covers every funder type equally well. Grants.gov is the free, comprehensive source for US federal opportunities specifically. For a search that also spans foundation and other non-federal sponsors, most research-intensive institutions add an institutional subscription to Pivot-RP or GrantForward, and add Candid specifically for private-foundation funding.
Is Grants.gov free to use?
Yes. Searching and browsing Grants.gov requires no account and no institutional subscription. An account and SAM.gov organizational registration are only required to actually submit an application through Grants.gov Workspace, not to search for opportunities.
What’s the difference between Grants.gov and NIH RePORTER?
Grants.gov lists currently open federal funding opportunities you can apply to. NIH RePORTER is a past-award lookup tool — it shows what NIH has already funded, not what’s currently open for application. They answer different questions and are typically used together.
Do I need a paid subscription to find funding opportunities?
Not for US federal opportunities — Grants.gov is free. A paid institutional subscription (Pivot-RP, GrantForward, or Candid’s foundation-search product) becomes useful when you need broader, cross-sponsor coverage, curated alerts, or foundation funding that isn’t centrally posted anywhere free.
What is Pivot-RP used for?
Pivot-RP is an institutional-subscription platform, licensed by universities and research organizations, that combines a funding-opportunity search across federal and foundation sponsors with researcher-profile and past-funding data in one interface, so a user can research both what’s currently open and who has previously been funded in a given area.
For the broader grants-management picture this fits into, see the Grants Management & Funding pillar.
