GrantHub Replacement Checklist: 12 Questions to Ask Before Switching

GrantHub shut down January 31, 2026. Thousands of Canadian nonprofits are now evaluating replacements — most for the first time since they originally picked GrantHub years ago. The market has changed. The tools have changed. And what you actually need from a grant-management tool has probably changed too.

This is a checklist, not a feature comparison. Print it. Use it the same way for every tool you demo. If you score each tool on the same 12 questions, you will see the gaps quickly — and you will avoid the four mistakes that hurt switchers the most: picking a tool that has zero post-award support, picking one with no real Canadian funder database, picking one that traps your team in a US-centric workflow, or picking one that does discovery and writing well but treats reporting as someone else's problem.

For background on the alternatives themselves, see our companion piece: GrantHub Alternatives for Canadian Nonprofits in 2026.

Section 1 — Funder coverage

The whole point of a grant tool is that it knows about funders you don't. If you have to manually enter every grant opportunity, you've replaced a spreadsheet with a more expensive spreadsheet.

1. Does it cover Canadian funders — federal, provincial, and Indigenous-specific?

Most grant-discovery tools were built for US foundations. They have impressive databases of Form 990 data and US private foundations. None of that helps a Canadian nonprofit applying to Heritage Canada, Canada Council, FPCC, NRT, ISC, CIRNAC, FNHA, OTF, or any provincial fund. Ask explicitly: how many Canadian funders are in the database? How is provincial coverage handled? Are Indigenous-specific funders treated as a first-class category or buried under “diversity”?

2. Does it use real funder data, or does it just track grants you enter manually?

There's a difference between “you can save a grant opportunity here” and “here are 8,000 Canadian grant programs you can browse and filter by your eligibility.” Discovery tools have a real database; pipeline trackers don't. Ask to see the funder browse page during a demo — not just the saved-grants page.

3. Does it integrate federal proactive disclosure data so you can see who has won similar grants?

The Government of Canada publishes every grant and contribution award above $25,000 as open data. That dataset is roughly 1.9 million records, going back over a decade. A good Canadian grant tool indexes that data so when you're considering applying to a program, it can show you the orgs that won similar grants from the same funder, what amounts they received, and what year. That single data point — “FPCC awarded $50K–$90K to organizations like ours in the last three years” — changes whether you spend a week on an application or skip it.

Section 2 — The writing layer

The unglamorous truth about grant work is that it's mostly writing. A good tool helps with the writing, not just the project-management around the writing.

4. Does it actually help you write applications, or only track them?

GrantHub was a tracker. It told you what was due when. It didn't help you fill out the application. That's the gap most newer tools claim to fill — but how they fill it varies wildly. Some give you generic AI prompts (“explain your organization's impact”) and call it AI grant writing. Others actually structure your application section by section, draft initial content, and let you edit. Ask to see the section editor on a real funder's application — not just a marketing screenshot.

5. If it has AI writing, does the AI know your organization?

Generic AI is barely better than ChatGPT. Useful AI knows your mission statement, your programs, your populations served, your past outcomes, and your geographic focus — and references those every time it drafts a section. That requires the tool to ask for that information up front and store it as structured context. If the tool doesn't have an “Org Profile” or “AI context fields” section that the AI clearly references, the AI output will sound like every other applicant's.

6. Does it support French and English in the same workspace?

Canadian funders increasingly require, and reward, bilingual applications. Especially Heritage Canada, Canada Council, FPCC for Indigenous orgs working in French immersion or Métis communities, and most Quebec-based funders. If the tool can't draft a section in English and instantly translate to French (or vice versa) inside the same record, you'll end up running two parallel workflows in Word and reconciling them by hand.

Section 3 — Post-award (the gap)

This is the section that should make or break your decision. GrantHub didn't handle the post-award side well — it tracked deadlines, but contribution agreements, deliverables, reporting calendars, and budget reconciliation lived in spreadsheets. Most of the newer entrants are no better on this. If a tool scores 0 on any of these three questions, eliminate it.

7. Does it track contribution agreements, not just grant applications?

Once a grant is awarded, the application is done — but the work is not. A contribution agreement (CA) governs everything that happens between award and final report: payment schedule, eligible expenses, special conditions, allowable overhead. If the tool ends at “Awarded” status and you have to track CA terms separately, you'll be back in spreadsheets within a quarter.

8. Does it handle deliverables, reporting dates, and budget vs actual reconciliation?

Deliverables are the concrete things you promised in the application. Reporting dates are when the funder expects to hear from you. Budget vs actual is the financial reconciliation that determines whether you'll be invited to apply again. All three should live attached to the contribution agreement, with the budget reconciling to the line items you proposed in the application — not as three separate trackers.

9. Can it generate post-award reports (interim, final, acquittal) from the data it already has?

This is the future of post-award. You've already entered the deliverables. You've already entered the budget. You've already entered the narrative for each section of the original application. A modern tool should let you generate a draft interim or final report from that data instead of opening a blank Word document at 11pm the night before it's due. Ask vendors directly: do you generate reports, or do you just remind me to write them?

Section 4 — Team and workflow

The four people who use a grant tool are the grant writer, the executive director, the bookkeeper or finance lead, and (sometimes) a board member or program staffer. They have different needs.

10. Can multiple people work in the same workspace with proper roles?

Roles matter. The ED needs to see everything but probably shouldn't be drafting sections. The bookkeeper needs the post-award and budget views but doesn't need to see in-progress applications. A board chair might want read-only visibility on a specific grant. Ask whether the tool has actual role-based access control (owner, admin, writer, viewer) — or whether it's just “everyone sees everything.”

11. Does it track funder relationships separately from grants?

Funders are not the same as grants. A single funder might run five different programs you could apply to; a single program might have multiple contacts at the funder; a single contact might handle two different programs. A good tool has a funder CRM — contacts, interactions, follow-up dates, relationship status — that's linked to but separate from individual grant records. If you can't log a phone call with a program officer without attaching it to a specific grant, the tool will leave half your relationship history out of the workspace.

12. What's the migration path from GrantHub, your spreadsheets, and your existing email-based workflow?

Most vendors will say “CSV import.” That's table stakes. The harder questions are: can the tool import your GrantHub backup file directly? Can it parse a spreadsheet with one row per grant? Will someone from the vendor side help you with the import in the first week, or are you on your own? Migration is where most switches stall — not because the new tool is bad, but because the data move is daunting and there's nobody on the other end pushing it through.

Scoring guide

Total score out of 24:

• 20–24: Strong fit. Trial it with a real grant application — not a demo workspace.
• 16–19: Workable. Check whether the gaps are in Section 3 (post-award). If yes, demote to maybe; if not, keep evaluating.
• 10–15: Partial fit. Probably solves your discovery or writing pain but leaves you in spreadsheets for the rest.
• Under 10: Not a serious GrantHub replacement, regardless of how the demo looks.

A note on honesty

I built GrantWise, so I have an obvious bias. I wrote this checklist anyway because it's the same checklist we use internally when we're asked what we are and aren't. We are strong on Sections 2, 3, and 4 — that's the whole reason GrantWise exists. We're still building out Section 1 (the funder-coverage database), and we'll tell you that directly if you ask.

If you want to see how GrantWise scores against this checklist on your own data, you can sign in with your work email — magic link, no password, two minutes — and the workspace seeds itself with Canadian Indigenous grant data so you have something real to evaluate against. There's also a walkthrough page if you'd rather see the product before signing in.

Whichever tool you end up with, the time you save by scoring every option against the same 12 questions is more valuable than the demo time you'll be invited to spend with each one.