Higher education institutions (HEIs) in the Nordic countries are increasingly faced with the pressures to produce more with less. Governments in Finland and Sweden are forced to think strategically of research and teaching activities. Features of concentration of resources and profiling of universities can be found in both countries. University profiling, including the setting of research focus areas, is an international phenomenon. The extent of profiling and the actual consequences may, however, vary considerably. Comparative empirical research is thus needed in order to find out, what profiling means for individual institutions and departments. This paper presents results from the research project ‘Priority-setting in Research Management: Organisational and Leadership Reactions to Institutional Reforms in Finnish and Swedish Universities’, where we have studied the responses of leaders and managers at different organisational levels in Finnish and Swedish HEIs to profiling pressures on research. The paper is based on data of altogether four universities in Finland and Sweden: two large, comprehensive universities (University of Helsinki and Lund University) and two smaller and newly merged universities (University of Eastern Finland and Linnaeus University). Comparisons are done at country level and at different organisational levels (central administration, faculty, departmental level).