Donorbox vs Houdini

Donorbox provides fundraising tools for nonprofit organizations, including customizable donation forms that can be embedded on an organization’s website. Listed formats include donation pages, recurring donations, peer-to-peer fundraising, crowdfunding, memberships, events, and text-to-give. QuickDonate lets donors save payment information for repeat giving. Donorbox says checkout supports 52+ currencies and 15 languages, and its donor CRM features include segmentation and giving insights. Listed integrations include Salesforce, Blackbaud, HubSpot, Mailchimp, QuickBooks, WordPress, Stripe, and PayPal; API access is listed on Pro. Payment options through Stripe and PayPal include Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Venmo, ACH, SEPA, iDEAL, Bancontact, BACS, and PADs. Donorbox says it is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant and has SOC 2 Type I and Type II certifications. It also says payment data is tokenized and credit card information is not stored on its servers. Standard is free, with platform fees of 2.95%–3.95% and payment processing fees applying. Pro costs $150 a month, with platform fees of 1.75%–2% and processing fees applying.

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.