Best AI Grant Writing Tools: 15+ Top Resources & Our Take

Every grant writer dreams about completely streamlining their grant writing process and finding new ways to effortlessly strengthen their proposals.

After all, if you could produce a winning proposal in half the usual time, how much more support could you win for your nonprofit? If you’re a freelancer, how much more business could you secure?

🔮 This is the vision for artificial intelligence in the grant writing field—unlocking efficiency and drastically speeding up the rate at which you can apply for and win funding. Breezing through the most menial parts of a grant means you’ll have more time to work on the parts that require human creativity and more time to simply enjoy your life outside of work. What’s not to love?

Tech is racing to catch up with grant writers’ dreams. We’ve seen some incredible innovations in a short span of time (ChatGPT was only released in 2022!), but there’s still a long way to go.

If you want to incorporate AI into your grant writing, you’ll need to navigate a confusing field of new platforms and buzzy jargon. Let’s cut through the clutter. In this guide, we’ll answer your burning questions:

• Are there any all-in-one AI grant writing tools?
• Which AI tools are worth my attention as a grant writer?
• What should I keep in mind if I use AI for grant writing?

Follow along as we highlight the top AI grant writing tools that we think are the best options to keep an eye on or add to your toolkit. We’ll also tell a bit of our own story working with AI and the (hard-won) lessons the Learn Grant Writing team has picked up along the way.

Before We Begin: Our Top Lessons from the AI Grant Writing Trenches

Imagine a company getting its first desktop computer decades ago, a humming, hulking beast of a machine. Before we learned how best to use these tools, there was a steep learning curve (and probably a lot of mistakes).

It’s kind of like we’re back to square one with a new technology now.

Before relying on just any AI tool to help you write a grant, and especially before paying for one, you should understand the reality of what they’re capable of.

Today’s AI tools are not perfect. They cannot write you a winning grant proposal from scratch with minimal input. You’ll need to actively collaborate with them to produce a quality proposal.

Here are the most important rules of thumb we’ve learned to keep in mind when using AI:

• Context is critical. The quality of the context you feed an AI tool determines the quality of its outputs. We’ve all seen funny stories of generative AI tools hallucinating incorrect (or downright bizarre) answers to prompts. Avoid these mishaps with thorough, crystal-clear context about the grant, nonprofit, and proposed project. We can show you how to build context for better grant writing.
• Effective prompting gets AI to focus. Even when you provide all the necessary context to an AI tool, how you frame your requests will impact the quality of its answers. Simple questions with clear-cut answers are less of a concern. However, for questions that would require a human to do multiple steps, you’ll need to employ something called “chain prompting,” guiding the AI through a logical process so that its answers build upon one another. (And no, you don’t need to be an engineer to do this!)
• You’ll need multiple AI tools. You know that grant writing involves much more than simply sitting down and writing a document. Various tasks related to admin, research, data analysis, and design also come into play. ChatGPT can’t do it all—you know what we mean if you’ve asked it to do research and received made-up answers! We’ll review recommended platforms in all of these categories below.
• AI can’t do novel and new. Since large language models learn from past information, they inherently struggle to produce and explain novel ideas. If your nonprofit proposes a completely innovative way to tackle a problem, you’ll see better results (and less wasted time) by drafting your grant the traditional way.

As you use AI tools for grant writing, you should also consider additional logistics like privacy and bias. Develop thorough AI usage policies for your organization, choose your tools thoughtfully, and always check their outputs. Our guide to grant writing with AI covers these considerations and more—check it out.

Want to use AI to write faster and win more funding? Of course you do! We’ve gathered the 9 most important lessons to master.

Top AI Grant Writing Tools to Keep an Eye On

Right now, no single AI platform can seamlessly handle all the moving pieces of grant writing—research, writing, editing, budgeting, project management—you name it.

To get the best results, you’ll likely need to mix and match different tools for specific tasks, like using one for research, another for writing assistance, and maybe even a third for data visualization. We can show you how to master the process of building your AI dream team.

That said, we’ve got our eye on two exciting platforms that show real promise:

Instrumentl

Already known as a leading grant database and hub of helpful grant writing tools, Instrumentl is actively testing a new AI grant writing tool.

We already trust Instrumentl as our top recommended database for grant writers. This platform simplifies every stage of the grant process, from finding relevant grant opportunities to tracking your progress to later managing the funding.

Why are we especially excited about Instrumentl’s foray into AI? Because Instrumentl already has access to thorough details about the grant opportunities in its database.

Theoretically, this background should dramatically reduce the time spent feeding context into the tool to generate a quality response. It should already understand the funder, the specifics of the grant, and what your nonprofit does. Instrumentl’s intelligent autofill feature could be a serious game-changer in the industry.

Grantable

Grantable is an AI grant writing assistant that’s been around for a while now—they spearheaded the whole idea of using AI to streamline grant writing several years ago. This platform aims to be an all-in-one, purpose-built solution for drafting grant proposals.

What stands out about Grantable is that it positions the AI as a true collaborator rather than just a machine to cajole for responses.

While you work on a proposal, you can prompt the AI to generate sections, suggestions, and corrections. Upload file and grant application requirements to quickly get on the same page with your digital assistant.

The interface also prioritizes organization through project tracking features and separate workspaces for different grants or clients. This ease of use alone makes Grantable more helpful than many generic AI tools, where different chats can quickly become jumbled.

We recently sat down with Grantable co-founder, Phillip Deng, to learn more about the platform and how it works:

You may be hesitant to invest in a complete AI grant writing tool right now—that’s fine! Instead, we recommend learning how to incorporate AI into your work in more targeted, low-risk ways using the tools listed below.

Want to use AI to write faster and win more funding? Of course you do! We’ve gathered the 9 most important lessons to master.

Recommended Supplemental AI Tools for Grant Writing

Grant writing isn’t just about crafting a killer narrative. It’s a whole juggling act of tasks—research, admin, data analysis, and even design. That’s why you’ll need more than one AI tool to keep all the plates spinning.

From general-purpose AIs to niche platforms for data crunching, the tech world is bursting with options. 🎉 It’s an exciting time to level up your workflow! But let’s be real: sifting through all those tools to find the gems? Not how you want to spend your day. The whole point of AI is to save time, right?

🤖 Good news: We’ve done the legwork for you. Below are the AI tools that have earned their spot in our grant-writing toolbox—organized by task so you can jump straight to what you need.

AI Tools to Help Draft Grant Proposals

ChatGPT

If you already know or have used an AI tool, it’s this one.

ChatGPT by OpenAI offers today’s industry-leading AI model. We’ve found it to be the overall best-performing text generator for grant writers. ChatGPT can also become an invaluable resource for brainstorming new ideas, visualizing data, and improving your writing once you learn how to prompt it effectively.

Claude

Claude is the second-most powerful and popular generative AI tool on the market.

Our team found that Claude generally does a better job of technical writing than ChatGPT. If your grants tend to be more technical in nature, try comparing the tools for yourself. Like ChatGPT, Claude can also help with brainstorming, basic data visualization, and more.

AI Tools for Grant Writing Admin Tasks

Zoom

Now a fixture of many of our lives for video calls, Zoom has rolled out a series of extremely helpful AI features in recent years. Their “AI Companion” can prove especially helpful for grant writers since so much of our work involves coordinating with other team members or clients, creating agendas, taking notes, and generating summaries.

AI features are available (or in development) for basic video conferencing users, with more complete suites of AI assistant tools available for users of the larger Zoom Workplace platform.

Fathom

Though less known than some of the big players in the AI space, Fathom is among the highest-rated AI notetaking tools available today.

Use Fathom to effortlessly record, transcribe, and summarize your meetings as you kick off new grant projects and meet with team members to gather information.

We love Fathom because, while focused on a few simple use cases, it accomplishes them very well. The tool also integrates with Zoom, Google, and Microsoft conferencing software, making it an ideal choice if you’re a freelancer who interacts with many different organizations.

FireFlies

FireFlies is another notetaking AI tool that grant writers may find helpful for improving their meetings and creating more actionable notes and summaries.

Though less well-known, this tool offers a few broader functionalities than Fathom. For example, you can use FireFlies to quickly search your meeting recordings for key action items, questions, and keywords.

FireFlies’ integrations with Slack, Asana, and other collaboration platforms may be particularly valuable for you. Imagine an AI assistant that automatically creates new tasks and reminders in your platform of choice during a meeting—pretty cool, huh?

AI Tools for Grant Research

Perplexity

Perplexity is an AI-driven search engine that pulls information from the internet in real time to generate concise answers. It emphasizes the reputability of its sources, prioritizing trusted news sources, academic papers, and well-established blogs.

For grant writers, we found that Perplexity offers the most value for research, helping you quickly pull relevant information and insights. Use it to help shape your grant narrative and fill in gaps in the logical argument you present to funders.

Jenni.ai

Jenni.ai bills itself as a purpose-built “intelligent research assistant” that helps users analyze, draft, and organize their research projects.

Designed specifically to support research, Jenni.ai offers specialized features that grant writers may find especially helpful. Intelligent citation features, file uploads, real-time information gathering, and text autocomplete tools can help you maintain momentum when drafting even the most technical of grant proposals.

AI Data Analysis Tools for Grant Writing

Coefficient

Coefficient uses AI to drastically streamline data reporting and visualization.

Import Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheets, then put all the time you’d otherwise spend on manual data updates and complicated report creation back into writing a stronger grant.

We’ve found Coefficient to be particularly valuable when working with very large datasets. It also offers a wide range of integrations with platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Mailchimp, and more, so if your organization uses any of these tools, you’d likely see time-saving benefits beyond just your grant seeking program.

DataGPT

DataGPT combines in-depth data analysis with AI-driven chatbot functionalities.

It essentially serves as a virtual data analyst that can quickly comb through your organization’s data to answer questions, visualize trends, and make projections to use in grant proposals.

DataGPT may be most useful for large organizations that use a data warehousing service like Oracle or Snowflake. It is an enterprise-level tool first and foremost, although DataGPT is actively developing a less expensive Xpress version for organizations to connect to their Google Analytics, Salesforce, and HubSpot instances.

Bardeen.ai

Bardeen.ai specializes in workflow automation. It uses AI to pull and import data, run analyses, send messages, and more, following your custom command chains. It also includes a full range of other AI features that connect your various apps to simplify data entry, writing, and research.

If you find yourself using complicated workflows to collect, input, analyze, and report data for your grant applications, Bardeen may be a smart addition to your organization’s toolkit. It’s highly adaptable but may create unnecessary complexity if your team doesn’t have a clear-cut use case for it.

Gemini

Gemini is Google’s flagship AI product and is broadly useful for writing, planning, and research tasks. Like similar platforms, it does a solid job of data analysis and visualization.

What stands out about Gemini for us as grant writers is that it works seamlessly with all other Google products, including Sheets, Docs, Analytics, Gmail, and more.

For organizations or freelancers already in the Google ecosystem, Gemini offers a highly accessible way to experiment with AI and explore new ways to simplify work.

Copilot

Copilot is Microsoft’s answer to ChatGPT and Gemini. It works very similarly to Google Gemini, providing intuitive generative AI and data analysis features that seamlessly connect the full suite of Microsoft applications.

If you use Microsoft apps to do your work, Copilot can likely help you save time with researching and drafting your grant proposals. Use it to find new ways to streamline and improve your work while reducing back-and-forth between multiple platforms.

AI Design Tools for Grant Writers

Canva

Already a favorite choice for simple digital design products, Canva offers an AI-powered Magic Design tool that generates custom designs for presentations, reports, videos, and more.

Magic Design draws from Canva’s expansive library of free templates and stock assets and also allows you to upload and edit your own materials. Use it to ideate and produce more polished, creative layouts and visualizations for your grant proposal materials with minimal learning curve.

Even aside from grant proposals, organizations of all sizes will likely find value in Canva’s AI features for adding extra shine and creativity to their social media posts, flyers, and other materials. Plus, Canva’s Pro Plan is free for registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits!

Gamma

Gamma focuses on using AI to streamline and improve the process of creating slide decks.

As a grant writer, we’d wager you’ve spent hours creating presentations for kickoff meetings, check-in calls, and more. For freelance grant writers constantly pitching and communicating with clients, you might feel like you live in one big slideshow presentation.

Gamma offers intuitive design, text generation, data visualization, and productivity features that might help you dramatically cut down the time needed to create slideshows. Its focused use case and affordable price for more advanced features could make it a smart choice for all kinds of grant writers.

Want to use AI to write faster and win more funding? Of course you do! We’ve gathered the 9 most important lessons to master.

Full Disclosure: Our Experience with AI Grant Writing Tech

We’ve put in the hours (and money) to learn the hard way what does and doesn’t work at the intersection of AI and grant writing.

A little background on our experience with AI here at Learn Grant Writing:

🎥 We recently presented with our partner Chris Bertulli from Beda.ai on What AI Can and Can't Do For Grant Writers. We dove into an unfiltered, #realtalk on what it really takes to build and use AI effectively. We’re talking thousands of hours and serious dollars invested, distilled into a high-value, no-fluff, 1-hour training that you don’t want to miss:

Through it all, we still stick to the guiding principles of our vision for grant writing AI tools.

If you encounter a platform that claims to offer comprehensive tools for grant writing, it should be:

• Smart, trained on tons of real, nonprofit-specific grant writing data and examples
• Purpose-built, designed for grant writing workflows, not generic writing projects
• Private, with clearly defined privacy and security policies
• Accessible, with an easy-to-use interface and affordable pricetag

Anything else won’t be worth your time. Of course, software constantly grows over time with new features and refined capabilities. Platforms like Instrumentl and Grantable (see our overviews above) look extremely promising and already offer some incredible features, but remember that they’re not finished products.

Until there’s a perfect solution on the market, using multiple tools for different tasks may be a better choice for many organizations and grant writing freelancers. You just have to understand their use cases and limitations beforehand.

This brings us to our final and most important point for AI-curious grant writers:

AI Won’t Help You Learn Grant Writing

You can break a grant proposal down into discrete steps where machines excel at certain tasks (and truly can save you tons of time and effort).

However, winning grant proposals must have a human touch. They tie together language, numbers, stories, and societal context to create compelling and persuasive arguments—a deeply human undertaking.

As you explore the marketplace for new tools and digital assistants, remember that almost all AI today is built for either general use by individuals or specialized use by for-profit companies, not nonprofits.

Relying on an AI tool that wasn’t built and trained with rich nonprofit context will likely lead to misalignment, mistakes, weird assumptions, and wasted time.

🚨 And, if you don’t already know how grant writing works and what makes a great proposal, you’ll run into even more headaches trying to use AI to take shortcuts. 🚨

You learn how to write grants by getting your hands dirty with old-fashioned training (or new-fashioned, like our curriculum).

Learn Grant Writing is the leading training resource and community for grant writers of all skill levels. Members of our Global Grant Writers Collective have raised over $1 billion and counting for nonprofit causes and earned over $67 million in revenue writing those grants. Check out their success stories to see for yourself.

Key Takeaways for Grant Writers

We love AI and the promise that it holds for our field. We’ve also seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t. If you only take away a few of our tips, we hope it’s these essentials:

• You’ll need multiple AI tools for different parts of the grant writing process. You likely won’t find a perfect all-in-one solution right now or at your price point.
• To make AI worth your time, context is everything. You have to provide that context (and we can show you how).
• Learn how to “talk” to AI productively by mastering the art of prompting.
• AI inherently struggles with new ideas and novel solutions to problems. It can support you as you present these ideas, but your human ingenuity must take the lead.

As always, we’ll keep you posted on the latest and greatest developments in the world of grants, including artificial intelligence. In the meantime, keep exploring and mastering the fundamentals of grant writing—it’s truly among the best investments you can make in your skills and career.

To learn more about grant writing, how to win more grants, or even launch your own freelance career, follow us on YouTube or keep exploring these resources from our team:

• Grant Writing 101: What is it & how do you get started?
• How to Write a Grant Proposal: 7-Step System & Bonus Tips
• Freelance Grant Writing: How to Start Strong & Succeed
• How To Change Careers & Thrive: Simple 7-Step Framework