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Grants: the alternative to Ayming
What moving from Ayming to Grants actually looks like in 2026.
Grants is what people use when Ayming stops fitting. Below is the honest side-by-side - same product surface, different posture: hosted in Germany, no third-party trackers, one honest price - plus the migration mechanics that decide whether the switch lands in an evening or in a quarter.
At a glance
Ayming is a serious, decades-old management consultancy with 1,600 consultants across 14 countries and 15,000+ active clients. For a complex multi-million Horizon EIC or BMBF Verbundprojekt where the documentation burden is genuinely enormous, hiring Ayming is rational - their compliance depth pays off at that scale. For an EXIST Gründerstipendium, IGP, or KMU innovativ application under €500k, the math rarely works: the success fee (typically 10%+) exceeds what an unfunded founding team can sensibly cede, and you still do most of the writing yourself. Grants keeps the cap-table whole, hands you the structure + reviewer-language coaching the consultancy would have charged for, and lets you learn how to write these applications - knowledge that pays off on every future submission. Ayming wins on enterprise complexity; Grants wins on startup economics.
Switching
What moving from Ayming actually looks like
The switch goes in three rough phases: export from Ayming, import into Grants, and reorganise what came over. Most people allocate an evening for it. The export side is where the time goes - Ayming hands you a CSV/JSON dump and the field mapping isn't always obvious; once that's resolved the import is a couple of minutes. We don't paywall the import path or pretend it's a pro-only feature, and you can run both side-by-side while you decide.
Grants vs Ayming: feature comparison
When to pick which
Pick Grants when
Pick Ayming when
Export from Ayming
Find the export option in Ayming's account settings. Most tools provide a CSV or JSON download. Save the dump locally - that's the source of truth for the next step.
Map fields in Grants
Open the import tool in Grants. Ayming's field names rarely match Grants' 1:1; the import flags any unmapped columns so you can pair them up before anything commits.
Run the import
Run the import. Grants shows a preview of the first parsed rows in the import dialog so you can sanity-check the column mapping + a sample of records before anything commits. If you're nervous about a large dump, import a small subset first, verify it landed the way you expected, then run the full file.
Re-create your views, tags, saved searches
Ayming-specific UI metadata (custom views, saved filters, in-app annotations) doesn't transfer with the data export. Spend an evening rebuilding the views you used most - usually a 30-minute job once you've done it once.
Cancel Ayming when you're confident
Run both side-by-side for a couple of weeks if you want to be sure. When you're confident, cancel the Ayming subscription from their side. Grants keeps your export option self-serve in account settings - no lock-in either direction.
Switching from Ayming
The five questions we get most often before someone moves their data over.
Start with Grants
Free plan, no credit card. We host in Germany. Export + delete are self-serve.
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