--- title: Blackbaud Luminate Online Reviews meta\_title: 'Blackbaud Luminate Online Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta\_description: Filter 65 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Blackbaud Luminate Online works for a business like yours. aggregate\_rating: rating\_value: 3.1 review\_count: 65 scale: '5' date\_modified: '2026-08-07' parent\_category: name: Nonprofit url: https://www.g2.com/categories/nonprofit --- # Blackbaud Luminate Online Reviews & Product Details Claimed ###### Profile Status This profile is currently managed by Blackbaud Luminate Online but has limited features. Are you part of the Blackbaud Luminate Online team? [Upgrade your plan](https://sell.g2.com) to enhance your branding and engage with visitors to your profile! Luminate executes your online strategy with integrated campaigns for digital, social and mobile channels, so you can engage more effectively with your supporters to raise more money for your mission. * * * Seller [Blackbaud](https://www.g2.com/sellers/blackbaud) Discussions [Blackbaud Luminate Online Community](https://www.g2.com/products/blackbaud-luminate-online/discuss) Solution Type All-in-One Overview by Kaney Steele Show More ## Value at a Glance Averages based on real user reviews. ### Time to Implement 5 months ### Perceived Cost $$$$$ [ View More Pricing Information ](https://www.g2.com/products/blackbaud-luminate-online/pricing) ## Top-Rated Alternatives [ ![Bloomerang CRM](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Bloomerang CRM") Bloomerang CRM 4.6/5(914) ](https://www.g2.com/products/bloomerang-crm/reviews) [ ![DonorPerfect](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "DonorPerfect") DonorPerfect 4.4/5(566) ](https://www.g2.com/products/donorperfect/reviews) [ ![Neon CRM](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Neon CRM") Neon CRM 4.2/5(438) ](https://www.g2.com/products/neon-one-llc-neon-crm/reviews) [ View All Alternatives ](https://www.g2.com/products/blackbaud-luminate-online/competitors/alternatives) ## User Insights Average based on 65 real user reviews. Implementation Time 5 months Perceived Cost $$$$$ [Log in to unlock pricing and user insights](/login) ![Verified User in Religious Institutions](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Religious Institutions") UR Verified User in Religious Institutions Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 3/27/2018 "It works but might not be your best solution" 3/5 What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online? It has many features including things like auto-login when donors click on a link. It's relatively easy to use. and was a stable platform. It did allow us to increase our online donation results. It has some good tools for reporting on email campaigns and their results, who donated to what projects based on the emails we sent them. They were able to work with our existing payment gateways which made setting up payments easy and did not cause us to incur any other fees with implantation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online? Integration with our internal systems was not great. It was sometimes difficult to get data out of the system and EFT recurring payments were inconsistent. The email creation tools are there but by and large they are more for people with some type of HTML background. We replaced their email functionality with ActOn and it is a much better "non-technical" platform for email generation/deployment. We switched out to a software package that more completely integrates in with our internal software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online: If this will be your primary mechanism for taking donations it's pretty good. Most of our issues revolved around integrating it in with our internal donor management software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you? We used it for an on line donation portal and for email marketing. As a tool it did accomplish the goals that we had. However the software itself was clunky and didn't have the finesse of some other platforms. Essentially it was software designed by engineers without the assistance of UI specialist. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerSource: Seller invite ![Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management") UN Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 11/27/2017 "Outdated aspects and an overcomplicated UI" 0/5 What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online? There’s probably more power under the hood than I’m aware of. I wouldn’t know because our org has our roles pretty well locked down and our consultants have pretty well taken over the global stylesheets and templates and make it difficult to work within the environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online? - The UI of the site is hard to sort through. Buttons are inconsistently or oddly labeled and often not in a predictable location. The design looks outdated and patched together: the teal-and-bright-green of the front page icons doesn't cohere with the bright blue logo, the dull navy navbar and the various color tints used throughout the site. - Many of the features used for template development are outdated/unnecessary in modern web / email design (body tag attributes? in 2017?). - The WYSIWYG editor used for text formatting in emails and web page builders is \*several dozen versions\* behind. Code appropriate to modern browsers is best done by hand, which makes it much less useful for non-coder users and means I have to go behind them and clean up their WYSIWYG code. - According to our production manager, pulling reports and updating lists is a painful experience. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online: Make sure you implement it correctly and have people who know what they're doing using it and controlling the implementation process. Don't rely on consultants. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you? We run email campaigns and newsletters, and some donations, through Luminate and are in the process of pulling some CRM functions into it related to another product. (Obviously my team was not given right of veto.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management") IN Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management Enterprise (\> 1000 emp.) 2/2/2018 "Quick time to market but difficult to build enterprise data solution around it." 2/5 What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online? The Luminate platform does allow you to get a donation form up and running very quickly. Platform manages credit card transactions and is a single solution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online? Getting data back out from the platform is very difficult. Although there are published APIs they don't seem to work well and it's difficult to get support. Although it may work well for a single entity, trying to get transactional data out to subsidiaries or different departments was extremely difficult. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online: Consider the pricing in detail if you want to deliver data to more than a handful of people. There is a hub where your users/stakeholders can grab data from reports but this was cost prohibitive for us. We also had extensive discussions about how the data would come across via the APIs. We intended to keep track of every single transaction but this became very difficult when refunds or changes came into play. If you intend to use their APIs, ensure that you test out different scenarios. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you? Deploying a single nationwide donation solution for a federated organization. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management") UN Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 10/26/2017 "Great CRM with Easy Customization " 4/5 What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online? Luminate Online is a good tool for organizations that want to be able to customize the information they can see and query about their contacts/donors. It is easy to navigate and there are a lot of helpful resources if needed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online? One negative about this system is in regards to creating reports. It comes with standard reports but we often need to create our own in order to be able to pull all the needed fields. For example there is a standard report of donations and households but we also need it to pull fields from contacts so we made our own. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online: I have not handled many other databases at the same length of which I've used Luminate so it's hard to say which would be best but I do recommend it. There are definitely other CRMs that are clunkier and with any system there will be things you love and things you find lacking. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you? We are solving the issue of needing a clear way to organize and view donor information and be able to track it as needed. Benefits realized are no longer having any shadow databases that may live offline or in employees personal drives. All information can be accessed in one place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management") UN Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 10/24/2017 "Our organization is transitioning to a different tool" 2/5 What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online? Luminate Online meets very basic needs. They are able to accommodate some particular things to our organization, like including premiums on our donation forms or the ability to schedule to unpublish and redirect a donation form. I like that they have chat support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online? So many things. Support is lacking. It is so complex to build in their system- for example, just creating a stationary needs to be done in a very specific complicated way. They rolled out a tweet your rep tool that needs so much work and fixing to be even usable. There are lots of little things that annoy me, too- like how it logs you out all the time, or how the WYZYWG breaks everything, or how you can only upload one image at a time. Their surveys are completely non-mobile responsive and require the most gigantic headache to build. Advocacy: there is no click to call and lots of delivery failures. Social sharing is not integrated. I could go on. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you? Luminate Online allows us to build emails, donation pages, action alerts, manage our audience lists, and collect data for reporting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Health, Wellness and Fitness](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Health, Wellness and Fitness") AH Verified User in Health, Wellness and Fitness Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4/12/2018 "A bit antiquated " 1/5 What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online? The multiple options. It has a lot to offer but some of the options have additional steps that waste time. For instance, a survey let's everyone view results at the bottom violating people's privacy. You have to create a page and then embed it there to make that disappear. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online? It's not intuitive compared to other new, more up to date programs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online: Have someone who's not technically savvy test it out. They should be able to figure out the basics especially when you compare what other companies have to offer now. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you? Outreach, Digital communication. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management") UN Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management Enterprise (\> 1000 emp.) 1/11/2018 "Fantastic Website Management" 4/5 What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online? Complete ease of use. You don't need to understand coding to easily use Luminate to manage your websites both for front end and back end interface. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online? Honestly there isn't anything I have disliked yet about the system. Sometimes creating reports can be more difficult than usual but it's typically easy enough to navigate through. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online: Great tool for managing participants and sending mass emails. Also going in the right direction with reporting and managing financial data. I enjoy being able to manage our accounts as thoroughly as I can with Luminate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you? Using it to manage websites and customer info. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Research](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Research") AR Verified User in Research Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 10/19/2017 "Good capabilities but not for an average nonprofit user" 2/5 What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online? The possibilities are endless - but you have to know how to code and the platform is very sophisticated. While most desired capabilities can be achieved, you have to have an expert on hand to do the work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online? It is way too complicated for an average nonprofit communications user. The events module is useless for ticketed events where you have to gather guest names - basic functionality that should be there. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Blackbaud Luminate Online: We are in the process of looking at Engaging Networks. Donor Drive was another great product we considered. We can't wait to get rid of Luminate Online. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you? We do our online donations and email marketing through Luminate Online. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More 12/19/2017 Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management") AN Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 12/15/2017 "Not great, not horrible" 1/5 What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online? Their customer support is actually pretty good and always easy to get in touch with. Their support agents are always friendly and courteous. Their API is helpful in configuring their donations forms above and beyond what their standard form can do, its also rather straightforward and easy to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online? Its rather expensive for what it is. I'm not a fan of how their email system is set up, it seems rather dated and clunky. Their CMS is decent and you can do a lot with it, but its rather expensive for what you get out of if. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you? We are able to connect with our constituents effectively. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management") UN Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 4/19/2018 "It has great potential" 3/5 What do you like best about Blackbaud Luminate Online? The products and features are great for any organization that needs a tool that solves more than one problem. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Blackbaud Luminate Online? It's archaic and needs to be modernized to meet today's demands of digital marketers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Blackbaud Luminate Online solving and how is that benefiting you? website content hosting, loading & updating; as well as email marketing Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ## Questions about Blackbaud Luminate Online? Ask real users or explore answers from the community Get practical answers, real workflows, and honest pros and cons from the G2 community or share your insights. [ Ask about Blackbaud Luminate Online ](https://www.g2.com/products/blackbaud-luminate-online/discussions/new) GU Guest User What is Blackbaud Luminate Online used for? 0 Upvotes 0 [ Join the conversation ](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-blackbaud-luminate-online-used-for) [ View all Discussions ](https://www.g2.com/products/blackbaud-luminate-online/discuss) ## Pricing Insights Averages based on real user reviews. ### Time to Implement 5 months ### Perceived Cost $$$$$ [ View More Pricing Information ](https://www.g2.com/products/blackbaud-luminate-online/pricing) Blackbaud Luminate Online Comparisons ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_f45992247dd07f6985ff3c5e60ede1a5/blackbaud-raiser-s-edge-nxt.png "Product Avatar Image") Raiser's Edge NXT 3.9/5(640) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/blackbaud-luminate-online-vs-blackbaud-raiser-s-edge-nxt) ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_38bb83e5f2ed81b8ec4462d274ff04fd/blackbaud-online-express.jpg "Product Avatar Image") Blackbaud Online Express 3.4/5(27) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/blackbaud-luminate-online-vs-blackbaud-online-express) ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_f45992247dd07f6985ff3c5e60ede1a5/blackbaud-teamraiser.png "Product Avatar Image") TeamRaiser 3/5(22) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/blackbaud-luminate-online-vs-blackbaud-teamraiser) ##### Categories on G2 [Nonprofit CRM](https://www.g2.com/categories/nonprofit-crm)[Fundraising](https://www.g2.com/categories/fundraising) ##### Explore More [Best customer success platform for growing software companies](https://www.g2.com/discussions/best-customer-success-platform-for-growing-software-companies)[Wiz vs Orca Security for a security team evaluating cloud workload protection that wants full coverage without deploying agents on every workload?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/wiz-vs-orca-security-for-a-security-team-evaluating-cloud-workload-protection-that-wants-full-coverage-without-deploying-agents-on-every-workload%20)[What are some enterprise information archiving platforms supporting seamless capture from Teams, email, and social media?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-some-enterprise-information-archiving-platforms-supporting-seamless-capture-from-teams-email-and-social-media%20) [Most recommended audit software for service industry](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-s-the-most-recommended-audit-software-for-service-industry)[digital asset management platforms](https://www.g2.com/discussions/digital-asset-management-platforms-what-s-your-favorite)[Pros and Cons Details](https://www.g2.com/products/blackbaud-luminate-online/reviews?qs=pros-and-cons) [Show MoreShow Less](javascript:void(0);)