BidSonar vs Stotles
Stotles is a serious B2G platform: tender feeds from ten UK portals, buyer and competitor intelligence, and AI that qualifies and drafts your bids — with a free tier, and paid plans from £475/month for the intelligence that matters. BidSonar is free all the way down: semantic matching against a plain-English profile instead of feeds to configure, grants alongside contracts, and an honest read on whether you can win. If you have a BD team and a bid-writing workflow, Stotles earns its price. If you're the founder checking between delivery work, start here.
Matching: what surfaces vs what you write
Stotles gives you feeds and filters to configure, then Stotles AI helps once you've found a tender — bid/no-bid reports and first-draft responses built from your past wins. BidSonar works at the other end: you describe your business in plain English once, and semantic matching decides what surfaces in the first place, each result carrying a confidence score. Their AI helps you qualify and write; ours helps you find. If you already know your niche and want drafting help, that's Stotles' strength, not ours.
Price and access
Stotles has a genuine free tier — tender tracking, pre-tenders, alerts, and three lifetime AI reports — with buyer and competitor intelligence from £475/month and bid drafting from £990/month. BidSonar is free the whole way down: matching, alerts, the 75,000+ organisation directory and the winnability read, with no caps and no card. The honest line isn't "we're free and they're not" — it's that we're free without a paid tier above it.
Coverage
Stotles pulls from around ten UK portals, including regional sources we don't yet cover — Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, Bluelight, eTenders Ireland — plus TED. That regional breadth is a real advantage today. BidSonar covers the five official UK and EU feeds and adds grants (Innovate UK, UKRI), which Stotles doesn't cover at all. Pick on what you chase: regional council work leans Stotles; grants-and-contracts in one place leans BidSonar.
Choose Stotles if
- You have a dedicated BD or sales team running a pipeline
- You need regional portals we don't yet cover — Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, Bluelight, eTenders Ireland
- You want AI help writing bids, not just finding them
- You want decision-maker contacts and a CRM-style workflow
Choose BidSonar if
- You have no BD headcount and no budget line for one
- You'd rather describe your business once than configure feeds and filters
- You want grants (Innovate UK, UKRI) in the same place as contracts — Stotles doesn't cover grants
- You want an incumbency and field-openness read before spending a day on a bid
- You want matching, alerts and 75,000+ organisation profiles free, with no caps
- Is BidSonar a free alternative to Stotles?
- For discovery and matching, yes — BidSonar is free with no caps. Stotles also has a free tier, and its bid-drafting workflow (Bid Studio) has no BidSonar equivalent, so if you need AI help writing responses, that's a genuine reason to use Stotles.
- Does BidSonar have saved searches?
- No — and that's deliberate. Instead of configuring and maintaining searches, you describe your business once and semantic matching surfaces relevant opportunities with a confidence score. Less to tune, more that finds you.
- Can I use both?
- Yes, honestly. The free tiers of each cost nothing to run side by side — BidSonar for free discovery and grants, Stotles for its bid-drafting workflow if you need it.
See it for yourself.
The whole index is free to browse, signed out — or describe your business and see what matches.
The enterprise option: UK market intelligence, spend analytics, early buying signals and buyer contacts, sold on annual subscription to BD teams.
A conviction we share — procurement data shouldn't be enterprise-priced — with free browsing capped at five views a day and paid plans from £350/year.