Online donations increased by over 20% in 2020 — clearly, people are in a giving mood. So, what’s the easiest way to collect donations online? For many nonprofits and charities, the best approach is using the one-two punch of WordPress with a WordPress donations plugin.
With the right plugin, you can collect both one-time and recurring donations through your website and rest assured that these payments are smooth and secure for visitors. Some plugins also include back-end donor management functionality and integrate with leading payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe.
In this post, we’ll unpack 11 of the best WordPress plugins for accepting online donations through WordPress. From fully featured charity plugins to form tools to simpler options, here are the tools you need to hit your goal.
Best WordPress Donation Plugins
- GiveWP
- Charitable
- Seamless Donations
- WPForms
- Gravity Forms
- Accept Donations with PayPal
- PayPal Donations
- Donorbox
- WP Crowdfunding
- Donation for WooCommerce
- Donation Thermometer
1. GiveWP
What we like: GiveWP is a cost-effective, powerful donations plugin that’s beginner friendly, but flexible enough to help just about any organization hit its fundraising goals.
With over 100,000 downloads to date, GiveWP is the most popular plugin on this list and has garnered praise for its range of features and sleek design. We highly recommend trying the free version if you want a dedicated charity plugin.
GiveWP has just about everything you’d want from a WordPress donation plugin while keeping things clean and manageable for beginners. In the free version, you can campaign pages with custom donation forms to collect donations, and you get enough features to track your progress and engage with donors.
The forms themselves are well-designed and highly customizable. You can add goals and incentives, multiple donation tiers, and a receipt option. Plus, there’s plenty you can alter visually to blend with your active WordPress theme. When it comes to payment, GiveWP works with platforms like PayPal, Stripe, Square, and Authorize.net.
GiveWP also features a donor management system, allowing you to watch your donation activity from your WordPress back end and see each donor’s history with your site. By leveraging an email marketing integration, you can send automated messages to donors, including thank-yous.
The core features of GiveWP are available for free with no transaction fees. The developers also offer paid add-ons to extend the plugin. There are add-ons for recurring donations, peer-to-peer fundraising, tributes (donations in honor of someone else), a Google Analytics integration, PDF receipts, and more. Add-ons can be purchased individually, or you can opt for a GiveWP paid plan which starts at $149 per year.
For more info on getting started with GiveWP, check out this video from the plugin developers:
2. Charitable
What we like: Charitable enables new WordPress site owners to customize their own simple campaigns without spending a cent (that includes no transaction fees), with the option to purchase upgrades if needed.
Charitable is another freemium all-in-one WordPress donation plugin that, while less popular, can go head-to-head with GiveWP in features and quality. The plugin offers customizable donation forms that you can place on unlimited campaign pages, and it lets you tweak the plugin’s visuals to conform to your nonprofit’s WordPress theme.
The Charitable plugin throws in some notable features with the free version. There are no transaction fees to use the tool, and it supports PayPal for free. In your dashboard, you can manage and export your donation records and integrate with email automation tools to update your supporters on your campaign’s progress.
Like GiveWP, Charitable makes its premium offerings available through extensions. These extensions allow for enhancements including recurring and flexible donations, Zapier integration, video support, peer-to-peer fundraising, interactive maps, and donations from payment gateways other than PayPal. You can also bundle extensions by purchasing a membership, starting at $139 per year.
3. Seamless Donations
What we like: Seamless Donations is a straightforward donations plugin with no upselling, ideal for small donation sides that don’t want to navigate an overwhelming number of features.
The third plugin on our list specializing in donation collection, Seamless Donations is also the most straightforward. It’s a freemium tool that gives access to simple donation collection forms and donation management on the back end of your site.
The free version of Seamless donations is pretty stripped-back, but a capable option for simpler donation websites. The plugin integrates with Stripe and PayPal for donations, and setup is relatively simple, allowing anyone to get started quickly. You can also enable thank you messages and recurring donations for free (unlike the previous two options).
Seamless Donations offers some paid add-ons for design enhancements to your forms, a customized thank-you page, spam protection, and other upgrades. Each add-on is $19.95.
4. WPForms
What we like: WPForms is a robust and easy-to-use forms tool that lets your site take donations. Plus, you can use the same plugin for all of your form needs to drive sign-ups.
If you’re looking to collect donations through WordPress, you might consider looking at form plugins as an alternative to dedicated charity plugins. While forms plugins won’t have the same donor management features or quite as much charity-specific functionality, they’re still a great option, especially if you’re already using one.
WPForms is one of top form builders in the WordPress ecosystem, popular for its ease of use and versatility. Users construct forms through a drag-and-drop interface, and there are dozens of fields you can insert into any form. Even more impressive are the 300+ pre-built templates for any purpose, including donations, so you don’t need to start from scratch.
Plus, WPForms allows for advanced form features like media embeds and conditional logic, in which questions are shown or hidden based on previous responses. You don’t have to use WPForms for just donations either — leverage the plugin for newsletter sign-ups, event and volunteer sign-ups, and lead generation too.
WPForms is free but requires payment add-on to collect donations. There are payment add-ons for PayPal, Stripe, Square, and Authorize.Net. These can only be used by purchasing the Pro plan (199.50 per year) or higher. However, WPForms generously offers a 75% discount off the Pro plan for nonprofits.
5. Gravity Forms
What we like: Gravity forms is a powerful form solution for any WordPress website, including those looking to collect donations. Building is intuitive, and collections are secure and easily manageable.
Gravity Forms is another strong contender in the forms space. It also incorporates a visual form editor that uses drag-and-drop functionality. Gravity Forms is great at collecting payments, making it suitable for charity and nonprofit websites.
To collect payments, you can select one of Gravity Forms’ payment gateway add-ons: Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.Net. As for pricing, Gravity Forms starts at $59 per year for use on one website, but payment add-ons are only available on the Pro plan ($159/year) and the Elite plan ($259/year).
Besides its donation capabilities, Gravity Forms includes CAPTCHA anti-spam measures, conditional logic, a notification message (which can serve as a thank-you), automated emails, and plenty of integrations with marketing and website tools you’re used to.
6. Accept Donations with PayPal
What we like: Accept Donations with PayPal is ultra-simple and cheap, offering a simple way to raise money through PayPal.
Accept Donations with PayPal does, well, exactly that. Formerly known as Easy PayPal Donation, this free and simple plugin puts a PayPal donation button on your WordPress site with either a widget or with shortcode. When visitors click the donate button, they can send a donation to your PayPal account from their own PayPal account, or with a credit card.
This is a good choice for site owners who want a quick and easy donation option for users. The payment itself is handled through PayPal, so you don’t need to worry about securing the transaction on your end.
While light on features, the free version of the plugin gives you seven button templates to work with, plus custom styling options and the ability to add images to the display. The free version only accepts one-time donations — for recurring donations, you need to upgrade to the paid version, which starts at $39.99 per year for one site.
7. PayPal Donations
What we like: PayPal Donations is a no-frills WordPress charity donation plugin that does one thing — enable PayPal donations on your site — and does it well.
PayPal Donations works a lot like Accept Donations with PayPal. It puts a button on your site (through a sidebar widget or shortcode) that links to your PayPal, letting users make quick one-time donations. You can also adjust some settings like currency and button size, or upload your own button if you’d prefer.
PayPal Donations and Accept Donations with PayPal are pretty equally matched in terms of popularity and offerings. Both offer free version — however, PayPal donations only offers a free version and does not allow recurring donations.
8. Donorbox
What we like: Donorbox is a SaaS fundraising platform that integrates easily with WordPress and packs enough features to support both small campaigns and major organizations.
Donorbox is a comprehensive, cloud-based donation platform built to integrate with many CMSs and website building tools. To use it with WordPress, you can install the free Donorbox integration plugin.
Like other donation tools we’ve covered, Donorbox offers a solid set of tools to reach your fundraising goals. Visually, the plugin has some impressive options that you can mold to match your branding. On the back end, there are plenty of donation management tools to track your goals, change currencies, and view donor profiles.
Donorbox supports one-time as well as recurring donations, and users can set recurring donations on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis. Donors may also pick from preset amounts or set their own donation amount, and you have the choice of several payment gateways to complete the transaction.
You don’t need to pay to start using Donorbox on your WordPress site. However, note the transaction fee or 1.5% in addition to PayPal/Stripe processing fees. If you want to integrate with an email automation service like or a CRM, note there are fees for this as well.
The plus side is that, with a SaaS model, everything is managed by Donorbox, meaning you don’t need to worry about handling anything on the technical side by yourself. Additionally, the 1.5% transaction is low compared to similar services.
9. WP Crowdfunding
What we like: WP Crowdfunding is the best WordPress plugin for crowdfunding projects, and can convert your site into a Kickstarter-like experience.
Crowdfunding took off in the late 2000s with the arrival of websites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe. Now more than ever, audiences have the power to back the projects or causes they like. If you want to make a crowdfunding site yourself, try the WP Crowdfunding plugin.
WP Crowdfunding works with WooCommerce to convert an ecommerce site into a full-on crowdfunding hub. Visitors can sign up, create campaigns, and get their projects funded. Campaign pages look professional, and the plugin was made to adapt to your active theme.
WP Crowdfunding offers both a free and a paid version. By subscribing to a paid plan (starting at $149 per year), you’re allowed unlimited rewards for campaigns, a built-in funds management system, email notifications when new campaigns are made, and more. We recommend downloading the free version and seeing how that works for you, then upgrading to get the advanced features you need.
10. Donation for WooCommerce
What we like: Donation for WooCommerce enables seamless donations on existing WooCommerce websites.
The Donation for WooCommerce extension lets you convert your product pages into donation campaigns and donations from visitors. This option works well for existing WooCommerce stores that want to add a charity component and encourage shoppers to give to various causes.
Donation for WooCommerce lets you adjust your campaigns to your preference, such as setting goals and providing preset donation amounts. It’s mainly focused on recurring donations, designed to encourage gifts on a monthly basis.
Another cool feature of this extension is round-up donations: When users check out, they have the option to round up their purchase to the nearest dollar amount and donate the difference. You can also let customers choose which charity or organization to send their round-up donation. This is a valuable feature if you want to align your brand with charitable causes.
At $99 per year, Donation for WooCommerce isn’t the cheapest way to gather donations, but it can still be more cost-effective than a paid donation plugin or platform.
11. Donation Thermometer
What we like: The thermometer is a classic visual in the world of fundraising. Here’s an easy way to put one on your donations page.
While it won’t collect donations by itself, Donation Thermometer can make a nice addition to your WordPress charity site. This free plugin provides a simple shortcode allowing you to embed a thermometer progress bar representing progress toward your fundraising goal. A visual trick like this one could make the difference between a contribution and a bounce, at least for some visitors.
To use the plugin, just connect it to your active donations plugin and watch as the thermometer automatically updates. Admins can customize various aspects of their thermometers to fit their site theme, and the thermometer’s SVG format ensures that the graphic will render cleanly regardless of its dimensions or the user’s screen size.
Hit your goals with a WordPress donation plugin.
Launching any website can be daunting, let alone one that your organization relies on to raise money. The last thing you need to worry about is a buggy website with a poor user experience — after all, you’re trying to win people over.
That’s where WordPress, paired with a donations plugin, can help you. By investing in a high-quality plugin, you’ll create a seamless donation experience that delights visitors, brings in more contributions, and ultimately makes a difference.
