Better Giving vs Houdini

Better Giving is a fundraising and financial platform for nonprofits built around an embeddable donation form. The form accepts card and bank or ACH gifts, PayPal and Venmo, Apple Pay and Google Pay, stock, donor-advised funds, IRA or QCD gifts, and cryptocurrency. Fundraising tools include recurring donations, peer-to-peer campaigns, dedication gifts, program-specific giving, goal progress bars, automated receipts, and reporting. Organizations can export donor-level records and giving history through CSV or API at no charge. The platform and donation form are public code and can be self-hosted with an organization’s own payment gateway. The free Fundraising & fund management plan is free, with all features included and donor contributions optional. Self-hosted software is free, but organizations pay gateway processing costs and manage receipts, compliance, and operations. Fiscal sponsorship costs $2.90 gift. Better Giving says donations are handled by Stripe; its security policy describes TLS 1.2+ in transit and AES-256 at rest, and says raw card data is not stored or processed by Better Giving.

Houdini is free, open-source fundraising infrastructure for nonprofits and NGOs. It provides crowdfunding campaigns, fundraising events, donation forms, a donate-widget page and generator, plus simple donor management. Nonprofit dashboards cover payment history, payouts, recurring donations, metrics, supporter relationships through a CRM and organizational user accounts. Campaign reporting is listed as advanced. Payment processing is separate and requires Stripe API keys during setup. Houdini runs as a self-hosted Rails application, with production instructions for Linux using SystemD and Nginx. Supported systems include Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, 22.04 or an equivalent. Prerequisites include Node.js 16, Yarn, PostgreSQL 12 (PostgreSQL 10 may work) and Ruby 2.7. The project describes its latest version as pre-2.0 and in heavy development, recommending v1 instead. Building JavaScript assets needs about 3 GB free RAM, while the deployment guide suggests at least 4 GB for the server. Security reports go by email; GitHub Discussions hosts project chat.