Donations are great way to reward someone for their work. I know a lot of people who rely upon the generosity of their blog readers as the way to pay the upkeep costs of running their website. Then, there are people from non-profit organizations who rely upon fund raisers.
If you are serious about getting money for your work or generating money for your business, then you should know the importance of having a website. You can easily start a WordPress website following our 15 minutes guide.
Once you have a WordPress powered website, you need to install a fundraising plugin. You can choose one from the below list. Most of the plugins listed in this post include features such as: ability to create multiple campaigns, accept payment in different currencies, and thank you templates.
In this post, I am going to share some of the best donation plugins that will minimize your worries and collect your funds in an effective manner.
Top Donation Plugins 2016
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. And it does work better than most other plugins available in this segment. 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 distinguishes Give from other solutions including reporting of forms, exporting of forms by date range (both as CSV & PDF).
Price: The core solution which includes all the essential features such as standard PayPal payment gateway, test mode, history of donations, and import & export function. If you want to extend the functionality or want to add another payment gateway, you will need addons, which will cost you a good deal of money.
Pros: It provides 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 about this plugin is that it can be used for accepting any type of payment and works smoothly with all the major payment gateways.
Cons: Give plugin follows freemium model, which I think is a win-win for both the makers and the people who use it. But not everyone likes freemium model, and some even fill cheated for not including all the features in core solution. Another thing about Give plugin is that it is the newest contender 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 users full control over their WordPress site’s donations.
The plugin’s key feature is that it was designed to be extremely developer-friendly and gives users full control over their site’s fundraising and donations module. Charitable has over 1,000 active installs and boasts a full 5 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 5 minutes!
Pros: 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.
Cons: 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
Paypal Donations has been downloaded 216,193 times, which makes it the most popular donation plugin 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 in your website including header, page, posts, sidebar, and footer using a simple shortcode.
Pros: 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.
Cons: 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’s a work around, you can create a thank you page, and redirect the donors to that page.
4. Seamless Donations
Seamless Donations is another great donation plugin in this segment, that can help you raise money for your organization or business. It lets you accept payment via PayPal and shows thank you message, when donors make a payment. The plugin has a number of useful features that might come in handy such as accepting payments anonymously, collecting recurring payments, invite users to join your email list, and track down donors.
I couldn’t find who originally created the plugin, but it was recently adopted by David Gewirtz, who plans to add a ton of new features. It looks Seamless Donations is on track to become a robust donation solution for WordPress.
Pros: One thing that makes this plugin stand out from the rest is its payment system. It has the most complete payment solution for accepting payments via PayPal. It also lets you embed the widget anywhere on your site using a simple shortcode.
Cons: While making donation and filing the address, it assumes that you are situated in USA. This is something that might work against your site, because not all donors are situated in United States.
5. Custom Post Donations
Custom Post Donations is a little different than other donation plugins. This plugin allows you to make 3 different types of widgets – Standard donation, Fixed + Additional donation, and Per item + Additional donation. There are two more type of widgets, and are only available in Pro version.
To choose a donation type, head over to the CP Donation settings page, and you will be shown an option to create your own widget to suit your purposes. Once, you have fill the necessary details, you will be given a shortcode. Now create a new page or post, and paste the shortcode there.
Premium version – The paid version of this plugin includes campaign donation type, multiple widgets, and two languages translations.
6. 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, and 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, you would be happy to know that plugin is super easy to customize and you can easily make modifications like changing color and text on the image.
7. Donation Content Locker
Donation Content locker allows you to hide the certain part of your content and displays it to only 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 other social content locker plugins do. You have to wrap the protected content with the [donationlocker] content [/donationlocker] shortcode.
And then 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 including PayPal, AlertyPay, Payza, InterKassa, and 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 functionality of your website.
Pros: Allow users to pay through one of the five popular gateways including PayPal and authorize.net.
Cons: Some people may not like the idea of using donation locker plugin, as it is not the best approach to attract donations.
8. Donation Manager Pro
Donation Manager Pro is another great plugin that handles the donation for you, but it is paid one and doesn’t include any support for 2Checkout. The plugin is easy to setup and has regular updates & support.
The plugin allows your visitors/readers to donate and include them into list of donators. At the moment, it supports PayPal, InterKassa, Authorize.net, EgoPay, and AlertPay. It is also the only plugin that supports more than five payment gateways.
9. Easy WordPress Donations
WPdonations, created by Remi Corson, makes it super easy for site owners to accept payments.
The plugin very simple to use and you can configure it in less than five minutes! Some of the features include ananyonmous donations, unlimited campaigns, donors donation dashboard, multiple payment gateways, offline payment, stripe checkout, recurring donations, campaigns target, multiple shortcodes, and more.
It also has a notification addon, which will send you notifications on your android or iOS smartphone, each time someone makes a donation.
The plugin has been removed by the author and is not available for purchase anymore.
Over to You
Raising money via your site is an easy job, you could easily do that by using a combination of plugins (Stripe + Gravity Forms). But what may not be easily possible is keeping all the records of payment, of course you can do it manually but that will require a lot of work.
The above donation plugins make it easy for site owners, bloggers, or anyone looking to raise money for their business venture or non-profit organization. Each plugin has its pros and cons.
If I had to choose any particular solution, my recommendation would be Give. But if you are looking for a very simple solution for accepting payments via PayPal, go with PayPal Donations.
Another more advanced donation solution with different payment gateways, unlimited campaigns, and offline payment option is Charitable.
I hope this article has helped you choose the right donation plugin. You may also want to see our post on 5 Proven ways to make money with WordPress.
If you have questions, please let me know in the comments 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.