# GrantNav vs OpenGrant: the same 360Giving data, two different jobs

GrantNav is the free, authoritative explorer of 1.5 million grants UK funders have already made. OpenGrant uses the same 360Giving data to answer a different question: what is open now, and who funds your peers.

- Author: OpenGrant
- Topic: [Grant databases compared](https://opengrant.co.uk/blog/category/grant-databases-compared)
- Published: 2026-10-26
- Updated: 2026-10-26
- Source sites checked: 2026-10-26
- Canonical URL: https://opengrant.co.uk/blog/grantnav-vs-opengrant

## Key facts

- GrantNav held 1,565,468 grants from 355 funders to 458,875 recipient organisations on 26 October 2026, plus 255,271 grants to individuals, all published in the 360Giving Data Standard.
- GrantNav data is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 and its source code under the GNU Affero General Public Licence; search, filter and download are free.
- GrantNav covers awarded grants. It does not list open calls or deadlines.
- OpenGrant lists open calls (1,021 schemes on 26 October 2026) and shows 360Giving totals, medians and recent grants on each funder page, with a GrantNav link beside them.
- OpenGrant's peers lookup takes a charity number and shows which funders have published grants to organisations like it; GrantNav shows the grants to that organisation itself.

GrantNav is 360Giving's free, open-licensed explorer of grants that UK funders have already made: 1,565,468 of them from 355 funders on 26 October 2026. OpenGrant uses the same 360Giving data for a different job, showing what is open now and which funders have published grants to organisations like yours, with a GrantNav link beside every figure. If you want to know what a funder has done, GrantNav is the authority. If you want to know what you can apply for this month, GrantNav cannot tell you.

## What GrantNav is

360Giving is the UK initiative that helps funders publish their grants as open data in a common format, the 360Giving Data Standard. GrantNav is its public search tool. Its homepage on 26 October 2026 reported 1,565,468 grants, 355 funders, 458,875 recipient organisations and 255,271 grants to individuals, and invited users to "search, explore and download grants data published by UK funders". The data is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, so you can reuse it with attribution, and the software is free under the GNU Affero General Public Licence.

In practice GrantNav lets you type a funder, recipient or keyword, filter by year, amount, region, funder and recipient type, open any grant to see its title, description, amount and dates, and download the result as a spreadsheet. A funder page lists every grant it has published; a recipient page lists every grant it has received from publishing funders. For [grant due diligence](https://opengrant.co.uk/blog/grant-due-diligence-checks) on a prospect, or for reading a funder's real giving pattern rather than its stated bands, nothing else is as complete.

## What GrantNav does not do

GrantNav covers awarded grants. It has no concept of a programme being open or closed, no deadlines, no eligibility criteria and no application links. A funder that published its 2024 grants in March 2025 looks the same on GrantNav whether or not it is accepting applications today. It also covers only the funders that publish: 355 of them, which includes almost every large trust, the lottery distributors and many councils and community foundations, but not the tens of thousands of small trusts on the charity registers that publish nothing.

That is why [Garfield Weston Foundation's](https://opengrant.co.uk/funders/garfield-weston-foundation) own site points applicants to GrantNav "to see who else we've funded like you", and in the same breath to its own application guidelines for what is open.

## What OpenGrant does with the same data

OpenGrant's open-call database is separate from 360Giving: it is built from funder pages and from published feeds such as GOV.UK Find a grant, UKRI, Innovate UK and the lottery distributors, with 1,021 open, rolling and forthcoming schemes on 26 October 2026 and a source link and last-verified date on each. The [browse page](https://opengrant.co.uk/grants/browse) is organised by place, organisation type, cause and deadline month.

360Giving data appears on the funder side. Each funder page shows, where the funder publishes, the number and total value of grants published, a typical award calculated as the median of the 100 most recent, the range across all grants, the split of recent recipients by organisation type, and the programme names that appear most often, with the fetch date and a link to the same funder on GrantNav. For example, [Esmée Fairbairn Foundation's page](https://opengrant.co.uk/funders/esmee-fairbairn-foundation) showed 7,345 grants worth £787 million and a median of £15,000 on 26 October 2026, next to its one open scheme and its register income.

The [peers lookup](https://opengrant.co.uk/peers) is the other use. Enter a charity number and OpenGrant finds organisations with similar registered purposes and shows which publishing funders have given to them. That turns the question "who funds charities like mine?" into a list of funder pages, each of which then links back to GrantNav for the full record.

## Side by side

- **Question answered**: GrantNav, "what has this funder given?"; OpenGrant, "what is open and who funds my peers?".
- **Data source**: GrantNav, 360Giving publishers only; OpenGrant, funder pages and open feeds for calls, 360Giving and the charity registers for funders.
- **Open calls and deadlines**: GrantNav, none; OpenGrant, yes, with monthly deadline pages.
- **Funder coverage**: GrantNav, 355 publishing funders; OpenGrant, 49,000 or more registered grant-makers, with 360Giving evidence where it exists.
- **Grant-level detail**: GrantNav, every grant with description and download; OpenGrant, totals, median, range and recent grants (the recent-grants table is in the paid tier).
- **Cost**: GrantNav, free and open; OpenGrant, every grant free with an account, research £29 a month.
- **Licence**: GrantNav, CC BY 4.0 data and AGPL code; OpenGrant, a public read-only API and MCP server for preview counts, with full data in the product.

## A working method

For a trusts pipeline, the sequence that uses each tool for what it is best at is: run the OpenGrant peers lookup on your charity number to get candidate funders; open each funder's OpenGrant page for register income, typical award and whether it has an open scheme; follow the GrantNav link to read the actual grants, amounts and descriptions, and download them; then go to the funder's own site for the application route. The [complete guide to charity grants](https://opengrant.co.uk/blog/charity-grants-uk) places that inside a full search, and [free UK grant finders](https://opengrant.co.uk/blog/free-grant-finders-uk) lists the other free tools worth adding. GrantNav figures and descriptions are taken from its site on 26 October 2026; 360Giving and GrantNav are the work of 360Giving, and OpenGrant is independent of them.

## Frequently asked questions

### What is GrantNav?

GrantNav is 360Giving's free tool to search, explore and download data about grants that UK funders have published in the 360Giving Data Standard. On 26 October 2026 it held 1,565,468 grants from 355 funders to 458,875 recipient organisations, plus 255,271 grants to individuals. The data is open under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

### Does GrantNav show grants that are open for applications?

No. GrantNav is a record of grants already awarded, which tells you what a funder has done, not what it is offering now. For open calls, deadlines and eligibility you need the funder's own site or a database of open schemes such as OpenGrant, GOV.UK Find a grant or the National Lottery Community Fund programme finder.

### Is OpenGrant just GrantNav with a subscription?

No. OpenGrant's open-call database comes from funder pages and government and lottery feeds, not from 360Giving. It uses 360Giving data for the funder research layer, showing published totals, a typical award and recent grants on each funder page, always with a link to the same funder on GrantNav. Every grant with full criteria is free with an account; the research tools cost £29 a month.

### Which is better for finding out who funds charities like mine?

Use both. OpenGrant's peers lookup starts from your charity number, finds organisations with similar purposes and shows which funders have published grants to them. GrantNav then lets you open each of those funders and read every grant they have made, filter by year, amount and location, and download the data. The two tools share the same underlying 360Giving records.

### Why do OpenGrant and GrantNav show different totals for a funder?

OpenGrant shows the number and value of grants it fetched for that funder on the date shown on the funder page, and its typical award is the median of the 100 most recent grants. GrantNav may hold grants published since then, or grants from a funder's second publisher record. Treat the GrantNav page linked from every OpenGrant funder page as the authoritative figure.

## Find grants

- [Funders A–Z](https://opengrant.co.uk/funders/a-z) (Markdown: https://opengrant.co.uk/funders/a-z.md)
- [Browse grants by place, organisation and cause](https://opengrant.co.uk/grants/browse) (Markdown: https://opengrant.co.uk/grants/browse.md)
- [Look up who funds organisations like yours](https://opengrant.co.uk/peers)

## Related guides

- [Charity Excellence Funding Finder vs OpenGrant: what each one is for](https://opengrant.co.uk/blog/charity-excellence-vs-opengrant): Charity Excellence's Funding Finder is free and worth keeping. OpenGrant adds source links, open-call ingest, 360Giving evidence, exports and an API. How the two differ, checked 26 October 2026.
- [Free UK grant finders for charities: what each one covers and what it leaves out](https://opengrant.co.uk/blog/free-grant-finders-uk): Eight free UK grant finders compared, plus Northern Ireland’s paid GrantTracker service: coverage, deadlines and registration. Checked 26 October 2026.
- [GrantFinder alternatives in 2026: paid, free and open-data options compared](https://opengrant.co.uk/blog/grantfinder-alternatives-uk): GrantFinder costs £1,020 a year for one user. The alternatives range from free government and open-data tools to £29 a month, each with a different trade-off. Prices checked 26 October 2026.
- [Grant due diligence: what do funders check?](https://opengrant.co.uk/blog/grant-due-diligence-checks): Prepare for grant due diligence with a practical checklist covering organisation records, accounts, named contacts and replies to funder questions.

## Sources and further reading

- [GrantNav (360Giving)](https://grantnav.threesixtygiving.org/)
- [OpenGrant: sources and coverage](https://opengrant.co.uk/sources)
- [OpenGrant: compare UK grant databases](https://opengrant.co.uk/compare)

All guides: https://opengrant.co.uk/blog.md · Glossary: https://opengrant.co.uk/glossary.md · Agent index: https://opengrant.co.uk/llms-guides.txt