Honest comparison

GozAround vs Groundswell.

Groundswell calls its model Philanthropy as a Service and builds it on a personal donor-advised fund for every employee. It is the most transparent pricing in the category and a genuinely different architecture. That architecture is also the whole decision: employee gifts route through DAF accounts held by Groundswell's sponsoring foundation, so the funds sit with an intermediary.

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The core difference

Groundswell sells the software. GozAround sells the software and the capacity to run it.

Groundswell sells a platform your team still has to staff and operate. GozAround combines the platform with an operating team that carries the recurring administration across matching, grants, volunteering and reporting. Your people keep strategy, relationships and the final decisions, you work in the same admin surface our team does, every action is attributed, and you can change any rule at any time.

Side by side

How we compare.

All claims about Groundswell come from publicly available information or buyer interviews. If anything here is wrong, tell us, we'll fix it.

Capability	GozAround	Groundswell
Model	Giving platform plus an operating team carrying the administration	Philanthropy as a Service, built on employee DAF accounts
Where the money sits	In your accounts until your finance team releases the payment	In DAF accounts under their sponsoring foundation
Who releases the payment	Your finance team, from your own bank	Groundswell, granting out of the DAF
2026 federal non-itemizer charitable deduction	Depends on how your program is designed; a question for your tax advisor	Gifts into a DAF fall outside it (cash gifts to public charities only)
Employee experience	Giving, matching, volunteering and impact history in one employee view	A personal DAF account each employee funds and grants from over time
Grants module	Built in: programs, applications, review, payout tracking	Not a published core module
Security artifacts	Controls documented on our trust pages	SOC 2 published on their trust page
Annual pricing	Published, starting at $36,000 per year	Published, from $8,500 per year per their pricing page

Where they're stronger

Be honest with yourself.

If you need any of the following, Groundswell may be a better fit than we are.

You want every employee to have a personal donor-advised fund they can fund, invest, and grant from over years. GozAround has no DAF product and no plan to build one.
You would rather the vendor handle distribution end to end than route charitable payments through your own AP process.
Published pricing decides it. Groundswell lists pricing from $8,500 per year on its own site, which is more than most of this category will tell you before a call. The two prices buy different scopes, software your team operates against software with an operating team behind it, and we will point that out once and then let you weigh it.
Your security review wants a SOC 2 report from the giving vendor specifically, and their published distribution timelines matter to your employees.

Where we're stronger

Be honest with us.

If any of the following matter more, bring them to the conversation.

Your finance or legal team will not accept an intermediary holding charitable funds. In GozAround the money stays in your accounts until your finance team releases the payment. GozAround prepares the payment request and records the giving; it never takes custody of funds, charges cards, or issues tax receipts.
Your employees are mostly non-itemizers. The 2026 federal non-itemizer charitable deduction covers cash gifts to public charities and excludes gifts to donor-advised funds, so the two models sit on different sides of that line. We are not your tax advisors, and this is the kind of thing worth raising with them before you choose an architecture.
You want an operating team carrying the recurring administration, matching queues, grant cycles, volunteer verification and reporting, while your team leads strategy, relationships and the final decisions.
You need grants as part of the program: intake, review, and payout tracking in the same system as employee giving, with one set of reports over both.
You want the audit trail where your controller already works: payment batches, receipt records, and finance reports tied to the same underlying records the program runs on.
You want full admin access to the same surface our operating team uses, with every action attributed and every rule changeable by you at any time.

If you're switching

Migration in plain language.

One thing to plan for before anything else: balances already sitting in employee DAF accounts stay with Groundswell's sponsoring foundation and are granted out under its rules. We cannot move them and we do not try to. New giving starts in GozAround while employees wind down existing balances at their own pace, which means a period where employees have two places to look. Say that to them plainly up front. Beyond that, migration runs as a 2-3 week parallel window scoped with you: we rebuild your nonprofit list and matching rules, import donation history by CSV as your archival record, and set up the payment batch your finance team will approve, so the first payment run happens with your controller watching rather than after go-live.

See how it fits