Best Donor Management Software, Priced at Your Size

Donor management software is the database that holds every donor, every gift and every contact, and produces the receipts, lists and reports your fundraising runs on. The price spread is enormous, from $0 to well over $10,000 a year for the same 5,000 donors, and most comparison pages hide it, because most of them are written by a vendor that ranks itself first. This page prices each tool at three database sizes, read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 8 October 2026, shows what a year actually costs, and counts the platform fees that make some “free” tools the most expensive option on the list.

If you need a wider platform, with volunteers, memberships, events and integrations weighed alongside donors, the nonprofit CRM comparison covers that. This page is about the donor database itself.

The short answer

• Under about 500 donors and raising mostly online: Zeffy or Givebutter’s free plan. Both carry a usable donor record and cost you nothing, because donors are asked for a tip.
• A few hundred to 50,000 records, one or two staff: Little Green Light. $45 to $135 a month by record count, unlimited users, and the strongest record-keeping per dollar on this list.
• A growing development team that wants the database to prompt them: Bloomerang, from $125 a month, whose built-in retention and predictive features are the reason to pay more.
• Large or complex, with an administrator: Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud, with ten free licences, or Raiser’s Edge NXT if you are already a Blackbaud shop.

What each tool costs at your size

Every vendor prices on something different, so a single “from” price compares nothing. This table puts each on the same footing: the monthly price at 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 donor records.

Three things stand out. Little Green Light is cheaper at 10,000 records than most rivals are at 1,000. Keela’s price climbs steeply with contacts, nearly tripling between 1,000 and 10,000. And DonorDock’s flat $500 a month is expensive for a small file and comparatively cheap for a large one, because it does not rise with contacts at all.

Virtuous, Raiser’s Edge NXT and Bonterra (which includes EveryAction and Network for Good) publish no prices. Virtuous splits its tiers at $5 million raised a year; the other two quote individually. Expect five figures a year, and ask for the renewal cap in writing.

What a year really costs

A monthly price on a pricing page is not what you will pay. Here is year one for an organization with 5,000 donor records, at the cheapest billing each vendor offers.

Remember the costs no pricing page shows: migrating your data (budget a week of someone’s time even with vendor help), training, and the payment processing fees every tool passes on, typically 2.2% to 2.9% plus 30 cents a card gift.

“Free” donor management software, and what it costs

Free donor databases come in three kinds, and they are not equally free.

Tip-funded. Zeffy and Givebutter’s free plan charge you nothing and ask the donor to add a tip at checkout. Your cost is zero; the donor’s is whatever they choose, and some donors resent the prompt. Zeffy also covers card processing, which almost no one else does.

Platform fee. Donorbox’s Standard plan is $0 a month plus a 2.95% platform fee (3.95% on events, memberships and peer-to-peer). Funraise is free for organizations raising under $1 million a year with a 5% platform fee. On $100,000 of online gifts, those fees are $2,950 and $5,000, before card processing.

Open source. CiviCRM is free to use and genuinely capable, but someone has to host and maintain it. Managed hosting through CiviCRM Spark starts at $9.50 a month; the real cost is the volunteer or consultant who keeps it running.

The crossover is easy to work out. Once your online gifts pass roughly $22,000 a year, a 2.95% platform fee costs more than Little Green Light’s annual subscription at 5,000 records. A “free” tool that takes a percentage is free only while you are small.

The shortlist, one by one

Little Green Light. Priced on records with unlimited users: $45 a month up to 2,500 records, $60 to 5,000, $75 to 10,000, rising $15 per 10,000 to $135 at 50,000. Annual billing is 10% off. Clean gift entry, receipting and reporting, and nothing you do not need. Wrong for organizations that want the software to tell them who to call; it advertises no AI features.

Bloomerang. From $125 a month billed annually for the CRM, on records with unlimited users; a Giving Platform bundle with online giving starts at $242. Its whole design is built around retention, with an engagement meter on each donor and predictive insights flagging who is ready to give more or at risk of lapsing. Kindful, which Bloomerang acquired, is no longer sold to new customers; its site now points to Bloomerang. Wrong for very small files, where its features outrun the data.

DonorPerfect. Core from $99 a month; Plus and Pro by quote, priced on constituent count. Long-established, very configurable, with a large user community. Wrong for anyone who wants a published price for the tier they will actually need.

Neon CRM. From $99 a month, priced on your organization’s revenue rather than contacts, with unlimited contacts and users; memberships, events and volunteers add 10% to 20% each. Wrong for a fast-growing organization with a small donor file, which pays for revenue it raises rather than donors it holds.

Keela. From $164 a month billed annually up to 1,000 contacts, rising to $438 at 10,000. Strong on email and on suggested ask amounts. Wrong for a large file on a tight budget, where it is several times Little Green Light’s price.

DonorDock. One plan, $500 a month billed annually, with unlimited contacts, five users, 10,000 emails a month and text credits, plus a one-time $3,800 onboarding fee and a 90-day money-back guarantee. Wrong for anyone under a few thousand donors.

Givebutter. A free plan with an unlimited-contact CRM, funded by tips or a 3% fee; Plus from $29 a month at 250 contacts and $79 at 1,000. Best as a fundraising front end with a donor list behind it. Wrong for major gift work, where you need pledges, moves and relationship notes.

Zeffy. $0 in every sense, donor management and email included. Wrong for anything beyond basic records and receipts.

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. Ten Core licences free through the Power of Us programme, then $70 a user a month billed annually. Unlimited in what it can do, and unlimited in what it takes to set up. Wrong for anyone without an administrator or budget for an implementation partner.

Raiser’s Edge NXT, Virtuous, Bonterra. Quote only, and built for larger shops. Raiser’s Edge remains the default at universities, hospitals and large charities; Virtuous sells “responsive fundraising” with a major gifts tool; Bonterra combines EveryAction, Network for Good and others.

How to choose

1. Count your records honestly. Include lapsed donors, event attendees and anyone you will mail. Most organizations hold several times as many records as active donors, and record-priced tools charge for all of them.
2. Price year one and year three. Year one includes onboarding. Year three includes the growth tier and the renewal increase. Ask for the renewal cap in writing.
3. Ask who enters gifts, and test it. A trial should include entering ten real gifts, issuing receipts and running your year-end report. Most switching regret is about daily data entry, not features.
4. Check the export. You should be able to get every gift, with dates and donor IDs, into a spreadsheet in one step. That export is what powers RFM analysis, retention tracking and any tool you add later.
5. Decide whether the database should think. Some tools now include predictive or AI features; others are pure record-keeping. Neither is wrong. It decides what else you might need.

Built-in AI, and adding it to the database you have

Every vendor now advertises AI. Most of it is writing help. The part that changes fundraising results is prioritisation: telling a small team which donors to contact this week and why. Here is what each database includes.

If your database already includes predictive features, use them before buying anything. If it does not, and particularly on Little Green Light or Salesforce, there is a second option: a separate tool that reads your database and does the prioritising.

Gratefully, an AI donor intelligence and stewardship platform built for nonprofits, is the most direct example. It connects live to Salesforce for Nonprofits, Bloomerang and Little Green Light, plus Mailchimp, Constant Contact and HubSpot for email engagement, and produces a ranked list each morning with the reason each donor is on it, along with answers to questions about any donor with a citation to the record. It is free for one person (five weekly tasks and ten AI answers a month), and $79 a month billed annually for Essential, which watches your top 25 donors. Paired with Little Green Light at 5,000 records, that is roughly $133 a month for a record-keeping database plus daily prioritisation, which is the comparison to make against a database that bundles both. It is wrong for organizations on Zeffy, Givebutter or Donorbox, which it reaches only by file upload; for Raiser’s Edge NXT users, likewise import only; for files with a year or two of history, where it has too little to read; and for anyone needing a SOC 2 Type II report, which the company expects to issue in the fourth quarter of 2026. Its PII handling, with donor details replaced by tokens before any AI prompt, is described on its security page. The AI fundraising tools roundup compares it with Dataro, Virtuous Momentum and Gravyty.

Switching databases without losing anything

• Export everything twice: once in the old system’s native format and once as plain spreadsheets of donors, gifts, pledges and notes.
• Map fields before importing. Gift type, fund, campaign and appeal codes never line up one to one; decide each mapping on paper.
• Run both systems for one receipting cycle. Reconcile gift totals by month before you switch the old one off.
• Keep relationship history. Contact reports and notes are what a new fundraiser needs most and what migrations most often drop. If they will not import cleanly, save them as documents attached to each donor; the donor handover template covers what to keep.
• Check recurring gifts. Card details do not always move between processors, so some monthly donors may have to re-enter them. Plan the message before you migrate.

Signs the database is not the problem

Organizations often switch donor databases to fix something no database fixes. If gifts are entered late, donors are not thanked within a week, or nobody runs a report until year end, a new system will reproduce the same results at a higher price. Fix the process on the database you have, measure the five metrics that matter for two quarters, and switch only if the software is genuinely what stops you.

How this list was made

Every price was read on the vendor’s own pricing page on 8 October 2026, with the monthly and annual views both checked where a page offers a toggle. Where a vendor publishes no price for a size, the table says so rather than estimating. Tools priced on revenue or by quote appear with their published starting point only. Gratefully is a company we cover closely. It is listed separately from the databases because it is not one: it is an AI donor intelligence and stewardship platform that works with the database you already have.