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 Bloomerang below is quoted from Bloomerang's own help center, with the date we read it, and where Bloomerang matches us we say so plainly rather than leaving the row out.
Every screenshot on this page is labeled with whose product it shows.
What does Bloomerang cost?
Two separate things: the software, and the money.
The software. Bloomerang publishes starting prices: The Giving Platform at "$242/month, billed annually", Bloomerang CRM at "$125/month, billed annually" and Bloomerang Fundraising at "$40/month, billed annually", which their pricing page notes "Must be purchased as part of bundle with Bloomerang CRM". Pricing scales with records: "Bloomerang pricing is based on the amount of records, or contacts, you track in the database." Users are unlimited, which is a good position.
Two things are not in those figures. Auctions and Peer-to-Peer are add-ons at $259 per month each. And membership management is an add-on with no published price at all: their help center says "To add membership management to your subscription, contact your account manager." If memberships are why you are shopping, that is the first number to ask for.
The money. This is the part worth slowing down for. Bloomerang Fundraising's published card rates are:
| Method | Bloomerang Fundraising rate |
|---|---|
| Visa, Mastercard, Discover | 3.95% + $0.30 |
| American Express | 4.95% + $0.30 |
| ACH (eCheck) | 1.95% + $0.95 |
Bloomerang CRM runs on different rails and a different, lower schedule: 3.2% + $0.30 for cards including American Express. If a Bloomerang quote is in front of you, establish which product each rate belongs to before comparing anything, because a full percentage point sits between them.
The American Express row deserves its own paragraph
In Bloomerang Fundraising, American Express costs a full percentage point more than Visa, Mastercard and Discover: 4.95% + $0.30 against 3.95% + $0.30.
Major donors and board members disproportionately carry American Express. So does anyone paying a gala table or a sponsorship on a corporate card. This is not a rounding difference on a rare card type; it is a surcharge that lands hardest on your largest gifts.
To be fair to Bloomerang: Bloomerang CRM charges 3.2% flat with no American Express premium at all. The premium is a Bloomerang Fundraising fact, not a Bloomerang fact, and we would rather scope it correctly than score a cheap point.
Bringing your own processor does not escape the fee
Bloomerang lets you use a different processor, which sounds like an exit from the rates above. It is not, quite. Their published schedule for "Payment processing through other processors (not Worldpay)" lists a Platform Processing Fee of 1.95%, described in their own words as "Per transaction; charged in addition to merchant processing fees". In Bloomerang CRM the equivalent figure is 1%.
So the choice is their processor at their rate, or your processor at your rate plus a fee to Bloomerang on top.
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. Memberships are not an add-on. Retail is not an add-on. Stripe processes the payment on your own Stripe account at 2.2% + $0.30, the non-profit rate our customers receive.
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.
Set that 3.148% next to 3.95% + $0.30 and note what each number contains. Ours is everything: the software and the card processing. Theirs is the card processing alone, before the subscription, before the membership add-on, and before Auctions.
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."
Clerestory vs Bloomerang, feature by feature
Read the right-hand column carefully. "Not documented" does not mean Bloomerang cannot do it. It means we searched Bloomerang'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 | Bloomerang |
|---|---|---|
| Memberships as a product with a term | Yes | Yes, with start and end dates and annual or monthly billing |
| Membership dues for a fixed period | Yes | Yes—"Members commit to monthly or annual (yearly) donations" |
| Card readers and in-person hardware | Yes | Yes, several, from $99 to $139 plus shipping |
| Optional donation added to a ticket purchase | Yes | Yes—"Allow registrants to make a donation without purchasing a ticket or add a donation onto their ticket purchase." |
| Donor option to cover processing fees | Yes | Yes, called GiftAssist—"Use GiftAssist in Bloomerang Fundraising to give donors the option to help offset processing costs." |
| That option available on a membership form | Yes | No—"Membership forms don’t include an option for donors to help cover processing fees." |
| Memberships expiring on a fixed shared date | Yes | Not documented—renewal is described from each member's own start date |
| Memberships without a required processor | Yes | No—"Bloomerang Payments is required if you plan to: Use online membership forms" |
| Timed-entry admission | Yes | Not documented—capacity is a single event-wide cap |
| Sales tax on retail items | Yes | Not documented anywhere, including on the store-item feature |
| Walk-up point of sale | Yes | Inside auction events only—"Check out guests who aren't using the Givi app, or who are paying by cash or check." |
| Online store or gift shop, open year round | Yes | Store items exist only inside the Auctions add-on, tied to an auction event |
| Retail inventory reduced automatically by a sale | Yes | Not documented—an "Available Quantity" field exists; no automatic decrement is described |
| Liability waiver captured at registration | Yes—versioned, required before payment, with signer, timestamp, IP and version hash recorded | Not documented |
| Correct tax receipt per 501(c) entity, per transaction | Yes | Not documented—the EIN is a single account-level value |
Clerestory does all fifteen. Bloomerang matches us on five of them, and we have left those five in plainly, because a comparison that finds the competitor lacking on everything is one nobody should trust. Bloomerang's membership object is real and dated, its dues handling works, its hardware range is wider than ours, its event forms carry an add-on donation exactly as ours do, and GiftAssist is a proper fee-coverage feature that does the same job ours does across most of the product.
The membership row that is easy to miss
GiftAssist is good, so read its scope rather than its headline. Bloomerang lists the transactions it covers: "Standard donations (one-time and recurring)", event donations and registrations, the virtual terminal, peer-to-peer, auction events, and kiosk. That is six, and membership is not one of them.
Bloomerang says so directly, in a sentence they publish twice, in two separate articles: "Membership forms don’t include an option for donors to help cover processing fees."
So on the single transaction where an organization most wants the member to cover the cost—a renewal, arriving on a predictable date, from someone who has already chosen to support you—the option is not there, and the organization absorbs the processing fee on every membership it sells.
Combine that with the rate: a $200 membership on a Visa card at 3.95% + $0.30 is $8.20 the organization cannot ask the member to cover. On a thousand memberships that is $8,200 a year, and no member was ever given the chance to say yes.
What one sale looks like
This is the Clerestory kiosk mid-transaction. Six of the rows above are visible in one screen.
Admission, retail and a donation in one cart against one member record, with sales tax calculated and stock decremented. On Bloomerang's side, the shop lives inside a $259-per-month auction module, the point of sale is an auction checkout screen, and sales tax is not documented at all.
If you run more than one 501(c) entity
Bloomerang's organization settings hold one EIN, account-wide. Their form-level receipt settings let you customize the title, sender name, reply-to address, subject and body—but not the tax identifier. Chapters exist as parent and child accounts, enabled case by case, and nothing documents each entity issuing receipts under its own EIN.
In Clerestory each entity is a payment account. Its own EIN, its own tax classification, its own bank account, and its own tax notice on the receipt. Every campaign routes 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.
Which is the better fit for your organization?
Bloomerang is a mature CRM with a real membership object, a proper dues concept, an unusually wide range of card readers, a working fee-coverage feature in GiftAssist, and the good manners to publish its processing rates when much of the industry will not. On five of the fifteen rows above it does exactly what we do.
If your organization is fundraising-led, your members are essentially recurring donors, and your in-person work is a gala and an auction once a year, Bloomerang is built for that and it is a credible choice.
Three questions decide it the other way. Can your members choose to cover the processing fee? GiftAssist covers six kinds of transaction and membership is not among them. What does a card actually cost, and does an American Express gift cost more? In Bloomerang Fundraising, 3.95% and yes, a full point more. And is the shop open in March, or only when an auction is running?
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 and published where you can read it before you ever speak to us. Then ask both of us the same question: what is the all-in cost per dollar raised, counting software, platform fee and card processing together? Ours is 3.148% and the working is above.
How we checked
On 3 September 2026 we read Bloomerang's own help center and pricing page, and verified every quote and every rate 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 marketing pages as evidence of what the software does.
One thing we deliberately did not claim: Bloomerang references a payment-capable kiosk in its documentation but never defines it, so we have neither credited it with a self-service kiosk nor said it has none. We would rather leave a row out than guess at it.
Screenshots labeled Clerestory are from a Clerestory demo organization with test data. Screenshots labeled Bloomerang are from Bloomerang's own help center. 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.
