NationGraph vs Pursuit: SLED Sales Intelligence (2026)

Two platforms, one pitch: SLED buying signals before the RFP. The real separation is what each one knows about the record underneath.

NationGraph and Pursuit both surface state, local, and education buying signals before the RFP posts. The difference shows up when a rep needs to know what the incumbent is charging. NationGraph runs public records collection as automated infrastructure that returns parsed competitor contract fields into your CRM, resolves every record to a standardized institution ID, and reads eleven distinct source types per institution, including meeting video and each institution's procurement rules. Pursuit wraps its signal in surrounding tooling: a browser extension, coaching dashboards, and a managed outbound program. If you want more tools around the signal, they have more of them. If you want a deeper signal, that is what NationGraph is for.

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What does NationGraph do that Pursuit does not?

Records collection as infrastructure, not analytics on records someone else gathered

NationGraph batches, routes, and rate-manages public records requests across institutions automatically, covering federal FOIA and state equivalents. Responses come back parsed into the incumbent, the annual value, the term, and the renewal window, and push to Salesforce or HubSpot.

Every contract collected persists in a corpus the next query hits first, so the usual experience is an immediate answer rather than a request and a wait. Running collection at that scale is a hard engineering and operations problem, and it is the reason our contract data is our own rather than licensed.

Standardized institution resolution

Every signal, contact, contract, and purchase order resolves to one institution record keyed to standard IDs including NCES codes. Pursuit maps agency hierarchy, which is a different and shallower thing. The test is simple: import a multi-state SLED list into both and count how many duplicate accounts you clean up afterward.

Procurement rules as a tracked source

NationGraph reads how each institution is permitted to buy, including sole-source thresholds and when a cooperative contract or full solicitation is required. That determines whether a rep is looking at a three-week close or a six-month bid. Nobody else in this category treats it as a data source.

Meeting video, not just the minutes

Minutes are written after the fact and routinely leave out the useful sentence. NationGraph reads the recording itself.

An MCP server exposing all eleven data sources

In pilot with customers now, with per-source access gating and an authentication flow built to Anthropic's verified connector standard. Reps query the underlying government procurement records from the AI tools they already use rather than through a dashboard.

What has Pursuit published about NationGraph that is out of date?

Pursuit maintains a comparison page listing ten capabilities marked as absent on our side. Most of the list is fair. Three items are no longer accurate, and one of them concerns security, so it is worth correcting directly.

• Seeing data before you buy. The page states there is no way to see NationGraph output without a sales call. Any team can request ten free signals for their territory and review real, sourced output before speaking to anyone.
• Security. The page states NationGraph does not advertise any security certification. NationGraph operates against SOC 2 controls today and is completing formal certification, maintains a zero-retention policy for customer data, holds read-only access to connected CRMs, and never writes to a CRM without an explicit user action.
• AI-native integration. The page states NationGraph has no MCP or AI-native integration layer. Our MCP is in pilot with customers now, exposing all eleven data sources with per-source access gating.

We would rather correct the record than argue about it. If you are evaluating both, check the claims on either site against what you see in the product.

What should you make of the $1M pipeline guarantee?

It is a well-designed piece of marketing and it deserves a clear-eyed read. The commitment is to identify $1 million in pipeline, not to produce $1 million in revenue, and pipeline identified is a number the vendor calculates. Read the terms, and look specifically at how a qualified opportunity is defined and what the refund process requires.

NationGraph takes a different approach to the same problem, which is that you should not have to trust a vendor's claims at all. Request ten free signals for your territory and judge the output before you spend anything. Then run a paid three-month pilot on your real accounts with your real reps. That is a shorter path to knowing whether this works than a guarantee with a definitions section.

NationGraph vs Pursuit at a glance

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Where does Pursuit fit better?

If you do not have reps to work the signal, Pursuit will run the outbound for you and hand over booked meetings. That is a genuine difference, and it is also a different purchase: you are buying outsourced sales capacity, not intelligence.

NationGraph is built for teams that already have at least two reps running a dedicated outbound SLED motion, because that is who gets value from a deeper signal. If that is not you, we will tell you before you sign anything.

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Which platform is right for your team?

Choose NationGraph if competitor contract detail is how you qualify, you want records collection running as infrastructure rather than a reporting layer, your CRM hygiene depends on institutions resolving to one clean record, you need to know how each institution is permitted to buy, or you want your reps querying the source database from their AI tools.

Choose Pursuit if you need someone else to run the outbound motion entirely, or you want post-sale renewal tooling in the same platform.

Vendors running this motion on NationGraph include Harris, Grainger, Gaggle, NVIDIA, Ramp, Verbit, Cofense, Ouster, Incident IQ, FlexPoint, InformedK12, Ativion, Kami, Resi, RTA, First Due, 4Mativ, U.S. Medical Staffing, Care Solace, and RocketLit.