FundFit Competitions vs InfoReady

The office this page is written for

A sponsor says an institution may submit two. Forty faculty want one of the two. Somebody in research development has to tell thirty-eight people no, on time, with a reason, and then make sure the institution does not accidentally send a third. That job has a name, limited submissions, and for most of the last decade the software behind it has been InfoReady Review.

If that is your office, you are the reader. FundFit Competitions runs the same cycle: find the limited opportunity, set the competition up, announce it, collect the applications, review them, and send the decisions. This page puts the two side by side, row by row, and says where InfoReady is still ahead, because a comparison that hides those rows is not one you should trust from either vendor.

What InfoReady does that we do not

Start here, because it is the part a vendor page usually leaves out.

InfoReady has an organisation hierarchy, so a college can sit under the university and a department under the college, with reviewers mapped to each level. It has co-administrators scoped to one competition, so a departmental coordinator can run their own without seeing everyone else’s. It has proxy submissions, where an administrator applies on someone’s behalf. It has a return-for-revisions routing step, a public API that pushes a fixed set of data into your other systems, and outbound data feeds on a schedule.

Competitions has none of those at launch. Some are on our list. If your process depends on one of them today, that row decides the evaluation, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it in month two.

InfoReady also has years of customers and a support portal with hundreds of articles. That is worth something. It is also, as it turns out, where most of the rows on this page come from.

Where the difference shows up

The competition starts from the solicitation

Every limited submission begins with a document the sponsor wrote. It says how many the institution may submit, the sponsor’s deadline, who is eligible, and which documents it wants. Those are the fields an administrator retypes into a setup form, and the retyping is where the hour goes.

Competitions reads the document instead. Paste the sponsor’s URL or upload the PDF, and the competition comes back drafted, with the limit, the dates, the award amounts, and the eligibility summary each showing the sentence in the solicitation they were read from. You are checking a citation, not trusting a summary. Then you set the internal deadline and the review window, and the timeline works back from the sponsor’s date and tells you if the schedule cannot be met.

InfoReady’s setup is a stepped form you fill in by hand, starting from a template. Which templates you start from depends on your level of service, and the older General and Funding templates were retired in July 2026, so a new competition starts from Form Designer. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a form. It is also the thing an office does eight or twelve times a year, and it does not get faster.

The limited opportunity finds the office

The second difference is upstream of the competition. FundFit already reads the funding opportunities your faculty are matched to. The ones a sponsor limits per institution are flagged and wait in an Incoming list for the office. You turn one into a draft competition or dismiss it, or let Competitions check every hour, draft them, and email your administrators when one arrives.

InfoReady’s answer is a push from a discovery tool you subscribe to separately. The Pivot-RP integration needs an account in both products and is switched on by InfoReady support, and GrantForward and Atom Grants have links of their own. If your office already pays for one of those, the integration works and this row is a draw. If it does not, the difference is whether the coordinator hears about the limited call from the feed or from the PI who wanted to apply.

What you can still change the day after launch

This one comes straight from InfoReady’s own support portal, in an article titled, honestly, what can’t be edited after launching.

An opportunity cannot be un-launched. If you launch by accident you can hide it from the homepage. Assigning one reviewer to one routing step locks the rating scales on every routing step that exists, and the workaround the portal offers is to delete the step and build it again. The maximum number of applications can be raised but not lowered. The opportunity owner is changed by InfoReady, not by you. Phase one of a letter of intent is locked once it converts.

Competitions keeps settings editable after launch and warns you when a change touches people who already applied. A published form is versioned, so changing it means publishing a new version rather than editing the one applicants already saw. Neither product lets you rewrite history. One of them lets you fix a scale on Tuesday.

What the tier holds back

InfoReady sells four service levels, Bronze through Platinum, plus Enterprise, and its 2025 service levels sheet is clear about what each one includes. Competitions, applicants, reviewers, and storage are unlimited everywhere. Almost everything else is tiered.

Administrator seats are two, ten, twenty-five, or seventy-five. Microsites, the landing pages a college or a centre gets, are one, one, three, or six. InCommon single sign-on starts at Silver; Shibboleth or CAS starts at Gold. Conditional logic in forms, blind reference letters, the master keyword list, and department-driven routing start at Gold. Sending email from your own address, a vanity URL, a data feed out, and directory look-up start at Platinum. Each of those can be bought as an add-on to a lower tier.

Competitions is one add-on to FundFit. Every feature on this page comes with it. Single sign-on is not held back for a higher plan, and sites, users, and administrators are unlimited. We do not publish a price, because it depends on your institution, but the shape is one line, not a grid.

The test is simple. Write down the process your office actually runs, and ask InfoReady which tier it needs. Then ask both of us for a number.

Rounds, letters, and what comes after the award

Most cycles do not need forty full proposals. Competitions runs a notice of intent, then a pre-proposal, then the full application, each as a round with its own form, dates, and reviewers. A round opens only if more people advance than the sponsor allows; if not, it is marked as not run and the earlier round names the nominees. Tracks split a competition by sponsor category, each with its own slot limit, and a decision that would overrun a track is refused before it goes out. InfoReady does the two-phase version, a letter of intent that converts into the full competition, and a maximum number of applications per opportunity.

Reference letters work the same way in both: the applicant names the writer, the writer uploads through a link without an account, and the office does not chase. InfoReady’s are Gold and above; ours come with the add-on, and the letter stays confidential from the applicant.

Progress reports are the row where InfoReady is ahead today. Its module is at every tier, with scheduling, reminders, batch assignment, and delegation to another user. Competitions ships post-award rounds at launch, with their own forms, deadlines, and reminders, on the same record as the competition and the award. If reporting to the funder is most of your year, ask both of us to show you a real one before you decide.

Reporting

InfoReady has pre-defined and real-time reports, a report dashboard, a PDF export tool, and Excel exports at every tier, and a scheduled data feed out at Platinum. That is a more complete set than we ship today, and if your office lives in those exports, weight the row.

What Competitions offers at launch is Lyn, the assistant in every Streamlyne product. Ask for the report you want in plain words, get it, and export it. There is no report builder to learn and no tier that unlocks a dashboard. Whether that is better depends on whether your office wants the twelve reports it already runs or the one it has never been able to get.

What an evaluation should test

1. Bring your own bad solicitation. Pick a real one with the limit in a footnote and the eligibility in an appendix, and stand the competition up in both products from that document. Time it, and check every field against the source.
2. Launch, assign one reviewer, then change a rating scale. Do it in both. One of them will let you.
3. Ask for the tier. Describe the process you run, with the sign-on you use and the units that need their own page, and ask InfoReady which service level it needs and how many administrator seats. Then ask us for a number for the same process.
4. Run a notice of intent into a full round. Check that the application that advances is still linked to its earlier round, and ask what the applicant retypes.
5. Send forty decisions. Time the morning after the deadline, from the last review to the last email, and read the feedback each applicant gets.
6. Ask about the rows above where InfoReady is ahead. Hierarchy, co-administrators, proxy submissions, the API, the data feed. If you need one of them, get a date from us in writing or choose InfoReady.

What we are not claiming

We are not claiming InfoReady is a weak product. It has been the answer to this problem for a long time, its routing engine is deeper than ours in several places, and on the rows above where it is ahead, it is simply ahead.

We are not claiming an office that runs InfoReady well should move. If the tier fits, the process fits, and the cycle takes an hour to set up, the case for changing is thin and we would rather say so.

What we are claiming is that the competition should start from the solicitation, the limited opportunity should arrive without anybody searching, the settings should still be yours the day after launch, and the product should not be sold in tiers. Four things, tested with your own documents.

Where these rows come from

The InfoReady column is from its public 2025 service levels sheet, its plans and integrations pages, and its support portal, read on the date printed under the table, with each row’s source listed in the change that published this page. The FundFit Competitions column describes the product as it ships on 1 October 2026, checked against the product’s own code. The rows marked at launch are the ones that arrive on that date, and until then a demo is the way to see them. If we have a row wrong, in either column, tell us and we will fix it and re-date the page.