ACCOLADE vs AWARD FORCE
Award Force is an awards management platform from Creative Force Ltd, focused on entry submission and judging.
Award Force is a mature, heavily certified submissions-and-judging platform. It holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type II, Cyber Essentials and PCI-DSS, it publishes its prices, and it lets you choose the region your data is stored in. If your programme ends at the judging decision, it is a strong product and we will say so.
Accolade is the better fit when your programme does not end there — when there is a ceremony to produce, a room to seat, sponsors to invoice and a door to run on the night. Award Force does not publish tools for any of that; Accolade’s 41 modules do.
ACCOLADE IS BEST FOR
UK and EU awards programmes that run a ceremony — where nominations and judging are the first half of the job and seating, sponsors, catering, check-in and run of show are the second.
AWARD FORCE IS BEST FOR
High-volume submission and judging programmes, and buyers whose procurement requires an ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certificate on file today.
Feature by feature
| Capability | Accolade | Award Force |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | Free £0 · Professional £495/mo · Enterprise £1,750/mo · Agency £3,500/mo | Growth €2,625/yr · Pro €5,250/yr · Premier on request3 |
| Billing period | Monthly, or annually at 20% off (£4,752 / £16,800 / £33,600 a year) | Per year on all three plans3 |
| Free plan | Yes — one event, 50 guests, 1 seat, 50 nominations, 3 judges, no card | “No free trial. No free version.”3 |
| Entry volume limits | Unlimited nominations from Professional upwards | Growth and Pro: up to 10,000 entries a year. Premier: 20,000 by default, extra blocks purchasable2 |
| Data residency | UK and EU only — database in Frankfurt, application in London. No choice of other regions. | Choice of region on AWS: European Union, USA, Hong Kong, Canada or Australia1 |
| Independent security certification | None held today. Encryption in transit and at rest, daily encrypted backups retained 30 days. | ISO/IEC 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type II, Cyber Essentials, PCI-DSS, published via a trust centre1 |
| Published availability | 99.9% uptime target, with service credit on Enterprise and Agency | “more than 99.96% service availability” since 2016, with a public status page1 |
| Support response commitment | 4 business hours on Enterprise, 1 business hour on Agency. Severity table | A support and application uptime SLA is listed on the Premier plan3 |
| Custom domain | Auto-provisioned subdomain on Enterprise and Agency | Custom domains available on the Pro plan1 |
| Table planning and seating | Yes — drag-and-drop table planner with a 3D room walkthrough (Professional and above) | Not in Award Force’s published feature index2 |
| Run of show and ceremony production | Yes — cue-by-cue run of show, AV and script (Enterprise) | Not in Award Force’s published feature index2 |
| Guest check-in on the night | Yes — check-in desk, badge scanning, live arrivals | Not in Award Force’s published feature index2 |
| Catering, suppliers and dietary | Yes — menus, dietary requirements, supplier tracking (Professional and above) | Not in Award Force’s published feature index2 |
| Sponsors | Sponsor CRM — pipeline, deliverables, outreach and invoicing (Enterprise) | “Sponsor visibility” is published under Promote — brand placement rather than sponsor relationship management2 |
| Scope of the platform | 41 modules — nominations, judging, guests, seating, sponsors, finance, catering, check-in, run of show and ceremony production in one workspace | Published feature index is organised as Build, Manage, Judge, Entrant experience, Promote, Secure and Integrate2 |
Sources
- Award Force, “Privacy, security + compliance” — https://awardforce.com/security/. Checked 7 August 2026. Hosting regions, data-residency choice, certifications, availability figure, custom domain on Pro.
- Award Force, “Awards management software features” — https://awardforce.com/features/. Checked 7 August 2026. The complete published feature index, and the entry-limit answers in its FAQ. Rows marked “not in Award Force’s published feature index” mean exactly that: we read the index and the capability is not listed on it. It is not a claim that the product cannot do it.
- Capterra, “Award Force Pricing 2026” — https://www.capterra.com/p/148148/Award-Force/pricing/. Checked 7 August 2026. Plan names, annual prices in euros, billing frequency, absence of a free version or free trial, and the Premier SLA line.
Award Force prices are quoted in euros because that is the currency Award Force is listed in; Accolade prices are in pounds sterling. We have not converted between them — an exchange rate on a comparison page is a number that goes stale silently. This page previously carried a number of claims about Award Force that we could not substantiate from Award Force’s own published material. They have been removed rather than softened. If you believe anything here is wrong or out of date, email hello@accolade.live and we will correct it and re-date this section.
Somebody actually runs their awards on this
The British Photography Awards moved off seven separate tools and onto Accolade.
These are the British Photography Awards’ own programme figures, as at May 2026. They describe the BPA’s programme, not Accolade’s results.