Comparison · Audited June 10, 2026

What other scholarship sites don’t show you.

We reviewed 62award and detail pages on six major scholarship platforms and checked each one for the four things that actually change a family’s college bill: sources, renewal rules, stacking policies, and automatic merit.

On June 10, 2026 we audited six major scholarship platforms — 62pages across Fastweb, Scholarships.com, CollegeData, Niche, Road2College, and MeritMore. On the pages we reviewed, not one showed per-claim citations to official school policy pages, the renewal GPA needed to keep an award, a school’s actual stacking or outside-scholarship displacement policy, or an automatic-vs-competitive merit classification with stat tiers. Those four things are most of what decides a family’s final bill, and they are what MeritPlaybook is built around: 7,052 documented awards, each linked to a school source; 3,267 renewal rules; stacking and displacement policies for 586 schools; and 1,365 awards classified as automatic on stats alone.

The four things we checked

Per-award source links to the school’s own page. The specific official page that states each amount, cutoff, and rule — so you can verify it yourself instead of trusting a database.
Renewal rules & GPA floors. A four-year award with a 3.5 GPA floor is a different financial product than one with no conditions. The renewal terms decide whether year-one money survives to year four.
Stacking & displacement policies. Whether an outside scholarship adds to your aid package or quietly replaces part of it — the rule that bites families hardest, and the one schools publish least visibly.
Automatic-merit category.Whether a student’s stats alone guarantee the money or the award is a competition. Knowing which is which changes the entire application strategy.

What each platform showed

What families need	MeritPlaybook	Scholarships.com12 pages	Fastweb14 pages	Niche8 pages	CollegeData15 pages	MeritMore1 page	R2C Insights12 pages
Per-award source links to the school's own page	Shown.7,052 awards, each source-linked	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Partial	Partial	Partial	Partial
Renewal rules & GPA floors	Shown.3,267 documented renewal rules	Partial	Partial	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Partial	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Partial
Stacking & displacement policies	Shown.586 school policies	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Partial
Automatic-merit category	Shown.1,365 automatic awards	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Not shown on the pages we reviewed	Partial

Shown. MeritPlaybook counts are computed from our dataset at build time.
Partial: the feature appeared in some form on at least one page we reviewed — a prose mention, a single page-level link, or a renewal duration without a GPA — but never as per-award, sourced data. Details below.
Not shown on the pages we reviewed.

How we ran this audit

On June 10, 2026, we reviewed 62 public award and detail pages across six platforms: Fastweb (14 scholarship detail pages), CollegeData (15 Scholarship Finder detail pages), Scholarships.com (12 scholarship detail pages), Road2College / R2C (12 pages: 8 school merit-scholarship articles plus 4 public pages describing its Insights tool), Niche (8 pages: 7 scholarship pages plus 1 college financial aid profile), and MeritMore (the 1 college page we could load — the rest of its site returned errors throughout our audit window).

We reviewed what a visitor sees without an account. R2C’s paid Insights tool interior, Fastweb’s and Scholarships.com’s logged-in views, and MeritMore’s paid tier (its free pages mask some fields behind upgrade prompts) were not audited. “Not shown” means not shown on the pages we reviewed — we make no claim about what gated or paid interiors contain. Competitor pages change; this table reflects June 10, 2026.

Platforms we did not audit — including Appily, Bold.org, Going Merry, Scholarship America, College Board BigFuture, and CollegeVine — are not covered by this comparison, and we make no claims about them. The MeritPlaybook column is derived from our college dataset at build time. Read how we verify our own data.

Platform by platform

Scholarships.com

Scholarships.com is one of the largest scholarship directories online, and that volume is genuinely useful for discovering outside awards. On the 12 detail pages we reviewed, though, no page carried a single external link — provider websites are named in the text with the URLs left out — and no page stated a renewal GPA, a school’s stacking or displacement policy, or an automatic-merit classification. Two pages mentioned renewal in provider-copied prose, without the GPA needed to keep the money.

Fastweb

Fastweb has been aggregating scholarships since 1998 and remains a solid free starting point for casting a wide net, with profile matching and deadline alerts. On the 14 detail pages we reviewed, the only apply path was a login form, no page linked to a school or provider source, and none stated a stacking policy or an automatic-merit category. One page mentioned a renewal duration in prose — without the renewal GPA, and without linking the requirements page it referenced.

Niche

Niche is strong at college discovery: reviews, rankings, and campus-life data that families actually read. The 7 scholarship pages we reviewed were mostly Niche’s own no-essay drawings, where the detail page is a signup form and winners are picked at random. The one college financial aid profile we reviewed showed aggregate aid statistics and a single link to the school’s aid office, with no named merit scholarships, renewal rules, or stacking policies.

CollegeData

CollegeData publishes the most complete public field set in our audit: every award page we reviewed had structured eligibility fields, sponsor contact information, and an outbound website link. But that link points to the sponsor’s site — on the school-run awards we reviewed, the same generic scholarships landing page was shared across four different awards — and no page stated a renewal GPA, a stacking or displacement policy, or an automatic-merit category.

MeritMore

MeritMore is the only platform in this audit with a merit-specific page per college, built on federal IPEDS statistics: average merit award, cost, and admission stats. We could load exactly one college page; every other route returned errors throughout our audit window. That page showed useful aggregates but no named awards, no renewal or stacking rules, and no per-claim sources, with a number of fields masked behind the paid tier we did not audit.

R2C Insights (Road2College)

Road2College’s school merit articles are the closest thing in this audit to our college pages: they name real institutional scholarships with real dollar amounts and link one official school page per article. On the 8 articles we reviewed, renewal appeared once as hedged advice (“typically require… a specific GPA”) without the actual GPA, stacking appeared once as strategy advice rather than the school’s stated policy, and “automatically considered” prose stood in for an automatic-vs-competitive classification. The paid R2C Insights tool — which R2C describes as built on IPEDS and Common Data Set information — sits behind a registration wall and was not audited.

The four rows in that table are the product. See what they look like for one school with a free instant preview, or read a full sample playbook to see how sources, renewal rules, stacking policies, and automatic merit come together into a plan.