The most expensive version (the $249 per year plan) offers some of the following features:

• Recurring donations
• Peer to peer fundraising
• Crowdfunding platforms
• Automatic crowdfunding payments
• Everything you would get from the lower priced plans

So, Charitable definitely stands out with some of its unique features. We particularly like the videos and geolocation tools found in the free version. It’s also nice to see anonymous donation support since not everyone likes to see their name plastered all over the internet after a donation.

Why This WordPress Donation Plugin? The Standout Features:

• Solicit donations based on location.
• Charitable doesn’t charge transaction fees.
• Connect with popular payment gateways like Stripe, Authorize.net, PayUMoney, and PayFast.
• There’s a peer-to-peer fundraising extension to expand your reach.
• About 15 extensions are sold for expanding on your donation form’s functionality.
• Share campaign updates with your contributors.
• All of the Charitable pricing plans allow for one site license and one year of premium customer support.
• The online support includes a ticketing system, FAQ, documentation, and a blog.

3. PayPal Donations

PayPal Donations might not sound like what you’re looking for, but you’d be surprised how sleek and powerful this little gem is. In fact, it makes sense that PayPal knows how to do donations right, since the company has been collecting payments for quite some time.

I recommend PayPal donations for anyone who enjoys the simplicity of PayPal products. Everything from PayPal can be used by beginners, and it doesn’t have any problem growing with your organization.

Keep in mind, this WordPress donation plugin wasn’t actually built by PayPal. It uses the payment gateway, but you shouldn’t expect customer support from PayPal.

That said, PayPal Donations adds a donation shortcode to your WordPress dashboard. This way, you can insert the shortcode on any page or activate the widget in a sidebar or footer. That’s all there is to it. You must, of course, link to your PayPal account, but that only takes a minute.

Why This WordPress Donation Plugin? The Standout Features:

• It’s the fastest and easiest way to start collecting donations on your website.
• About 15 translations are already built into the plugin, mostly removing the need to install an additional translation plugin.
• The PayPal Donation buttons are already designed for you. This cuts down on development time. It’s also great since so many people recognize and trust the PayPal brand.
• The shortcode and widget are easy to find and add to a page, sidebar, or post.

4. Seamless Donations

Similar to many other WordPress donation plugins, you can download Seamless Donations for free, then buy add-ons and extensions if needed. The developers claim that you can get the plugin setup within five minutes. All it takes is a connection to your PayPal account and some messing with the settings.

As with the other top donation plugins, Seamless Donations doesn’t collect transaction fees. Instead, it makes money through add-on sales.

As for the basic plugin features, you can start by collecting recurring donations. After that, the plugin has tools for tracking donors and donations. Thank you messages are also included in the feature-set, allowing you to thank some of the VIP donors.

The Seamless Donations plugin has strong currency and language support, so you’re more likely to receive donations from around the world.

Also, here’s a list of the most popular add-ons:

• Giving level manager
• Enhanced thank you messaging
• Delete donations, donors, and funds
• Anti-spam
• CSV export

Why This WordPress Donation Plugin? The Standout Features:

• Recurring donations are built into the plugin, so there’s no need to get an add-on.
• Dozens of currencies (like Thai Baht and Hungarian Forint) are accepted. The same goes for translations.
• The plugin uses standard post types for donors and funds, so it’s easier to track what’s going on with your donation site.
• The plugin developers provide support through an FAQ, documentation, video tutorials, and a forum.

5. WooCommerce Donation Plugin

If you’re currently running an online store, or would like to make one part of your charity/non-profit site, it’s worth installing the WooCommerce Donation Plugin to accept donations through your eCommerce store. The basic functionality adds a donation as a regular product, where the customer then adds this product to the shopping cart, pays for it, then doesn’t get an actual product in return. The other option is to include a donation field in the shopping cart itself, prompting customers to donate a little extra, on top of what they’re paying for already.

The field in the shopping cart receives any denomination of donation, then it adds the donation to the customer’s total. Reports are delivered on the backend, where you can decide how much of your revenue is from donations and how much is coming in from regular products.

Many non-profits already sell merchandise like hats, mugs, and t-shirts, so why not include a donation option to see if people want to be even more generous?

Why This WordPress Donation Plugin? The Standout Features:

• It changes nothing about your online store, but it gives customers a chance to donate on top of orders.
• Simple reports guide your decisions on whether or not to continue a donation program. These are also great for seeing where the donations are coming from.
• You can have the Donation field consist of a drop-down with predefined values or a blank field for people to type in their own donations.
• Campaigns can be named for better tracking.
• The WordPress donation plugin only costs a one-time fee of $18.

6. Smart Donations

Smart Donations is a WordPress plugin with very simple Donation buttons. These buttons can be placed anywhere on your site, and you can also set goals to convince more people to spend money.

One thing to keep in mind is that the free version is virtually useless. However, the premium membership plans start at only $19.99 and go up to $49.99. These are one-time payments without the need for spending anything in the future.

This Smart Donations plugin provides somewhat modern-looking donation buttons, along with a widget interface for placing your buttons in sidebars, footers, and anywhere on your theme a widget goes.

The analytics and recurring payments are nice, but the real reason I would consider this plugin is if I wanted to show how far I am from reaching a goal. This is similar to a crowdsourcing platform, where you set a goal and build buzz as the ticker moves closer and closer to the goal.

Why This WordPress Donation Plugin? The Standout Features:

• You can set goals to reveal your campaign progress and show customers how close you’re getting to the goal.
• The plugin mainly runs with buttons, but you can create forms if you require more information from your contributors.
• Recurring payments are built right into the plugin.
• Donation walls are available. A donation wall is basically a wall of fame, where the top contributors are shown on the website and praised for their generosity.
• You can’t beat the Smart Donations pricing.

7. Donorbox

Donorbox isn’t only a WordPress donation plugin. Yes, it integrates with WordPress quite well, but many other website builders and CMSs can use Donorbox as well. The benefit behind Donorbox is that it embeds onto your website within seconds, then it displays a beautiful recurring donation system. The process takes maybe 15 minutes, and it’s all built on those recurring donations.

The downside to Donorbox is the transaction fee once you start collecting more than $1,000 per month. Sure, the 0.89% fee per month is not exactly high, but the majority of the WordPress donation plugins on this list don’t charge anything. The platform pricing is also free until you hit that $1,000 donation per month mark. After that, it starts at $26.70.

Although the recurring payment is pushed pretty hard on the forms, you can still give your donors a one-time payment button.

Why This WordPress Donation Plugin? The Standout Features:

• It has a strong focus on recurring payments, removing the need for you to pay for an add-on, while also guiding you to the business model that’s generally the most profitable.
• You don’t have to pay a dime if your monthly donations remain under the $1,000 mark.
• Accept payments through cards, ACH bank transfers, PayPal, and Stripe.
• All donors have full control over their recurring donation plans. This means a donor could remove a monthly payment and adjust it to only pay out per year.
• This WordPress donation plugin supports dozens of currencies and languages, expanding your reach to the world.

8. Total Donations for WordPress

The Total Donations for WordPress plugin is sold through CodeCanyon, but you can find some handy features, demos, and a knowledgebase on this website. If you’re looking for an easy-to-implement (and run) donation module, this might be the one for you. It’s as barebones as they come, but you can go in there to adjust CSS or HTML for more advanced designs.

The standard donation module asks the customers how much they would like to donate. There’s also a custom amount field for filling in any denomination.

The customer can select which campaign they would like to spend the money on, while also choosing how often they would like to make a contribution. All of these settings are customizable on the backend of your own website. PayPal and Stripe payments are both accepted, both of which have wonderful recurring payment tracking tools to see how much your organization should expect for the year.

Why This WordPress Donation Plugin? The Standout Features:

• The plugin has a solid drag and drop form builder for adding items like checkboxes, text areas, and radio buttons.
• The WordPress donation plugin is completely responsive on both the front and backends.
• You can customize the donation widgets to include progress bars or show recent donations.
• Auto-generated messages are sent out to donors. The messages have shortcodes for filling in personal information.
• The plugin supports a wide range of languages.

9. Donation Content Locker

The Donation Content Locker does exactly what the name says: It locks content behind a payment wall until the user donates money. It’s similar to the way some online magazines block portions of the website until you signup as a subscriber. The only difference is that with this the customers are considered donors.

So, it depends on what type of content you’re willing to create with your non-profit or charity. If you have a blog, podcast, video course, eBooks, or anything similar, these are all items that could be seen as valuable.

The only reason you’d use the Donation Content Blocker is if you wanted to exchange content for donations. If that’s not the case, look for another plugin.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to run a non-profit for this to be useful. In fact, I can see lots of WordPress plugin developers using this. Bloggers might find it helpful as well.

Why This WordPress Donation Plugin? The Standout Features:

• The plugin only goes for $15.
• It effectively blocks certain parts of your website depending on what you’d like to get paid for.
• The donation form looks modern and only takes a few steps to collect a payment.
• Accept payments through gateways like PayPal, Payza, Authorize.net, or InterKassa.
• Your content is protected by an activation link that’s sent to the donor through email.
• You can block donors who share activation links.
• The design process is fueled by a WYSIWYG editor and shortcodes.

10. Donation Manager for WordPress

The Donation Manager for WordPress plugin embeds into a site with ease, handles donations on a website, and supports multiple payment gateways. The main feature that stands out is the unique payment gateway support. You can connect to gateways like InterKssa, Skrill, AlertPay, EgoPay, and Payza. Some people might not see these gateways as unique, but they’re pretty obscure for those in the US.

So, if you’re not interested in PayPal (or if your operation won’t get approved by PayPal,) this WordPress donation plugin might solve your problems. Recent donations are shown on the page if you want, and there’s a “target to reach” field to give folks an idea of how much more money is needed. What’s more is that the user can actually select the payment gateway they want to pay through.

Why This WordPress Donation Plugin? The Standout Features:

• Several payment gateways are supported, many of which are unique or specific to regions.
• Display how much money you need to make.
• You can send out thank you messages to your donors.
• The plugin is translation ready for accepting payments from all over the world.

Narrowing Down the WordPress Donation Plugins

• For the best value – Choose the Give WordPress donation plugin
• For the simplest setup – Choose PayPal Donations
• For geolocation and video support – Choose the Charitable plugin
• For the most supported currencies – Choose Seamless Donations
• For less common payment gateways – Choose Donation Manager for WordPress
• For locking your content – Choose the Donation Content Locker plugin
• For asking for donations through WooCommerce – Choose WooCommerce Donation Plugin
• For more of a focus on recurring payments – Consider Donorbox

There you have it! These WordPress donation plugins are the best of the best. You’re not going to find the same features in all of them, but that’s why we tried to narrow it down and explain the situations in which you might use each plugin. If none of the above suit your needs, you might also check out CiviCRM, an open source CRM for nonprofits and NGOs. And yes, it does have a WordPress integration.

If you had any experience with any of the WordPress donation plugins above, or if you’d like to ask a question, drop a line in the comments below. If you still have questions make sure you check out this another detailed guide: Creating A Charity WordPress Site: Your Complete Guide.