Donately vs Houdini

Donately is an online fundraising platform for accepting donations and managing donor activity. It provides branded donation pages with custom messaging, branding, drag-and-drop editing, mobile optimization, and recurring giving. Campaign pages can include rich media, live fundraising thermometers, peer-to-peer and team fundraising, custom branding, and social sharing. Donation forms and widgets embed on websites, landing pages, or blogs without redirects or coding. Donor tools include profiles, donation tracking, segmentation, automated receipts, reporting, exports, and retention insights. Native integrations include HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Slack, and Constant Contact, while Zapier connects to thousands of tools. An API supports sending or updating donation information in external systems. Payments can use Stripe or PayPal, Google and Apple wallets, multiple currencies, and one-time or recurring gifts. Donately lists PCI compliance, HTTPS on forms, fraud-prevention tools, and GDPR and CCPA support. It runs on the web and through an API. A free plan is available; paid plans start at $99/mo.

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.