7 Best Givebutter Alternatives for Nonprofit Events in 2026

Our top pick

Best for: organizations on Raiser's Edge NXT whose largest event has outgrown a general-purpose donation platform, and who need gala, auction, ticketing and sponsorship workflows plus a real CRM sync in one system.

Platform Overview

Trellis is our event fundraising platform for galas, auctions and golf tournaments. If you use Raiser's Edge NXT and you raise over $200K a year through events, it is built for you.

We are the only platform that actually integrates with Raiser's Edge NXT in real time, so the reconciliation that takes other platforms two to five weeks is finished the same night or the next day. Giving is text-first, so if your donors can receive a text message and click a link, they can give, and the platform takes the weight off your team before, during and after the event.

Gala ticketing, sponsorships, check-in, silent auction, paddle raise, raffles and add-on items run in one system. For a team that adopted a free platform and has outgrown it at the gala, this is the step up built for exactly that event.

The 4 Problems We Built Trellis to Solve for Teams Outgrowing Givebutter

A contact sync tells the CRM who was there. It does not tell it that the Hendersons bought a table for $5,000 attributed to the gala appeal, won a $1,200 trip with $800 of it deductible, and pledged $2,500 in the paddle raise.

On Givebutter the Raiser's Edge NXT path runs through Omatic, a paid third-party platform, and gift sync with fund and appeal mapping was still an open request on Givebutter's own community board in 2025.

Someone builds those gift records by hand, and the spouse becomes a duplicate on the way.

We are the only platform in this guide that actually integrates with Raiser's Edge NXT at every level in real time: constituents matched with your spouse and household rules, every ticket, sponsorship, winning bid and pledge written as its own gift with campaign, fund, package and appeal mapping, event participation records, and sponsorship scenarios. That is not a feature, it is the reason customers choose us. Other platforms list Raiser's Edge as an integration. Read the documentation and it is a contact sync, an import plug-in run after the event, a paid middleware subscription, or a sync that stops at a constituent and a single fund. We actually integrate.

Every guest is matched to a constituent with your spouse and household rules, every ticket, sponsorship, winning bid and pledge is written as its own gift with campaign, fund, package and appeal mapping applied the moment it lands, and attendance is written to the Raiser's Edge NXT event module.

Post-event reconciliation that used to take weeks or months is finished the same night or the next day. Grace Christian School completed three weeks of former post-event work in one day.

Every event planner checks the same thing first: can my guests use it? At a gala the guest path matters twice over. A sponsor paying $5,000 for a table meets a tip prompt at checkout, and a guest trying to bid meets an account to create or a password to remember. Each one is a place where the moment passes.

Trellis is text-first and mobile-first. As long as your donors can receive a text message, they can give: a text arrives, they tap the link, and their account opens with no app download, no login and no learning curve.

Whether guests are offered the option to cover fees is your decision rather than a default, and outbid alerts, check-in confirmations with table numbers and paddle raise prompts arrive by text, tied to what is happening in the room.

Easy enough that nothing goes wrong on the night of. That is the standard we hold ourselves to.

Most platforms create work before, during and after the event. Tables and seating live in a spreadsheet, sponsorship packages are managed by email, and details that already exist in Raiser's Edge NXT are re-keyed into the event tool.

On the night, the paddle raise has no live display and the auction closes on a timer with a checkout line at the end. Afterward, the person on the hook for the total and the colleagues pulled off their real jobs spend a month rebuilding records.

Trellis does the opposite. Before the event, your team pulls what it needs directly from Raiser's Edge NXT and Trellis, with no chasing the event planner, no manual exports and no re-entering data that already exists.

On the night, staff walk in and it just works, with no prior training required: hundreds of guests are checked in within minutes, and everything volunteers need is in front of them proactively, so the event planner gets to be present rather than stressed and fielding questions. Trellis runs at 99.99% uptime, published live for anyone to check at status.trellis.org, and we build the product so it does not need a person from our company standing in your ballroom.

After the event, the data is already where it needs to be. Child and Family Agency of Southeastern Connecticut grew its gala from $125,000 to $350,000 on Trellis. The line we hear most often after a first Trellis event is a customer's: "my team doesn't dislike me anymore."

Givebutter's published pricing is clear that free depends on donor tips. Disable tips and a platform fee applies, and auto-charging auction winners triggers it even with tips on. Finance asks what the event actually cost, and the answer is a percentage of the biggest revenue night of the year, paid by the organization or by the guests you most want to steward.

Trellis is $5,000 per year, flat, with 0% transaction fees on eligible checkouts under $3,000, so Finance sees the whole number before signing, with no percentage of proceeds and no fee triggered by charging winners.

Donate Auction Bid captures a losing bidder's opt-in while they are still bidding and processes the donation automatically at close, which raises up to 15% more per event and surfaces motivated donors your gift officers can call the next week, rather than emailing losing bidders afterward and asking them to enter an amount. Together with full-page upsells at checkout, it is the strongest set of revenue drivers in this guide.

Interactive Product Demo

Watch a ticket, sponsorship or winning bid land in Raiser's Edge NXT within minutes.

Pricing

Trellis is $5,000 per year, flat. There is no per-event fee, no percentage of funds raised, no separate charge for the Raiser's Edge NXT integration and no charge for onsite staff, because we do not send any. Transaction fees are 0% or 3.5% + $0.30. With 0% Transaction Fees turned on, Trellis covers the fee on eligible checkouts under $3,000 and your guests are offered the option to add a small contribution at checkout; if they decline, we still cover it. Checkouts over $3,000, and back-office entries through the Sales Entry System or Check-In Tool, are charged at 3.5% + $0.30, and you choose whether your organization or the purchaser covers them.

We are not free. Price the whole gala before you decide: on a $200,000 event, Givebutter with tips off costs roughly $11,800 on Standard pricing (3% platform fee plus 2.9% + $0.30 processing) and with tips on asks your guests to tip about 15%; GoFundMe Pro is $3,588 a year before processing and the Omatic subscription; Trellis is $5,000, and with 0% fees on the total usually lands very close to that, because few checkouts run above $3,000. An organization running Raiser's Edge NXT has already invested tens of thousands of dollars in its CRM; the platform that writes into it correctly, and gives your database administrator back two to five weeks after every event, is worth more than the one that hands back a contact list.

Raiser's Edge NXT Integration

Every other platform in this guide that lists Raiser's Edge as an integration gets there through a contact sync, a file export, a paid middleware subscription such as Omatic that customers tell us typically adds thousands of dollars a year on top of the platform, or, in Funraise's case, a native sync that covers constituents and gifts to a single fund and stops there.

When a guest buys a ticket or a sponsor confirms a table, we match them to an existing Raiser's Edge NXT constituent or create a new one, applying your spouse and household rules so a couple never becomes two records.

As the event runs, each ticket, sponsorship, winning bid, paddle raise pledge and donation is written as its own gift rather than a lump transaction, with campaign, fund, package and appeal mapping applied as the gift lands and fair market value and fees handled the way your Finance team configured them.

Attendance is written to the Raiser's Edge NXT event module, so next year's appeal can query who actually came. Sponsorship and organization gifts have their own rules.

The settings run nine sections deep and cover four levels: campaign, fund, package and appeal mapping; constituent matching with spouse and household rules; the event module and participation records; and gift type. For every one integration point most competitors offer, we have roughly twenty. What customers tell us after their first event is not that it is better than the last integration. It is that it works.

Setup

We can move as fast as you can. Setting up banking, the Raiser's Edge NXT integration and your first event takes one to two weeks; the four to eight weeks you will hear from other vendors is the runway for ticket sales to run, not setup time. Migration from Givebutter covers a contact export and import, item catalogue import from a spreadsheet, sponsor and table setup, and a one-time Raiser's Edge NXT mapping session with your database administrator.

Past campaign pages and historical transactions stay in Givebutter's exports. Setup is self-guided, with in-product tutorials and training moments that walk your team through each part of the event journey, and our team available at every step. There is no mandatory series of onboarding calls to get through before you launch.

Event-night staff and volunteers need no training on the platform; onboarding is for your database administrator and event lead.

Tradeoffs

We are not free and not the lowest-priced option. Givebutter's product scope covers online donation pages, peer-to-peer and lightweight ticketing well, and organizations whose fundraising sits mainly there may not need an event platform at all. Peer-to-peer and year-round campaigns sit outside our product.

We do not send staff to your venue and we do not sell emergency day-of support packages, because the product is built so you do not need them; we are the only company in this space that works this way, every customer is nervous about it before their first event, and the testimonials after that first event are the reason we keep doing it. Organizations not on Raiser's Edge NXT get less of the core differentiator. Switching carries setup time that compresses against a near-term event, and we have far fewer public reviews than Givebutter.

Support

Givebutter's support is well rated and self-serve, with live chat, a help centre and workshops.

We give a team running a 400-guest gala something different: a product that works, with 99.99% uptime published live at status.trellis.org, screens that tell volunteers what to do with no prior training, the most robust in-product tutorials in this category, self-guided onboarding for the core team that moves as fast as you do, and a named rep with a direct line on event night. What we do not do is send a junior staff member to stand in your ballroom; customers who have paid for that elsewhere tell us the person could not fix anything when something went wrong, which is why we build the product so nothing does.

Mini Case Study