Givebutter vs Houdini

Givebutter is a nonprofit platform for fundraising, donor management, and supporter engagement. It supports donation forms, fundraising pages, events, auctions, peer-to-peer fundraising, and recurring donations. Its free CRM includes unlimited contacts, donor histories, custom fields, notes, tags, and reporting. The free plan also includes unlimited users, email blasts, and fundraising campaigns. Givebutter Plus adds automated workflows, task management, texting, an advanced email editor, custom reports, expanded data visualizations, file uploads, data hygiene, and discounted direct mail. Plus pricing is contact-based: listed tiers include $29/mo for up to 250 contacts, $79/mo for up to 1,000, and $129/mo for up to 2,500, billed annually; a 30-day trial is offered. With optional tips enabled, the listed platform fee is 0%; with tips disabled, it is 3%, plus 2.9% + 30¢ processing fees. Givebutter says it connects with 1,000+ applications, including Mailchimp, QuickBooks Online, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Stripe. Its free iOS and Android app supports donations, event management, and campaign tracking.

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.