Whether you’re a nonprofit organization that relies on fundraisers or a blogger with an appreciative reader base, donations are a great way to be rewarded for your hard work. They can even help with the upkeep costs of maintaining a website. However, figuring out how to accept them on your site can be tricky.
Fortunately, if you have a WordPress site, plugins offer a simple solution. Fundraising and donation plugins give you the ability to accept payments in different currencies, create multiple campaigns, and so much more.
In this post, we’ll explain the benefits of using a donation plugin for your WordPress site. Then we’ll share six of the best donation plugins that will help you collect your funds in an effective manner. Let’s get started!
Why You Need a Donation Plugin
One of the biggest advantages of using WordPress is the plethora of plugins available. These extensions are a powerful way to expand the functionality of your site. So if you’re looking for a method of accepting payments, donations plugins are a smart solution.
There are many reasons to use a donation plugin. It gives you the opportunity to:
- Accept payments from multiple payment gateways, allowing donators to use their preferred method.
- Make it easy for people to donate from both desktop and mobile devices.
- Quickly and easily integrate your WordPress site with payment gateways.
If you’re a charity, donations are, of course, a major part of being able to run your organization. However, even if you’re not a non-profit, there are still many reasons to consider using a donation plugin.
Running a website can get expensive quickly. If you’re providing your audience with meaningful and unique content, you should be compensated for your work – even if you’re not providing a product for them to purchase.
Many people are more than happy and willing to show their support for websites they frequent or organizations they believe in through monetary donations. Adding a donation plugin to your site is a gentle yet effective way to inform readers that you accept donations while also making it easy for them to contribute if they wish.
6 of the Best WordPress Donation Plugins in 2020
Making the decision to use a WordPress donation plugin is easy. What’s more difficult is figuring out which one is best for your site.
The good news is that you have a solid selection to choose from. Let’s take a look at six of the best WordPress donations plugins to choose from in 2020!
1. Give Donation Plugin
Give is the new-ish contender to the list. Its authors are Matt Cromwell and Devin Walker, who are behind some of the most popular plugins available in the WordPress directory. They also run a small theme and plugin shop called WordImpress (and yes, they do create impressive stuff).
It markets itself as the most robust and flexible solution for accepting donations via WordPress. While this particular plugin doesn’t have many active installs as other plugins listed here, the people who have tried it seem to really like it, and it is pretty clear from the reviews on WordPress repository.
Some features that distinguish Give from other solutions include reporting of forms and exporting of forms by date range (both as CSV & PDF).
The core includes all the essential features such as:
- Standard PayPal payment gateway
- Test mode
- History of donations
- Import and export function
If you want to extend the functionality or want to add another payment gateway, you will need addons, which can be a bit pricey.
This plugin provides an intuitive solution for raising money without taking any cut from the money raised. What I like most about the plugin is its simplicity and clean design. Another great thing is that it can be used for accepting any type of payment and works smoothly with all the major payment gateways.
The Give plugin follows the ‘freemium’ model, which I think is a win-win for both the makers and the people who use it. However, not everyone likes freemium model, and some even feel cheated for not including all the features in core solution. Another thing about the Give plugin is that it is one the newest contenders in the market, so it lacks some features like anonymous donations and profile pages.
2. Charitable
WPCharitable and Eric Daams joined forces to create the powerful and extendable fundraising plugin Charitable. Charitable is a one-of-a-kind donation plugin that gives you full control over your WordPress site’s donations.
The plugin’s key feature is that it is designed to be extremely developer-friendly and provides you with full control over your site’s fundraising and donations module. Charitable has over 10,000 active installs and boasts a full five-star rating from users. The plugin is incredibly easy to use and presents an intuitive interface for users to work with – you can have your first fundraising campaign set up and ready to go in less than five minutes!
Unlike most other donation plugins, Charitable doesn’t charge users a fee on every transaction they make. The plugin is available for free and there are no hidden transaction fees – it’s a no-brainer!
Another amazing feature about this plugin is that you can set up as many fundraising campaigns as you like and customize them according to your preferences. The extendable plugin comes with a ton of extensions for users to pick from, as well. You won’t have to worry about the plugin’s compatibility with your site’s theme as it is designed to work with all WordPress compliant themes seamlessly.
The Charitable plugin supports donations made via PayPal right out of the box. However, if you’d like to enable more payment gateways, you will have to purchase the plugin’s premium add-ons which allow donations to be made through Stripe, Authorize.Net, and PayUMoney.
3. Paypal Donations
With over 50,000 active installations, Paypal Donations is among the most popular donation plugins in the WordPress directory. As the name suggests, the plugin is specifically designed for accepting payments via Paypal, the most recognized online money transfer service. The donation button can be added anywhere on your website including header, page, posts, sidebar, and footer using a simple shortcode.
It does a good job of collecting money. You can set the minimum or default payment, currency of your choice, button style, country, and language.
While this may be the most popular plugin in this category, it definitely lacks a few things. One of them is no simple feature to thank donors, though there is a workaround: you can create a ‘thank you’ page and redirect the donors to there.
4. Donation Thermometer
As the name suggests, this plugin adds a custom thermometer image charting the amount of donations raised. The plugin uses a simple shortcode to display classic-style thermometers on your WordPress site for your fund-raising activities.
Donation Thermometer is a simple plugin and doesn’t have a lot of features, which is okay for someone with very basic needs. The plugin does the job of displaying a simple thermometer for collecting donations quite well.
With shortcode available, you can display it anywhere you like. You can also specify the width and height of the image in the shortcode itself.
Additionally, the plugin is super easy to customize. You can easily make modifications such as changing the color and text on the image.
5. Donation Content Locker
Donation Content locker allows you to hide this particular part of your content so it ‘s only visible to those who have made donations on your site. This may not be the best way to go about collecting donations, as you are indirectly asking for a premium fee. The better option would be to turning your site into a membership area.
The plugin works similar to how most social content locker plugins do. You have to wrap the protected content with the [donationlocker] content [/donationlocker] shortcode. If people want to view your content, they must donate a small amount.
You can set the minimum amount for users. One big advantage of this plugin is that it comes with five payment gateways:
- PayPal
- AlertyPay
- Payza
- InterKassa
- Authorize.Net
After successfully making the donation, donors will receive an activation link to make the locked content visible. Donation Content Locker is a perfect way to monetize and extend the functionality of your website.
6. Donation Manager Pro
Donation Manager Pro is another great plugin that handles the donation for you. However, it is paid one and doesn’t include any support for 2Checkout. The plugin is easy to set up and comes with regular updates and support.
The plugin allows your visitors and readers to donate. Once they do, it will add them to list of donators. Currently, it supports PayPal, InterKassa, Authorize.net, EgoPay, and AlertPay.
Final Thoughts
Raising money via your site is an easy job, but it could be made that much easier by using a combination of plugins. Donation plugins make it easy for site owners, bloggers, or anyone
looking to raise money for their business venture or non-profit organization.
In this post, we discussed six of the best WordPress donation plugins to consider adding to your site:
- Give: A great overall solution that lets export report forms as both CSV and PDF.
- Charitable: A more advanced donation solution with different payment gateways, unlimited campaigns, and offline payment options.
- PayPal Donations: A simple plugin that is great if you’re looking for PayPal payments specifically.
- Donation Thermometer: A fully customizable plugin that includes an aesthetically pleasing visual of donations raised.
- Donation Content Locker: A unique donation plugin that only shows the donation content to those who have donated to your site.
- Donation Manager Pro: A premium plugin that lets you choose from an extensive list of payment gateways to connect with.
Do you have any questions about WordPress donation plugins? Let us know in the comments section below!
We’re offering a way to raise money for good causes with your website without the need for cash donations, worthy a look: adtruism.com WordPress plugin on the way but in the meantime you can add the embed code in a text widget 😉
Great donation plugins. surely use one of them on my site. my developer didn’t tell me about this plugins. I gave order to him. thanks to Wpk i got what i was looking for ….
Glad I could able to help you, Syed.
Been looking for a good/simple Authorize.net donation plugin and have come to the conclusion that none exists. Been dealing with WooCommerce (after purchasing their plugins) for over a month, but nothing works and their customer service sucks. Found a couple more that seemed good, although one doesn’t work at all and the other has such a poor record of support that I’m not feeling lucky enough to give it a go. Anyone know of anything out there?
Have you tried Donation Manager Pro plugin? It accept payments through Authorize.net.
Thanks for the response, Devesh.
I actually ponied up the $15 to try this one out, despite my misgivings about lack of support/updates as evidenced by the replies in the forum. However, I found that it requires a value for MD5 Hash – which my other (working) Authorize.net plugin will not support – so it’s back to square one.
I also tried WP Donate which just came out – however it’s not working at all (won’t store the Login/Transaction Key) and I have yet to hear back from the developer
Hi Dev,
Awesome plug ins! I need a new donate widget; looks like a I found it.
Thanks!
Hi Devesh,
you have gone through great length in giving an overview of these plugins, and I appreciate the effort you put into this.
Great to have a these different options all in one place.
I bookmarked this post to come back to when I want to add a donation button to my site.
Thank you so much for this valuable post!
Cheers,
Yorinda
i want to collect payment through cc-avenue payment gateway how can i do it?
my ngo website is in wordpress and now i am using smart donation.
Thank you so much! I just need one of those!
Easy WordPress Donations seems the best.
Hi, i’m looking a donation plugins with the possibility to donate for example 5euros all month during 5 years… Is it possible ?
Has anybody tried the WordPress plugin – ‘Smart Donations?’
Looks nice. Thanks for sharing, Rex.
Nice work Devesh, here I would like to suggest another free plugin for donation “WP-Donate” using Authorize.net. This plugin provides a form to receive donation as well as donor management at admin area from where admin can see list of donors and information related to each donation.
I want a danation button which does not donate to me, but directly to a charity project.
Is there a plugin for wordpress for that?
REason: I offer some things for free download, but would suggest to donate then a small amount to a specific charity organization, eg. UNICEf.
PayPal Donations Plugin is the best out of list and others are also useful. I would like to suggest another free WordPress plugin which provides rich features including donation form, authorize.net payment gateway, donation list at admin area, donation information, email notification to admin are donor, email content and thank you page management, etc… http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-church-donation. Hope it will help to someone else as well. Thank you for sharing such great list with us.
Thanks for your suggestion, Hardik — I will check it out.
I’ve tried them all. My favorite is Total Donations which isn’t on your list. Seemless is pretty good as well but lacks a progress bar. Easy Donations is not bad but confusing and didn’t do everything we wanted.
Just wanted to add another to your list (shameless self-promo). Check out Give http://wordpress.org/plugins/give It was released about a month ago and we believe it takes the cake. Would love your informed feedback. And thanks for serving the WP Community with this blog.
Hi Matt,
Ah no problem. I have been thinking about including the plugin ever since I saw the post on WPTavern.
Finally added the plugin, thanks for the kick :).
Cheers,
Dev
Wow. That’s excellent, thanks so much for the update and the high praise!
Also just a heads up that Anonymous donations and donor listings, as well as per form goals are all coming to Give soon and each will be part of the Core free plugin. Lots of great things in store for Give.
As to the comment you linked to at the Tavern, I think (as many others commented as well) that he was really mis-informed about the features Give offers out of the box. We find the freemium model (a robust free plugin, with premium Add-ons) to be one of the best ways to ensure that a plugin has a future, is well supported and developed. Lots more can be said about that. Thanks again!
Hello Matt,
Please I am from Nigeria, and I have one site on WordPress.com site, but I am thinking I f Nigerian are allowed to use this plugin on their site? If I self-host my site, can I use this plugin as a Nigerian because PayPal had some restrictions to some countries, in which Nigeria is included. Or is there any payment gateway I can use this plugin with, besides paypal.
Thanks
Have you looked at Total Donations? It’s one of the nicer ones out there. I think it’s one of the best in its price range if not the best overall, but I *could* be a little bias, I’m one of the authors. 🙂
Looks like a great solution, will check it out. Thanks for stopping by, Astried.
Hi Devesh,
Another one to consider adding to your list is Charitable (http://wordpress.org/plugins/charitable/). I’m one of the creators.
We released it in August, but we already have a number of premium extensions available from wpcharitable that add features like anonymous donations, Stripe credit card donations and custom user profile images (instead of using Gravatar). One extension we’re particularly excited about is called Charitable Ambassadors, which allows you to set up peer-to-peer fundraising on your website. Super powerful for organisations that want to leverage their supporters’ network of family and friends.
Cheers,
Eric
Thanks for the suggestion, Eric — I’ll check it out.
Thanks for checking it Devesh! One thing that makes it unique among donation plugins is the way we sell our extension packages. Those can be purchased on a Pay What You Want pricing model, which is something we started doing to support non-profits with tighter budgets.
Hi Devesh,
I only have one question in relation to all of these plugins , especially to Give. If I don´t use the option paypall , how I make the retirement money donation? Since Give and other plugins give the option to Pay pall , and off line would be with checks by post card, but has not be with any of these two ways.
Thank you!
Juan,
If you don’t want to accept PayPal, you can use Authorize, Stripe, or 2Checkout. Here’s a complete list of their payment gateways — https://givewp.com/addons/
Thanks for stopping by.
WPdonations seems to be offline by now
Yup, looks like the plugin has been discontinued. I’ll update the post to reflect that. Thanks for letting me know.
Great. Thanks, I need your help in guiding me which plugin to use peer to peer find raising. I mean individual volunteer raising funds for the organisation. Your suggestion would help us to choose better option.
Thank you.
I’d recommend going with GiveWP or Charitable — both are good solutions with great support.
Appreciate the mention Devesh! Ashok, we created a Charitable extension called Ambassadors specifically to help organisations do peer to peer fundraising campaigns with WordPress: https://www.wpcharitable.com/extensions/charitable-ambassadors/
If you’d like to try a demo, I’m more than happy to arrange that for you.
Just send us a message via https://www.wpcharitable.com/support/
Is it easy to export the donations in Charitable? And is it easy to export also the Ambassadors donations as well?
Hi Vincent,
Yep! There is a donations export tool built into Charitable that works for any donation made through Charitable, including ones to Ambassador campaigns.
Hello guys,
Is there any WordPress plugin to allow creating a Pop UP Donation form whenever you access that webpage?
Similar like accept cookies plugin?
Thank you,
Nicos
As I was looking over the “reviews” of the WP Charitable plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/charitable/), I noticed that nearly all of them (76 of them) are from the same “reviewer”, Eric Daams–the owner. I don’t know if Mr. Daams is responsible for this, but it puts the product in a very bad light.
Hi Richard,
That would be me. 🙂
None of the reviews are written by me, though the redesign on WordPress may make it look that way. Check the “Started by:” bit on the left; that’s who left the review. My name is on the right as the “Last Post” for most reviews because I generally like to reply and say thanks for leaving a review.
Cheers,
Eric
Yes, you are correct Eric. My mistake as I was looking at “last post”. From what I just read on your reviews, you seem to have the strongest supporters out there I’ve ever seen.
Best wishes.