WP Simple Pay vs. Charitable (Compared)

Are you looking to raise funds for your nonprofit or charity organization and wondering which WordPress plugin is right for you?

Many options are available to help you accept online donations via your WordPress site. Some offer a full-fledged donation platform that lets you manage donors, create memberships, run peer-to-peer campaigns, and more. Others provide a simpler solution that enables you to create donation forms and accept donation payments directly on your site.

In this article, we’ll provide a detailed comparison between WP Simple Pay vs. Charitable to help you choose the best plugin for donations.

WP Simple Pay vs. Charitable

WP Simple Pay and Charitable are both WordPress plugins that let you collect donation payments on your site, send customized email receipts, integrate eMail marketing automation with your favorite service providers, create branded donation pages, and more.

While each plugin is a good option for raising funds online, this article will provide information about their differences so you can choose the best one for your particular organization.

Choosing the Right Donations Plugin

Nonprofit organizations have diverse needs when it comes to managing online donations through their WordPress site. While some larger or more established nonprofits require a comprehensive donation plugin with advanced features like campaign management, recurring donations, and donor analytics, others may find these options overwhelming or unnecessary.

Smaller organizations or those just starting their online fundraising efforts often benefit from a simple payment plugin that allows them to quickly set up and accept donations without the complexity of a full-fledged fundraising system.

The choice between a comprehensive donation plugin and a simple payment solution ultimately depends on the organization’s size, fundraising goals, technical capabilities, and the level of donor engagement they wish to maintain.

Let’s compare two of the leading WordPress donation plugins: WP Simple Pay vs. Charitable.

We’ll help you determine which solution best suits your organization’s unique fundraising needs by examining its features, pricing, and user experience.

What is WP Simple Pay?

WP Simple Pay is the best Stripe payments plugin for WordPress. It lets you easily accept online donations directly on your site without setting up a shopping cart or installing additional plugins.

One of the best parts about the plugin is that you can offer multiple price and quantity options, allowing donors to choose several causes to donate to on one donation form.

The plugin also lets you add suggested donation amounts to your donation forms, helping donors complete their payments quickly and easily. They can also choose what their donation will go to.

WP Simple Pay Features

The standalone plugin offers 10+ payment methods, including Cash App Pay, traditional credit and debit cards, Apple Pay / Google Pay / Microsoft Pay, ACH Direct Debit, Alipay, Buy Now, Pay Later, Bacs Direct Debit, and more.

WP Simple Pay also integrates with third-party plugins and a built-in automation solution to help you create targeted popup campaigns, recent sale notifications, and even donor mailing lists.

With the plugin, you can also:

• Control the number of transactions a donation payment form accepts with Inventory Limits.
• Schedule your donation forms during specific times and date ranges to meet your goals.
• Send your donors personalized email confirmations and donation confirmation messages when they donate using an individual form.
• Allow your donors to choose the amount they want to give using Suggested Donation Amounts.
• Pass the additional 3% Stripe processing fee on to donors to ensure that more of their donated funds go towards your cause.
• Recurring Donations: Allow donors to sign up for recurring donations that automatically charge them weekly, monthly, or yearly.

WP Simple Pay Pricing

WP Simple Pay offers four different premium licenses and a free version, WP Simple Pay Lite, to help you meet your cause’s needs.

The plugin’s Personal Plan, which costs just $49.50 for the entire year, comes with the essential features you’ll need to start easily collecting donation payments. It allows you to use WP Simple Pay on one site and set up either Off-site Stripe Checkout forms where your donors complete their transactions on a secure page hosted by Stripe or On-site payment forms that let donors check out without ever leaving your site.

You can use the Personal plan to accept multiple payment methods, including credit and debit cards, ACH Direct Debit, Apple Pay / Google Pay / Microsoft Pay, Giropay, Alipay, and more.

Additionally, with the Personal plan, you can add, edit, or remove custom form fields to collect the information you need from your donors using text fields, dropdowns, number fields, checkboxes, and more.

The Plus Plan costs $99.50 per year and expands the number of sites you can use WP Simple Pay on to three sites. It allows you to collect recurring payments that automatically charge your donors on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.

The Professional Plan, which costs $199.50 per year, allows you to use the plugin on up to ten sites. This makes it ideal for your organization if it runs several fundraising campaigns or separate causes.

It also offers priority customer support via email and adds even more payment method options, including Cash App Pay. You can also use it to collect the correct tax amounts based on the location of your donors and send custom invoice receipts to those who have joined your cause as a subscriber.

Finally, the Elite Plan costs $299.50 for the year and is the ultimate donations and payment solution for your fundraising needs and beyond. It includes all of the same features and benefits as the Professional plan, plus use on an unlimited number of sites and premium support.

WP Simple Pay Pros & Cons

WP Simple Pay Pros

• User-friendly drag-and-drop payment form builder
• Standalone plugin
• Multiple payment methods
• Integrates with third-party plugins
• Recurring donations
• Fee recovery
• Discount for nonprofits
• Free version
• All-in-One payment form builder for more than just donations
• Offer multiple donation options in one transaction

WP Simple Pay Cons

• Stripe payment gateway only

What is Charitable?

Charitable is a powerful WordPress plugin for donations and fundraising. It is an all-in-one comprehensive tool that allows organizations to easily set up and run multiple fundraising campaigns.

In addition, it provides a user-friendly interface for creating donation forms, managing donors, and tracking campaign progress, all directly from the WordPress admin dashboard.

Charitable also offers features like peer-to-peer fundraising, donor management, donation forms, and reporting. Similar to WP Simple Pay, you can use the plugin to accept donations directly on your site.

One of the best parts about Charitable is its customizable options that let you personalize donation forms, emails, and campaign pages to match their specific needs.

It offers a customizable drag-and-drop campaign builder for creating professional campaign pages directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Charitable also makes it easy to monitor campaigns and get real-time information about the donations coming in.

Charitable Features

The robust donations plugin offers tons of features to help you collect the money you need on your WordPress site.

While WP Simple Pay is restricted to Stripe for its payment gateway, Charitable lets you accept one-time or recurring donations on your site through PayPal, Stripe, Square, Payrexx, and several others. By default, Charitable is initially set up to collect payments via Stripe.

Using Charitable, you can also:

• Create professional donation forms in minutes using pre-built templates.
• Easily manage donor information and generate reports to help maintain donor relationships.
• Create and run as many fundraising campaigns as needed with no restrictions on the number or duration of campaigns.
• Get actionable insights into the performance of campaigns with visual reports
• Save on transaction fees by asking donors to cover them
• Promote fundraising campaigns by letting donors opt-in to newsletters
• And more…

Charitable Pricing

WP Charitable offers four premium licenses to help you meet various fundraising needs. All plans include a 14-day money-back guarantee.

The Basic Plan, which costs $69 for the entire year, offers all the essential features you need to set up donation campaigns for one site.

It lets you run an unlimited number of campaigns with no restrictions on the amount of donors you can accept payments from.

You can also use it to create custom donation forms, get access to full donor management through the dashboard, and generate donation reports.

On top of all that, the Basic plan enables you to add videos to your campaigns and ensure that your location is viewable on Google Maps.

Charitable won’t charge an additional transaction fee if you choose to purchase a Basic license. Keep in mind that transaction fees will still apply depending on the payment gateways you decide to add to your site.

The Plus Plan, which costs $99 per year, offers all of the same features and benefits as the Basic Plan with the addition of eMail marketing features.

This plan lets you integrate popular eMail marketing services into your campaigns, helping you stay in touch with donors and foster ongoing support for your cause.

The Pro Plan, which costs $199 per year, unlocks all of the same features included in the Plus Plan but helps you take your campaigns to the next level with powerful features, including fundraising functionalities, Crowdfunding, Ambassadors, and Stripe Connect.

With a Pro Plan, you can also easily connect your site with automation platforms like Zapier to streamline tons of different workflows.

Finally, the Elite Plan costs $299 per year and is the ultimate donation and fundraising plugin for WordPress. It gives you access to all of the same features and benefits as the Professional Plan, plus it can be used on up to five sites. If you plan to create more than one fundraising site, the Elite Plan is the right choice for you.

Charitable Pros & Cons

Let’s break down the plugin’s pros and cons to help you compare.

Charitable Pros

• User-friendly platform
• Pre-made donation form templates
• Multiple Payment Gateways
• Integrates with third-party plugins
• Recurring Donations
• Fee recovery
• Automated eMails
• Free version
• Donor Management
• Automation
• Tons of extensions
• Customizable campaign pages

Charitable Cons

• For donations only

Verdict: Which is Best?

Organizations looking to implement online donation capabilities on their WordPress site have two excellent options: WP Simple Pay and WP Charitable. Each caters to different needs and levels of complexity.

WP Simple Pay is ideal for smaller nonprofits, individual fundraisers, or organizations that require a straightforward solution for accepting donations. Its simplicity makes it perfect for those who want to quickly set up a donation form without dealing with complex features or extensive customization options.

WP Simple Pay is particularly well-suited for organizations that primarily need to accept one-time donations or recurring donations and prefer using Stripe as their payment processor.

It’s also a good choice for those who want to minimize transaction fees and don’t require advanced donor management features.

On the other hand, Charitable is better suited for larger nonprofits, established charities, or organizations with more complex fundraising needs. It offers a comprehensive set of features, including campaign management, recurring donations, peer-to-peer fundraising, and detailed donor management tools.

The plugin is the go-to choice for organizations that run multiple campaigns simultaneously, need to track and engage donors over time or require advanced reporting and analytics. It’s also ideal for those who want to offer a variety of payment options to their donors and need a solution that can scale with their growing fundraising efforts.

Ultimately, the choice between WP Simple Pay and Charitable depends on the organization’s size, fundraising goals, technical capabilities, and the level of donor engagement they wish to maintain.

There you have it! We hope this article has helped you learn about the differences between WP Simple Pay and Charitable so that you can choose the best solution for your donation needs.

If you liked this article, you might also want to check out our guide on how to maximize donations with easy online giving.

What are you waiting for? Get started with WP Simple Pay today!

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