Both platforms collect applications. Reviewr is built for how you evaluate them.
SmarterSelect is a capable, budget-friendly way to get your programs online, and for straightforward needs it does the job well. The difference shows up in the evaluation — how reviewers score, how you model a real judging process, and how the experience holds up once programs get serious — where an older evaluator interface and tier-gated features start to strain. Reviewr is built for that depth from the start: a modern experience, with the capabilities included rather than reserved for the top plan.
SmarterSelect's applicant and form-building experience is solid — but the evaluator and deep admin interface is where it shows its age. There are many menus to navigate, and an evaluator view that reviewers describe as dated.
A modern, unified experience for admins, applicants, and evaluators alike — built recently and refined continuously, so your reviewers spend their time judging applications, not hunting through menus.
In SmarterSelect, the scorecard is nested inside the application form, so each scoring prompt has to map to a single form field. A prompt like "rank academic achievement" — which draws on several fields and uploaded files — becomes very hard to score. Evaluator assignment is basic, without complex judging models.
A native side-by-side reviewer view where scoring is independent of form structure, normalized scoring that surfaces reviewer bias, and configurable assignment — conflicts, panels, tiers, load balancing, and randomized distribution.
Form logic, autoscoring, evaluation groups, SMS, interview scheduling, reference requests, and scholarship matching are reserved for SmarterSelect's higher tiers — so the capabilities a growing program needs often mean stepping up to a bigger plan.
The capabilities that make programs run well are included, not gated behind the top plan. Three straightforward tiers, with the essentials in every one of them.
Reviewers consistently flag SmarterSelect's exports as needing work — not board- or print-ready without extra effort — and there's no easy bulk export for evaluators
Board-ready reporting and clean exports are built in, including bulk export for evaluators — so your board and committee get print-ready output without the extra formatting work.
SmarterSelect nests the scorecard inside the application form, which means every scoring prompt has to map to a single form field. Ask a reviewer to "rank academic achievement" — a judgment that draws on several fields and uploaded files — and there's no clean place for it. Add an evaluator interface reviewers describe as dated, no real reviewer dashboard, and a conflict-of-interest prompt that doesn't actually restrict anything, and the review stage is where programs feel the strain.
To be fair, SmarterSelect's applicant and form-building experience is genuinely easy to use — that's not where the gap is. Reviewr is built so the evaluation holds up too: a native side-by-side view where scoring is independent of form structure, normalized scoring that surfaces reviewer bias, configurable judging models, and conflicts that are actually enforced.
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The all-in-one platform for managing scholarships, grants and awards programs.
