ACCOLADE vs OPENWATER
OpenWater is an application and review platform owned by Advanced Solutions International, covering awards alongside grants, scholarships, fellowships and abstracts.
OpenWater is the broader product. It runs five different kinds of application-and-review programme under one subscription, integrates with more than 65 association and CRM systems, and publishes a support commitment we cannot match on paper: a ten-minute average first response and a guaranteed answer within one business day.
Accolade is narrower on purpose. It does one kind of programme — an awards programme that ends in a ceremony — and it carries the ceremony itself: the seating plan, the sponsor invoices, the catering, the door, the run of show. If you need awards and grants and scholarships in one system, OpenWater is the honest answer and Accolade is not.
ACCOLADE IS BEST FOR
A UK or EU awards programme that stages a ceremony, where the evening itself is half the work and the data must stay in the EU.
OPENWATER IS BEST FOR
Associations, foundations and universities running several kinds of application programme — awards, grants, scholarships, fellowships, abstracts — that need to sit alongside an existing AMS or CRM.
Feature by feature
| Capability | Accolade | OpenWater |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | Free £0 · Professional £495/mo · Enterprise £1,750/mo · Agency £3,500/mo, on the pricing page | “Subscription-based payment model and provides custom quotes for each customer depending on individual usage needs”1 |
| Programme types covered | Awards programmes and the ceremonies that follow them. Nothing else. | Abstracts, awards, grants, fellowships, scholarships, applications and competitions, all under one subscription1 |
| Support response commitment | 4 business hours on Enterprise, 1 business hour on Agency. 99.9% uptime target. Severity table | “average response time for support queries is 10 minutes, and we guarantee that you’ll get an answer within one business day”1 |
| Judging | Single and multi-round judging, scoring rubrics, panel assignment, slate locking and winner publication | Multi-round review with random reviewer assignment, compiled score dashboards and optional double-blind judging1 |
| Ceremony-night operations | Table planner with a 3D room walkthrough, run of show, guest check-in, catering and dietary, all in the same workspace | Not among the seven platform areas OpenWater publishes1 |
| Sponsors and event finance | Sponsor CRM with pipeline, deliverables and invoicing; event budget and invoice tracking (Enterprise) | Post-award fund tracking covering funding amounts, payment dates and programme budgets for grants and scholarships1 |
| Conference session scheduling | A schedule module for the ceremony evening only | Built-in schedule builder; approved abstracts transfer automatically into the conference agenda and export in several formats1 |
| AI | AI Setup Wizard that builds categories, criteria and the judging workflow (Professional and above) | OpenWater AI, an opt-in beta for existing customers as of early 2026, analysing submissions and surfacing insights1 |
| Integrations | Stripe for card payments and entry fees | “more than 65 popular AMS, CRM, directory, and payment gateway solutions”, including iMIS, Salesforce, Blackbaud, Microsoft Dynamics, Stripe and PayPal1 |
| Data residency | UK and EU only — database in Frankfurt, application in London. No data leaves the EU. | Not published. OpenWater’s security answers cover SSO, encryption, two-factor authentication, CAPTCHA and GDPR support, but state no hosting region1 |
| Ownership and head office | Independent. United Kingdom. | Owned by Advanced Solutions International since 2022. Head office 1800 Diagonal Road, Suite 600, Alexandria, Virginia, USA1 |
| Scope of the platform | 41 modules — nominations, judging, guests, seating, sponsors, finance, catering, check-in, run of show and ceremony production in one workspace | Serves more than 750 organisations across professional and trade associations, foundations and higher education1 |
Sources
- OpenWater, “Frequently Asked Questions About OpenWater’s Software” — https://openwater.com/faqs. Checked 7 August 2026. Pricing model, the five programme types and the platform menu, multi-round review, post-award fund tracking, the abstract-to-agenda schedule builder, OpenWater AI beta status, integration count, the security answer, ASI ownership, customer count and the registered head-office address. “Not published” on the data-residency row means we read OpenWater’s published security answer and it does not state a hosting region. It is not a claim that OpenWater hosts outside the EU.
This page previously carried several claims about OpenWater — a US hosting location, the absence of a free tier, a setup fee, a support response time and a set of missing features — that we could not substantiate from OpenWater’s own published material. They have been removed rather than softened, and one of them (support response time) was contradicted by OpenWater’s published commitment, which now appears above in OpenWater’s favour. If you believe anything here is wrong or out of date, email hello@accolade.live and we will correct it and re-date this section.
Somebody actually runs their awards on this
The British Photography Awards moved off seven separate tools and onto Accolade.
These are the British Photography Awards’ own programme figures, as at May 2026. They describe the BPA’s programme, not Accolade’s results.