Looking for an influencer marketing platform? You’ll inevitably find Grin and Aspire (along with a host of other tools). On the surface, they look like interchangeable software with a few extra features here and there. But if you dig deeper, you’ll land on a clear choice of which tool is right for you.

This article will help you choose between Aspire vs. Grin — minus the hour-long demos.

Grin vs. Aspire at a glance

The main difference between Grin vs Aspire is that Aspire offers agency services along with influencer marketing software. Opt for Grin if you want better integrations & automated workflows. In selecting Aspire, you’ll trade user-friendliness and custom reports. Grin’s biggest con is its lack of native influencer discovery.

Both Grin and Aspire aren’t A+ at helping you find relevant influencers.

• Grin has a native search ability only for Instagram. If you want to find influencers on any other platform, you have to use their service, Curated Lists — where Grin sends you a list of potential creators you can work with, at a limited frequency.

• Aspire has 170M influencers in its database, but it's severely skewed towards only US-based influencers. If you want to partner with international creators, Aspire won’t suffice for your influencer search.

A better option for influencer discovery? Modash. It has over 300M+ creators across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Every creator with over 1,000 followers is in the database — regardless of the country, city, or niche. There are basic and advanced filters to narrow down your search.

The benefits don’t end here: you don’t have to ask creators to sign up on Modash to monitor their content (unlike Aspire) or request influencers to authenticate their social media accounts to use or track their influencer-generated content (unlike Grin). You get the performance and monitoring data at your fingertips — without burdening your influencer partners.

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The best part, though? Modash’s pricing is transparent and includes a no-strings-attached two-week trial — no demos or credit card required. Take it for a test drive.

Aspire has an agency service, Grin has a creator discovery service

Aspire’s most prominent advantage over Grin is that Aspire also offers an agency service. If you’re looking to hand off your tasks to an influencer marketing agency — from finding influencers to sending outreach messages to monitoring ROI — Aspire is the clear choice.

If you need help only in hunting down influencers and outreaching them, Aspire has a Curated Creators service at $300/month for 600 invites — $100 per additional 100 invites.

⚠️ Remember: This is only an invitation to the creators chosen by Aspire experts, not a guarantee that the creator will partner with you.

Grin also has a Curated Lists service where the Grin team sends you a list of influencers who meet your requirements. But this is more to compensate for the lack of native influencer discovery features — you can only search for Instagram influencers on Grin. It’s also unclear whether this service means the creator is ready to partner with you or whether they’re yet to confirm.

Bottom line: Aspire is the clear choice if you need experts to help you craft your influencer marketing strategy.

Both Aspire and Grin don’t have a free trial or public pricing

Staying within budget might be your biggest hurdle when purchasing influencer marketing tools. A close second? Time-crunch in evaluating all these software(s).

Unfortunately, Grin and Aspire both increase your troubles in these two departments. Aspire lists three plans — Starter, Pro, and Premium. The Starter plan might be for those beginning ecommerce influencer marketing, Pro for those scaling influencer marketing, and Premium for large-scale collaborative influencer marketing efforts.

But this is just a guess. For instance, you can have only ten active projects even in the Premium plan — which isn’t sufficient for large organizations running multiple always-on and one-off influencer marketing campaigns. It’s also unclear whether they offer monthly plans. To find out for sure, you’d have to sit through an Aspire demo. 😬

The case with Grin is worse. There are no bifurcated plans. All pricing is custom-quoted after you bear a demo. On combing through reviews, expect a starting price around $20-25K/year — which increases even further as you grow your influencer marketing program. There are no monthly plan options.

Bottom line: tighter budgets have no place (or time!) to use Aspire or Grin. Try Modash instead — monthly pricing transparently available, and a free 14-day trial of the tool — without taking out your credit card or blocking your calendar for a demo.

Both Grin and Aspire rely on Meta’s API

Aspire relies on Meta’s API to provide an influencer’s analytics (number of followers, engagement rate, etc.) or a creator to enter these numbers on their own by signing up to their marketplace.

Creators have to link their Instagram insights and authorize their accounts for you to monitor their content on Aspire. They even have to create an account with Aspire to view the influencer contract, content guidelines, and influencer briefs.

Grin is the same way: it relies on first-party data, and your influencer partners need to connect their accounts to Grin for you to monitor their performance.

The extra work leaves a sour taste for many influencers — and adds an unnecessary step to your workflow.

Bottom line: it’s better to use influencer marketing software (like Modash) that crawls the publicly available social media data for audience insights and monitoring influencer content. If not, use an influencer analytics tool in conjunction.

Grin is more user-friendly

Many reviews say Grin is easy to use. The features are intuitive to understand and utilize, the reports are easy to grasp, and the dashboard is simple to handle.

Aspire reviews complain consistently of bugs and long load times. However, every review also highlights that the Aspire team more than makes up for these bugs through their excellent customer support.

Bottom line: if your team needs something simple to use with a minimal learning curve, choose Grin.

Aspire has a better influencer search engine

Aspire has its own influencer database and a creator marketplace for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Pinterest. It also has a unique Image Search feature where you can find influencers with a similar aesthetic to the ones you already like.

Grin lets you search only Instagram influencers on your own. To search influencers on any other platform, you have to use their Curated Lists service (the Grin team finds the influencers for you).

While Aspire might look like the clear winner, there are three caveats:

• Aspire isn’t the place for finding influencers outside the U.S. Its Audience Authenticity Score even marks influencers outside the U.S. as suspicious. Reviews say customers struggle not only in finding international influencers but even in integrating international ecommerce platforms (like connecting your Canada Shopify account for sales tracking).
• Despite having a native influencer database and a creator marketplace, Aspire only has around 170M influencers. It might seem like a lot, but the creator lists narrow down significantly as you apply more filters. Customers complain this leads to a crowded creator search and a lack of relevant influencers.
• There are multiple reviews complaining the Aspire team doesn’t vet the influencer profiles on its database. In the best-case scenario, you don’t find quality creators for your campaign. In the worst-case scenario, you get scammed.

Bottom line: Aspire has a better influencer search engine than Grin, but it's not without its faults. If you want a larger database of influencers beyond the U.S., try Modash’s influencer search tool. There are 300M+ creators across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube from across the globe.

Grin has more ecommerce integrations, Aspire has more affiliate integrations

Grin integrates with Gmail, Slack, Outlook, PayPal, Shopify, Salesforce, Shopify Plus, Magento, and WooCommerce. The company keeps growing the list of tools it integrates with.

Aspire’s integrations are competitive too. It integrates with Outlook, Gmail, Slack, Impact, ShareASale, Gorgias, WooCommerce, Shopify, and Klaviyo.

Grin’s integrations are more ecommerce-friendly (Shopify Plus, Magento). Aspire’s integrations are geared towards affiliate influencer marketing (Impact, ShareASale).

Bottom line: if your influencer marketing strategy is ecommerce driven — like shipping merch to influencers for product seeding or sponsored posts — Grin’s integrations will make your job easier. If your focus is on finding affiliates, Aspire’s integrations will make tracking smoother.

Aspire provides influencer rate recommendations

Aspire offers a Recommended Payment feature for Instagram (but not for Reels), TikTok, and YouTube influencers.

But you can see the suggested amount only after you reach the “Review and Set Offers” stage. You can’t see influencers’ rates during the influencer search and evaluation step.

While Recommended Payment is definitely a perk for this Grin alternative, influencer rates are a tricky affair. Prices vary widely depending on influencer size, type of collaboration, historical performance, scope of work, and more. If you take this number at face value, you might end up underpaying or overpaying the influencer.

Bottom line: Aspire offers a recommended amount for what you should pay a creator after you send them the terms of your influencer contract. Taking this number as a benchmark can skew your influencer negotiations, though.

Grin allows you to build custom reports

Both Grin and Aspire have thorough reporting tools — tracking sales, measuring impact, and ROI transparency. But Grin goes a step further and lets you build custom reports on what metrics matter the most to your company.

Each company has different influencer marketing KPIs — some metrics might be more valuable to company A than company B. Creating personalized reports natively from Grin itself takes a lot of tedious work off your plate and tailors the platform to your needs.

Bottom line: Grin is the better choice if you have to report handpicked influencer marketing metrics often. You can get the same metrics in Aspire, but you’ll have to do the legwork of personalizing reports.

Aspire vs. Grin: Which one should you choose?

After reading all the benefits Aspire and Grin have to offer, you’d know which one matches your needs better. Here’s the bottom line:

Choose Aspire if:

• You’d benefit from agency support along with an influencer marketing software
• You’re focused on running and scaling affiliate influencer partnerships
• You want to search for influencers on your own beyond Instagram

Choose Grin if:

• You want to delegate finding influencers to experts
• You prefer a tool that has a minimal learning curve
• You need to build custom reports frequently

A third choice: Modash

Even after closing the battle of Grin vs. Aspire, you’d need another tool for finding influencers. Grin only lets you search influencers on Instagram on your own, and Aspire’s creator discovery has limited influencers — especially from a global standpoint.

Try Modash. With every creator over 1K+ followers listed, we have over 300M influencer profiles across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube — country no bar.

The cherry on top? Modash has monthly plans, transparent pricing, and a 14-day free trial. See for yourself (no credit card, creator authentication, or demos required).