1. GiveWP

Free and always free plugin. Add-ons can cost money. Check it out!

Reliability sometimes comes at a price. Paying for a well developed plugin like GiveWP can cost less than paying $0 for a plugin coded poorly.

Many of the early (small) plugins don’t have revenue or budget to keep improving them. GiveWP does and it is growing and improving every year.

Yearly license range from $187 – $374 (on sale currently) covering 1-5 sites and depending on your choice between 3 different sized plans.

2. DonorBox.org has been a popular donation plugin(in our comments) providing matching fund options from corporate entities. It works with paypal, stripe, apple pay and google pay. It allows for recurring donations.  This donation service is free for organizations that receive less than $1k per month.  Beyond that there is a pricing structure equivalent to the fees that PayPal or Stripe charges on credit cards, the PayPal direct fee equals PayPal’s own reduced non profit donation rates for 501(c)3 organizations. DonorBox offers advanced capabilities for corporate matching options (fee of $40/ month) and even allows ACH donation processing with a max fee of $5!

   Donor Box Integrations

   They integrate with Employer Gift Matcing, Salesforce, Zapier, TextToGive and MailChimp, if you have lists to work with donation activities or requests in a mailing campaign. There can be extra fees associated with integrations.

   They support fundraising in any country supported by Stripe (from what I can make out). Accept monthly recurring donations – recurring plans can be managed by donors.

3. Our Progress – Display a thermometer to measure non profit fund raising results.  Does not manage the actual submission of donations, just helps you display and track results somewhat manually.  Not one of the most sophisticated non profit fund raising tools in terms of functionality, but your team or client will likely be sold with the thermometer graphics!  See FAQ section for shortcodes! This is a simple donation goal tracking plugin and seems to still work but hasn’t been updated in over a year.

4. Simple PayPal Donate – With this one, you still have to get a donate button from PayPal after logging into your non profit account.  This then serves that button up nicer.  It makes special formatting easier, and delivers xhtml compliant / valid code.  In some ways its a bit tedious as you still have to go into PayPal itself, but at the same time giving you customization options on your own site is very useful and valid code maybe even more useful especially for sites that are concerned with section 508 compliance, web standards and more!
5. Seamless Donations  -Seamless Donations is free to download and doesn’t charge a commission rate. This plugin allows you to track donors, and send customized thank you messages. It works with Pay-pal, Stripe, and credit cards. Donors are able to create recurring donations as well as choose a tribute for donations.
   This does seem like a great plugin, however, if your site is running on Godaddy Managed WordPress hosting, the cache system on Godaddy and this plugin do not play nice, especially if you attempt to run a donation form on a home page of a website.  There are some work arounds for other pages (requires adding ?nocache=1 to the end of the donation URL ), but they are not the cleanest and problems could still arise.

    

   1. Update 2021 – This plugin is now on version 5.1.6 and is getting regular updates. It also has a good reputation for problem support. That’s amazing for a donation plugin!
6. Custom Post Donations – “This WordPress plugin will allow you to create unique customized PayPal donation widgets to insert into your WordPress posts or pages and accept donations. WP Plugin for creating custom PayPal donation widgets. PayPal for WordPress. WordPress ecommerce.”
7. Donations Made Easy – Smart Donations – “The all in one donation plugin, create different kind of donations, set goals, monitor your results, donation forms, thank you emails”
8. PayPal Donations – Adds donation shortcode and sidebar Widget to WordPress. The options menu lets you setup your PayPal ID and a few other optional settings. You can choose which donation button you want to use or if you want to use your own button.
9. Multi Currency PayPal Donations – Average solution in general that handles multiple PayPal accounts in different currencies exceptionally well – PayPal charges high fees for cross border transactions. If you are one of the fortunate few that have paypal accounts in multiple currencies then this plugin is for you. It allows you to route different currencies to specific paypal accounts. Even if you don’t have multiple accounts this is still a great non profit plugin for accepting donations.
10. WP-Webmoney – Receive donations and accept payments from people using WebMoney system. WebMoney is the most popular payment system in Europe. You can show donors list and total donations amount in your blog sidebar and pages.
11. Donate Plus – place the shortcode on a WordPress page and accept donations. The form includes the option to be recognized on your website after the donation is received. The Recognition wall can be placed on any WordPress page using the shortcode. You can display your running donation total.
12. GTPayment Donations – Plugin established more to help people using GTPayment processing services not PayPal – insertion of GTPayment donate buttons with a shortcode or through a sidebar Widget
13. WP Paypal Donation Plugin
14. WordPress PayPal Donation Plugin – WordPress plugin to recieve donation in multiple currencies in one click. Can be used in the sidebar, posts and pages. WordPress PayPal Donations Plugin uses IPN to ensure the values are correct and you can also chose to display your total donations to date. (How to turn off the PayPal IPN (instant payment notification) later if you stop using this tool some day.)
15. WordPress Paypal Donation Plugin from TipsandTricks-hq.com – This Plugin looks promising but I haven’t been able to find it in WordPress.org itself.  Lots of great plugins are outside of the WP website repository, but I haven’t been able to verify this one for functionality nor safety yet.  Summary – WordPress Paypal Donation Plugin can be used to receive donation in one click. Donation can be received in multiple currencies. The plugin can be used in the sidebar, posts and pages.
16. Simple Donate with Donation Limits for Political Campaigns – a visitor suggested I add this non profit donation plugin to the list and after checking it out I agreed.  This donation plugin for non profits and political campaigns is excellent, when you need to set a cap on the total that a person can donate.  Sure, I bet a lot of us even had a donation max problem, but for those that do (and don’t want to get in trouble with the law, and who does?) this donation plugin may be essential!
17. SponsorMe – More for the indidvidual or crusader rather than for a non profit or organization – show people what your target is, how much you have saved and how much is outstanding. And if they decide to contribute, SponsorMe will collect details of their pledge and allow them to make a PayPal payment straight into your account.  Update 3-1-2012 It has been a while since this donation plugin was last updated.  It offers some components that are difficult to find in a single donation plugin solution but probably needs a serious update for both WordPress and PayPal.  I reached out to @OwenC the developer an old blogger/developer friend of mine and he might tackle it sometime soon.  Maybe a donation to the plugin development cause might even help!
18. WP-DONATORS – Update – This donation plugin is also no longer available in the WordPress repository.  At one point this open source plugin (as all wordpress plugins are) included some trojan script, possibly not the fault of the plugin creator whose own site was reportedly hacked.  However, it is no longer present.  It may or may not come back with a clean update.  In the meantime if you have an old version, we recommend you deactivate and delete it and check your server, update your passwords etc.
19. Donation Can – UPDATE as of 3-1-2012 this donation plugin is no longer available in the WordPress plugin repository.  Some users were reporting that it did not work with wp 3.3.  It was a popular plugin and we hope that it will make a return.
20. Gravity Forms combined with their PayPal Addon or Stripe Add ons– We use this plugin for non profit sites running wordpress more than any other plugin. In this list of free donation plugins some of the best plugins have fallen, and some have been hijacked over the last couple years.  As such we wanted to add a very very reliable option.  Gravity Forms is a form generating plugin for WordPress.  It requires a paid license to use with WordPress but that brings with it a significant amount of support and add-ons.  One of the add ons for this plugin is the PayPal add on which turns this form generating plugin into a donation or e-commerce plugin if you choose.  It can even be connected with services like MailChimp, Freshbooks, Zoho, SalesForce and dozens more through additional add-ons, APIs and plugins.   We’ve even covered it in other articles as a WordPress survey or poll plugin option. If you have $39 and need something very reliable(downloaded by over 300k users last we looked), this might be a good fit. Gravity Forms does work with Bank of America/First Data’s PayEasy system. This can significantly reduce fees on transactions over $1k.  The PayEasy system itself is far from easy to setup initially. The Payeasy addon for Gravity Forms makes the coding side of things easier at least. (The account management side is initially a lot uglier). Once done, all that work can save many medium to large charities a lot of money in fees on the donations they process electronically.
21. Need PCI Compliance with your Donation Plugin? Checkout Heartland Payment Service’s and their Donation plugin (available on github).

Go Old School with  PayPal Widget Code for your Non Profit!

Non profit plugins are awesome when you find the right fit for your website.  However, sometimes a low tech alternative can be get the job done.  Keeping it simple might even be more stable.  So after you create a PayPal account, login, and use the widget code that PayPal offers up.

This would not be our recommendation if you plan on making a lot of updates to the page or post that will run this code.  PayPal widget code is notorious for suffering from strange deletions of important pieces of the code, rendering the button useless.

 

Admittedly, you may not get all the functionality you want, or you may not be able to style and format things as easily, especially if you are less technical with code.
However, the major advantage is that you do not have to worry that a developer might get bored or lose funding and stop supporting the plugin that your non profit relies on for grass roots online fund raising revenue.  Plus, if you are working on a high traffic site, you might be able to speed up load times and reduce CPU resources by not using a WordPress plugin and just using the PayPal widget code.

If you know of any other great donation plugins that we’ve missed, let us know.  drop us a comment or leave some feedback on our quick help form.

If this article has been helpful for you, do us and your friends a favor and share it on twitter or Facebook or wherever great people need help raising money for great causes!

Have you Covered the Basics for PayPal Donations yet?

A PayPal account is necessary & frankly essential even if you also use a merchant account, but that just gives you the means to process the transaction.  If you haven’t set up your non profit for PayPal yet, go back and get that started to begin your fund raising efforts online.  The process is not difficult but does take several days as they perform the due diligence required to insure your group is legitimate.
After incorporating a tax exempt nonprofit corporation, and setting up your non profit on PayPal such non profits can accept donations through their website or through Facebook, the next step is to find the right non profit donation plugin.