What do you like best about Raisely?
We’re currently using Raisely as our main donation and fundraising platform. It has been a solid choice in many ways, but there are now key limitations that are affecting operations and donor experience. That said, there are still a number of features and strengths that made it appealing to us originally — and some that still hold up well.
Fast setup
We can create graphically strong fundraising campaigns quickly and easily, without needing developer time. It’s straightforward to use and visually polished, which means our team can launch campaigns fast with minimal training or fuss.
Reliable and stable
It’s reliable at processing donations — we haven’t experienced downtime or transaction issues. This matters a lot when running live campaigns or donation pushes.
Peer-to-peer fundraising
Peer-to-peer campaigns are one of Raisely’s stronger areas. The system makes it easy to create branded, good-looking supporter pages. While there are some notable limitations (like no support for recurring PayPal donations and poor reporting for recurring donors), the framework is solid. I even built a custom widget to get around some of these gaps — and thankfully, Raisely allows for that kind of custom code injection.
Decent API access
The API is robust and flexible. We’ve used it to integrate data across our systems and automate reporting. While it doesn’t go deep enough on recurring donors (a theme you’ll see in my review), the rest of the API offering is excellent and well-documented.
Australian-based support
One of the most refreshing aspects of Raisely is their support model — it’s local. Being based in Australia means their team understands our regulatory and operational environment. We’ve had great experiences with fast responses and useful help, without needing to wait two or three days for someone overseas to respond.
Thoughtful feature set (pre-2023)
It’s clear the platform was originally built with care and insight into what nonprofits need. The documentation is incredibly well-written, the UX is mostly intuitive, and you can tell a lot of effort went into making it a flexible, empowering platform — up until 2023 when it was sold to Keela. Since then, updates have slowed, and a few key features have been neglected or abandoned, but the original build quality still shows. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Raisely?
While the foundation remains strong, there’s a fair few small bugs and inconsistencies in the page-building tools that impact how reliably we can launch or update campaigns.
The mini-CRM, while functional for basic use, has significant limitations — particularly when it comes to managing supporter records. For example, it lacks modern search and filtering capabilities; we can’t run queries like “find me records with this name OR that tag, AND this words” and multi-condition searches are simply not supported.
This makes day-to-day admin frustrating and forces us to use awkward workarounds just to perform routine tasks.
The page building tools and login/management methods for P2P are very very restrictive and force user down a certain path, and after coming from a more open platform like GiveWP (which we moved off because it was so unreliable) we are really restricted in how it worked.
No pledge or partial payment tracking
There’s no way to handle pledges or scheduled gift commitments. Everything must be a one-off or recurring payment. This creates major issues for structured gifts, sponsorships, or offline donors who want to give in instalments. We track pledges manually outside the platform.
The biggest issue, however, is that Raisely still does not support PayPal for recurring donations. That’s a serious blocker. A large portion of long-term sponsors prefer PayPal, not just out of habit but because it avoids issues like expiring credit cards. Some Raisely users that are logo'd on the website are actually using other tools for regular sponsorship's.
You can’t get a clear view of who’s giving regularly, what they’re giving, or easily share that data with P2P fundraisers. We had to build our own widget to even make this visible. You cant create a peer and assign a peer owner and say "you need $10k a month" and that then displays on the site. Just donations.
Event and gift tracking are basically non-existent
Thin support for ticketing, no RSVPs, or managing events in a meaningful way. No proper way to track gifts from offline or third-party sources. You can’t link documents to supporter profiles or store any files — so even basic record-keeping has to happen elsewhere.
They have after a long time announced an integration with Keela, which is made by the same company. But again, frustratingly they dont allow users to see or trial the platform. Instead they have a nag on the admin panel asking you to book in a meeting with Keela (Eg, sales presentation) and they dont provide any pricing or other information to consider prior to having that.
Keela is an NFP CRM. It also supports Paypal Subscriptions and has more robust CRM/donor management capabilities, so imagine that we are now told that we need to pay even more money to get a feature that should already be in the package we are paying for already (and fees per transaction).
When that happens, the first thing anyone does it look at the alternatives, as "if we are being pushed to spend more on another platform, to do what we need, lets look at more than one other platform"
If I was Raisely/Keela, I would have simply turned the integration on, got people using it then made it an add on. At a reasonable price. Not a sales meeting.
When we looked into it, Keela would have a significant cost for our donorbase (they charge a success tax based on how many subscribers in your donor list). So we have worked around that with Airtable.
(Sidenote, one of the biggest detractors in all the approaches of assessing software are companies that will not provide you pricing or trial access without a meeting/sales presentation. That tells you they need to "sell you" on something) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
