Cobber vs DearMEP

Cobber is a web and API platform for Australian political parties, advocacy groups, and campaigns. It keeps members, donors, volunteers, and signups in searchable supporter records, then connects those records to hosted forms, email and SMS campaigns, donations, memberships, events, tasks, and automations. Automations can send follow-up messages or assign team tasks after a donation, petition signature, volunteer action, or contact. National, State, and Branch divisions support role-based access by area, while new supporters receive federal, state, and local government area tags. Prospects combines AI and deterministic rankings to identify supporters to call and suggest an ask. Membership types sync to Stripe products. The NationBuilder importer recognizes exports but summarizes historical donations rather than importing each transaction and does not create membership records automatically. Cobber is Sydney-hosted and Australian-built; pricing is available on request.

DearMEP is free, open-source software that helps citizens contact elected representatives in the European Parliament. Users can call once or schedule daily or weekly calls, and can also contact politicians by email or social media. The system chooses a representative from the user's country whom it estimates may be persuadable, using voting behavior and feedback. NGOs and activists can adapt the tool for campaigns and other assemblies, or embed a customizable widget on a campaign website. The widget detects the browser language and also lets visitors choose a language; campaign URLs must be added to the instance's allowed origins. DearMEP offers API documentation for advanced integrations and custom client implementations, and is available as web software, an API, or self-hosted software. A new instance requires an account with 46elks, its calling provider. The project says it minimizes personal-data processing and follows privacy-by-design and privacy-by-default, with GDPR compliance. Its privacy design document says IP addresses are used for geolocation and abuse prevention but are not persisted by the application itself; the document notes that some described functionality may not be implemented.