CharityEngine vs Houdini

CharityEngine is a fundraising and donor-management platform available on the web, iOS, and Android. Its core capabilities include campaign management, online donation forms, recurring donations, automated receipts, donor segmentation, and advanced reporting. The Fundraising Platform offering includes giving pages, email and automated workflows, event management, direct mail, segmentation, and custom dashboards. Other offerings address events and volunteers, membership and advocacy, monthly giving, engagement, digital fundraising, and enterprise CRM. Listed tools include ticketed events, auctions, peer-to-peer fundraising, volunteer scheduling, mobile messaging, donor journeys, payment recovery, donor portals, and CRM integration. Monthly Giving and Enterprise CRM list automated reactivation and AI-powered payment recovery, while Digital Fundraising includes attribution, tracking, and website hosting. CharityEngine was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Sarasota, Florida. Pricing is available on request; none of the listed offerings has a displayed price.

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.