The US procurement landscape looks fragmented but consolidates around five platforms. Federal opportunities live on SAM.gov. Two paid intelligence layers — GovWin IQ and BGOV — enrich them with pipeline and forecasting. State, local and education (SLED) opportunities flow through BidNet Direct. And a growing share of municipal buyers run their actual RFx process on Bonfire, which you only see when invited.
Below: what each platform is, what registration it asks for, what format the notice arrives in, and the qlows workflow on that platform’s notices.
What it is. The System for Award Management — the single official portal for US federal contract opportunities, contract awards, entity registration, and exclusion lists. Replaced FedBizOpps / FBO.gov in 2019. Mandatory for any vendor that wants to receive federal payment.
Access pattern.Free to read for anyone. Registration (Unique Entity ID + CAGE Code) required to bid. Notices appear as solicitation packages — typically a base PDF (the RFP / SOW) plus 5-30 attachments (J&A letters, past-performance forms, FAR clauses, pricing workbooks).
How qlows works with SAM.gov. Paste the SAM.gov solicitation URL into qlows. It pulls the base document and every attachment, extracts the requirements across the bundle (Section L instructions to offerors, Section M evaluation factors, FAR clause flowdowns, certifications), and produces a compliance grid with page references. Section L instructions become response structure; Section M factors become the win-theme map; FAR clauses become the legal-review queue.
What it is. The dominant federal+SLED market-intelligence subscription. Forecasted opportunities (often 12-24 months before the solicitation hits SAM.gov), incumbent data, contract-vehicle visibility, agency spending history.
Access pattern. Paid subscription, seat- based, typically $15k-50k+/year for a small team. Opportunity records link out to the live solicitation (SAM.gov, state portals, or buyer-direct).
How qlows works with GovWin IQ. Use GovWin to pre-qualify opportunities in your pipeline; once a target opportunity goes live, take the SAM.gov / state- portal URL from the GovWin record into qlows. qlows handles the decomposition; GovWin handles the upstream targeting. The two are complementary, not overlapping — and pairing them is how the most efficient federal bid teams operate.
What it is.Bloomberg’s federal intelligence platform. Strongest on contract data, agency budget analysis, congressional appropriations linkage, and GovCon news. The federal market’s equivalent of the Bloomberg Terminal.
Access pattern. Paid subscription, seat- based. Heavier on news + analyst workflow than on opportunity capture, but contains the full SAM.gov feed plus enrichment.
How qlows works with BGOV.Same handoff as GovWin: pre-qualify with BGOV, decompose with qlows. BGOV’s competitor and budget-context data is also useful as input to the “Lock the field” step of the prep framework — copy the relevant snippet into the qlows Model Export and your downstream AI gets the buyer background it needs.
Try qlows on a SAM.gov solicitation
Paste a real SAM.gov URL and watch the compliance grid build itself.
Currently in private beta. Bring an active solicitation; we'll process the full attachment bundle and ship you a Section L / Section M / FAR compliance grid before you commit.
Book a 30-min demo →What it is.The largest aggregator of US state, local, and education (SLED) bid opportunities. Operates regional “Purchasing Groups” (the Northeast Purchasing Group, the New England Purchasing Group, etc.) where each group’s member agencies post their RFPs.
Access pattern. Read for free, but downloads + alerts require paid registration. Most members subscribe to one or two regional Purchasing Groups. Notices arrive as PDF bundles, occasionally with structured procurement forms.
How qlows works with BidNet Direct. Download the RFP bundle from BidNet, drop it into qlows. The extraction logic is identical to SAM.gov — what changes is the schema: state and municipal RFPs lean heavier on local preference clauses, MWBE participation requirements, and bonding thresholds. qlows surfaces those as their own compliance-matrix rows so the response addresses each explicitly.
What it is.An e-procurement SaaS that buyers (US municipalities, school districts, universities, and increasingly Canadian public agencies) run their RFx process on. Vendors interact via an invitation link or by discovering the buyer’s public Bonfire portal.
Access pattern.Free for bidders. Self- registration when you receive an opportunity. Notices live inside the Bonfire workspace: the RFP document, the Q&A thread, attachments, structured response forms, and the submission deadline timer.
How qlows works with Bonfire.Download the full RFP bundle out of the Bonfire workspace (Bonfire makes this one-click). Feed it to qlows. The compliance matrix maps each requirement back to the Bonfire response form field, so when you copy answers back into the portal the structure is one-to-one. For Q&A threads on Bonfire, export the thread as you go and re-ingest — qlows re-emits the matrix with the clarified requirements.
Across all five US platforms, the qlows half of the workflow is the same:
- Ingest the notice bundle (URL or PDF).
- Extract requirements, evaluation factors, clauses, certifications, response structure.
- Compliance grid with owner, evidence, response location for each row.
- Route open questions to SMEs (Tech, Legal, CFO) via magic link.
- Hand off to your AI of choice (Claude / ChatGPT / Cursor / Copilot) via Model Export or MCP.
What changes per platform is upstream — where the notice comes from, what format it arrives in, what registration the buyer expects — not the prep work. That’s the leverage point: pick the right platforms for your pipeline, let qlows handle every notice the same way once it lands.