Most comparison pages are written by the company that wants to win, which is why almost none of them are useful. This one is too, so here is how we have tried to make it worth reading: every claim about Altru below is quoted from Blackbaud's own documentation, with the date we read it, and where Altru matches us we say so plainly rather than leaving the row out.
Every screenshot on this page is labeled with whose product it shows.
How much does Blackbaud Altru cost?
Blackbaud does not publish a price for Altru. On 3 September 2026 we checked the Blackbaud pricing page, the Altru product page, the Raiser's Edge NXT product page and the Blackbaud CRM page. None carries a figure, a range, or a starting-from number. Each offers a form.
Blackbaud answers the question directly in its own FAQ, which we will quote rather than characterize. Asked "Why doesn't Blackbaud list pricing on the website?" the answer is: "Blackbaud uses a tailored pricing model because each organization has unique needs. Instead of a one-size-fits-all price, we provide a personalized quote to ensure you receive the right combination of solutions, services, and support for your goals."
And asked "How much does Blackbaud cost?", the answer names the variables without naming a number: "Blackbaud pricing is customized based on your organization's size, goals, and the solutions you need." The screenshot at the top of this page is that FAQ, on Blackbaud's own website, exactly as it stood on 3 September 2026.
Card processing they do publish, and they deserve credit for it. Blackbaud Integrated Payments lists 2.99% + $0.30 for Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Diners Club and JCB, 3.5% + $0.30 for American Express, and a $15 chargeback fee. What is not published is the cost of the software.
We are not going to guess at their license price. Anyone who tells you what Altru costs without a quote in front of them is making it up.
What does Clerestory cost?
3% per transaction, and that is the whole of our price. No license fee, no per-seat pricing, no modules, no support tiers, no minimum and no contract. Stripe processes the payment on your own Stripe account at 2.2% + $0.30, the non-profit rate our customers receive.
The number that matters is the all-in one. Across every payment we processed through August 2026, our customers' all-in cost—software and card processing together—was 3.148%. Bare Stripe at its standard 2.9% + $0.30, with no software at all, would have cost 3.177% on the very same payments.
And 3% is a ceiling, not a floor. Our published Terms of Service say it plainly: "At higher processing volumes, the platform fee may be adjusted or capped at a mutually agreed rate." Three per cent is the most anyone pays us, and it is the only direction the number moves.
Clerestory vs Blackbaud Altru, feature by feature
Read the right-hand column carefully. "Not documented" does not mean Altru cannot do it. It means we searched Blackbaud's published documentation for it on 3 September 2026 and did not find it. If it exists and we missed it, tell us and we will correct this page.
| Capability | Clerestory | Blackbaud Altru |
|---|---|---|
| Price published on the vendor's own website | Yes, 3% per transaction | No |
| Timed-entry admission | Yes | Yes—"You configure scheduled programs to sell tickets for timed events." |
| Memberships expiring on a fixed shared date, or rolling from purchase | Yes | Yes, both—"To expire the memberships for the program on the same day and month every year, select Is fixed" |
| Walk-up point of sale | Yes | Yes—"The Daily Sales screen is designed for efficiently processing walk-up sales" |
| Sales tax on retail items | Yes | Yes—"you must add each required tax to the system and configure the rate" |
| Card readers and in-person hardware | Yes | Yes—hardware documented; no price published |
| Donor or member option to cover processing fees | Yes | Yes |
| Retail inventory reduced automatically by a sale | Yes | Not documented—every inventory change we found documented is operator-initiated |
| Self-service kiosk | Yes | Not documented in Altru, Raiser's Edge NXT or Blackbaud Merchant Services |
| Liability waiver captured at registration | Yes—versioned, required before payment, with signer, timestamp, IP and version hash recorded | Not documented—a registration notice/disclaimer field exists, documented as display text with no acceptance step described |
| Correct tax receipt per 501(c) entity, per transaction | Yes | Not documented |
| Process on your own Stripe account | Yes | Not documented—online donation forms are documented as requiring an active Blackbaud Merchant Services account |
Clerestory does all twelve. Altru matches us on six of them, and we have left those six in plainly, because a comparison that finds the competitor lacking on everything is one nobody should trust. On the remaining six we could not find documentation that Altru does them at all.
What one sale looks like
This is the Clerestory kiosk mid-transaction. It is worth looking at closely, because six of the twelve rows above are visible in one screen.
Admission, retail and a donation are in the same cart, on the same tap, against the same member record. That is the part worth weighing against Blackbaud: on their side, admission and the gift shop are Altru, and fundraising is Raiser's Edge NXT.
What a liability waiver actually has to survive
Collecting a tick box is easy. The question an insurer or a court asks is what you can produce afterwards.
Altru documents a registration notice or disclaimer with two fields, a name and its content. What its documentation does not describe is any acceptance step by the registrant—no tick, no signature, no record of assent. It reads as display text.
The version hash matters more than it sounds. If you revise a waiver mid-season, you can still show which wording a given family actually agreed to.
If you run more than one 501(c) entity, ask this question first
A museum and its foundation. A society and its endowment. A club and its charitable arm. Two legal entities, two EINs, and every dollar has to land against the right one.
Blackbaud's documentation for Raiser's Edge NXT describes support for one primary tax ID plus one alternate, set at the level of the whole environment. The wording is worth reading closely: "You may need an alternate tax ID that appears on receipts and giving statements if your organization references more than one tax ID in parts of the organization that were merged or acquired." And changing the primary one is not self-service: "Blackbaud uses your organization's primary tax ID to verify your non-profit status. To change it, contact Support."
That treats a second entity as the residue of a merger to be tolerated, rather than a way an institution might simply be built.
In Clerestory each entity is a payment account. It has its own EIN, its own tax classification, its own bank account, and its own tax notice on the receipt. Every campaign routes its revenue to the account you choose, so the gift lands against the right entity and the receipt carries the right EIN at the moment it is sent, rather than being corrected afterwards. Each account can carry its own reply-to address too, so a question about the 501(c)(3) reaches a different person from a question about the 501(c)(6).
It also works the other way, for a single entity that wants separation: memberships and general donations into one bank account, a scholarship fund or a gala into another. And if you operate under a fiscal sponsor, you write the tax notice that explains the relationship rather than accepting a default that does not describe you.
You move between them from one login. There is no ceiling of two, and there is no support ticket in the process.
One structural fact worth more than any single feature
Raiser's Edge NXT has no retail module, no timed ticketing and no walk-up point of sale. Those are Altru. An institution on Raiser's Edge that wants to sell timed admission or run the gift shop is looking at a second Blackbaud product, at a second price that is also not published.
It is worth knowing which product a quote actually covers before you compare it to anything.
Which is the better fit for your organization?
We are not going to pretend Blackbaud is a bad product. Altru is mature, it is deployed across the cultural sector, and on six of the twelve rows above it does exactly what we do.
If you are large enough that a percentage of everything makes you uneasy, say so early. Our terms already provide for the platform fee to be adjusted or capped at a mutually agreed rate at higher processing volumes, documented in writing between us. That is published in our Terms of Service, where you can read it before you ever speak to us, rather than being something you have to discover you are allowed to ask for.
Then ask both of us the same question: what is the all-in cost per dollar raised, counting license, platform fee and card processing together? Ours is 3.148% and the working is above. Theirs cannot be computed from anything they publish, because the license price is not published and neither is the billing unit. That is not a small difference when you are the one who has to defend the number to a board.
How we checked
On 3 September 2026 we read Blackbaud's own help center, knowledgebase and user-guide PDFs for Altru and Raiser's Edge NXT, and verified the quotes above against the live pages in a browser rather than trusting an automated fetch. We did not use G2, Capterra, or any comparison site, and we did not treat Blackbaud's marketing pages as evidence of what the software does. That distinction matters, because it is where most competitor comparisons go wrong.
Screenshots labeled Clerestory are from a Clerestory demo organization with test data. Screenshots labeled Blackbaud Altru are from Blackbaud's own website or documentation. Every quote is reproduced as it stood on 3 September 2026. Documentation moves and products change. If anything here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
