GiveNow vs Houdini

GiveNow is a web-based Australian fundraising platform for small and medium-sized charities and not-for-profit organisations. Organisations can collect one-off or recurring donations, customise forms, and embed those forms on their own websites. The service also covers peer-to-peer CrowdRaisers, memberships, event ticketing, and grant search. Supporters may create unlimited individual CrowdRaiser pages, while organisations can review pages before publication. Listed donor payment methods are Visa, Mastercard, AMEX, Apple Pay, and direct debit. GiveNow lists Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack and Google Analytics integrations, plus CSV export for donor and donation data. It says data is stored in Australia, sensitive information is encrypted, and OrgHQ uses multifactor authentication, role controls, and 24/7 monitoring. Donor credit-card details are not stored. There are no upfront or subscription fees; platform fees range from 1.5% to 3.5%, with a commonly listed payment-provider fee of 0.26%.

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.