Little Green Light: LGL's own knowledge base article on event registration, read on 3 September 2026, which opens by stating that LGL does not offer public-facing event registration.
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 Little Green Light below is quoted from LGL's own knowledge base or pricing page, with the date we read it, and where LGL matches us we say so plainly rather than leaving the row out.
Every screenshot on this page is labeled with whose product it shows.
LGL publishes its whole price list, which we think is the right thing to do and which is why we publish ours. Pricing is by constituent record count, in their words: "Transparent pricing. No surprises. That's our promise. Pricing is based on constituent record counts."
| Number of constituents | Monthly |
|---|---|
| up to 2,500 | $45 |
| up to 5,000 | $60 |
| up to 10,000 | $75 |
| up to 20,000 | $90 |
| up to 30,000 | $105 |
| up to 40,000 | $120 |
| up to 50,000 | $135 |
Above that: "Over 50,000 constituent records? Add $15/mo for each additional 10k tier. Little Green Light accounts can have up to 200,000 constituent records." Prepaying twelve months takes 10% off. Extra users are free, and every account gets every feature.
And LGL takes no cut of your donations at all. Their pricing page says it directly: "Starting at 2.2% + $0.30 per transaction paid to the payment processor (no fee to LGL)." That is a real and unusual position, and anyone comparing platforms should know it.
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.
Supporters can cover both fees at checkout, ours and Stripe's. Across every payment we processed through August 2026, our customers paid an effective 1.65% platform fee on our 3% once supporters had covered their share, and about 1.5% in Stripe processing.
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."
LGL charges a fixed monthly subscription and takes nothing from a gift. We charge nothing monthly and take a percentage of a transaction. Which one costs less depends entirely on how much money moves through the system, and we are not going to pretend otherwise or bury it below the fold.
What we will say is that the percentage is the part we can move. Our terms already provide for the platform fee to be adjusted or capped at a mutually agreed rate at higher volumes, so an organization that processes a great deal is not stuck watching a number scale forever. That provision is published, so you can read it before you ever talk to us.
But price is not really the question here, because the two products are not doing the same job.
Read the right-hand column carefully. "Not documented" does not mean LGL cannot do it. It means we searched LGL'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 | Little Green Light |
|---|---|---|
| Price published on the vendor's own website | Yes, 3% per transaction | Yes, the full table by record count |
| Process on your own Stripe account | Yes | Yes—"Your organization's name and phone number will appear on the donor's credit card statement." |
| Donor option to cover processing fees | Yes | Yes, fixed at 3%—"The amount of 3% is not editable, however." |
| Inventory reduced automatically by a sale | Yes | Yes, per form—"LGL Forms will track the number of items sold across all form submissions and prevent the sale of more than you have available." |
| Public-facing event registration | Yes | No—"Little Green Light does not offer public-facing event registration" |
| Timed-entry admission | Partly—walk-up admission is sold by price tier, not by time slot; timed sessions with a capacity can be sold as an event series of dated sessions | Not documented—submission limits are described as "a blunt tool, in that your entire form will be closed to the public after the submission limit is reached" |
| Memberships carrying dues and money | Yes | No—"memberships in LGL are completely separate from gifts and do not include or relate to any monetary information such as gifts or other transactions" |
| Walk-up point of sale | Yes | Not documented |
| Card readers and in-person hardware | Yes | No—"No. The ability to swipe a credit card is not available at this time." |
| Sales tax on retail items | Yes | Not documented |
| Online store or gift shop | Yes | Through a paid third-party WooCommerce add-on built by an outside firm, not by LGL |
| Self-service kiosk | Yes | Not documented |
| Liability waiver captured at registration | Yes—versioned, required before payment, with signer, timestamp, IP and version hash recorded | Not documented—the published field types include no consent, agreement or signature type |
| Correct tax receipt per 501(c) entity, per transaction | Yes | Not documented—the EIN appears as text you type into a statement template |
| Silent auction with bidding from the guest's own phone | Yes—max bids, buy-now and outbid alerts by email | No—"LGL is not designed to manage auctions." |
| Live auction and paddle raise recorded by bidder number | Yes—the auctioneer screen shows the winner's name as the number is typed | No—LGL points to Auctria or Greater Giving for auctions |
| Winners charged in one batch from cards saved at purchase or check-in | Yes—plus a pay link for anyone left owing | No—LGL points to Auctria or Greater Giving for auctions |
| Auction receipts showing fair market value and the deductible amount | Yes | No—LGL points to Auctria or Greater Giving for auctions |
| Raffle tickets sold online and at a table | Yes—singles or bundles, such as 10 for $40 | Partly—online, as an item on an LGL form; no card sales at a table |
| Random raffle draw inside the product, with every draw recorded | Yes—a cryptographically random pick, and refunded tickets cannot win | Not documented |
| Raffle money kept out of giving history and never receipted as deductible | Yes | Partly—entered by hand as non-deductible income |
| Move a payment between a membership and a donation, with a corrected receipt | Yes | Not documented |
| Membership grace period, and a longer first term or lower first price for late joiners | Yes | Not documented |
| Offer codes on event tickets | Yes—percent off, amount off or a fixed price, with caps and date windows | Partly—discount codes on LGL forms, the route LGL suggests for selling tickets |
| Member pricing applied automatically at event checkout | Yes | Not documented |
Clerestory does twenty-four of the twenty-five in full and timed entry in part. Little Green Light matches us on four of them, and two of those four are matches almost nobody else on this list makes: LGL lets you keep your own Stripe account, and LGL takes no percentage of a gift. Those are genuinely good positions and we are not going to talk around them.
LGL's knowledge base article on event registration begins like this: "Little Green Light does not offer public-facing event registration, but there are a few options to consider if you want to offer event registration using available functionality". The three options it then gives are its own form builder, a Wufoo form syncing in, or a separate system such as Eventbrite with the data imported afterwards.
We want to be clear that we admire this. Most vendors would have written a features page. LGL wrote the truth and then offered workarounds.
The workaround is worth understanding, because it shapes what a ticket actually is. LGL's own published event-registration example builds tickets as dollar-amount options with conditional display rules, and the article says so outright: "Note that the value being passed in the field titled "Tickets" is the dollar ($) amount, not the quantity." A two-ticket purchase is a $200 option that triggers a text box for the guest's name. There is no ticket record and no ticket holder.
That is fine for a gala with sixty seats. It is a different proposition for an institution selling admission all day, every day.
LGL does have a membership object, and it tracks levels and dates. What it deliberately does not do is carry money. Their best-practices article is unambiguous: "It's important to be aware that memberships in LGL are completely separate from gifts and do not include or relate to any monetary information such as gifts or other transactions."
Expiry behavior is a convention rather than an engine. LGL describes what customers do by hand: "LGL customers often set up memberships either to expire one year from the start date of the latest membership, or on December 31, regardless of when during the calendar year the membership began." And there is a documented ceiling worth knowing if you sell household or dual memberships: the feature "is designed to track one active membership at a time".
This is the Clerestory kiosk mid-transaction. Six of the rows above are visible in one screen.
The card reader in that photo is the single clearest difference. LGL's own FAQ answers the question in one word: asked whether cards can be swiped, the answer is "No. The ability to swipe a credit card is not available at this time." Everything LGL processes is a web form, including when a staff member is typing a card in on a supporter's behalf.
LGL publishes its complete list of form field types, and it contains no consent, agreement, signature or waiver type. An organization could build a required tick box beside a block of formatted text, and that is a reasonable bodge, but there is no waiver document, no versioning of the wording, and no documented record of who accepted which version when.
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.
Little Green Light says it plainly: "LGL is not designed to manage auctions." Its guide points to two auction platforms instead, Auctria and Greater Giving. Raffle tickets can be sold online as an item on an LGL form, but we found no draw and no way to sell them at a table.
Auctions and raffles are now part of Clerestory, in the same account as memberships, admission and the gift shop. Guests bid on silent items from their own phones, with max bids, buy-now and outbid alerts by email. The auctioneer records live items and paddle-raise levels by bidder number, and a big screen in the room shows the running total and the countdown to each close. After the event every saved card is charged in one batch, with a pay link for anyone left owing. Each guest's statement separates fair market value from the deductible amount, and a paddle-raise gift lands in the donor's giving history as a gift.
Raffles run on their own or inside an event, sold online or at a table. A numbered raffle is drawn inside Clerestory with a cryptographically random pick, and every press of the button is recorded, so a re-draw is visible rather than silent. Raffle money counts as money raised, never as giving, and it is never receipted as deductible.
Memberships and events moved too. Membership rules now cover a shared membership year or a rolling one, a grace period, an early-renewal window, and a longer first term or a lower first price for late joiners. A payment recorded against the wrong thing—a membership paid through the donation form, say—can be moved between membership and donation after the fact without charging anyone again, and the donor receives a corrected receipt that replaces the earlier one. Event offer codes give percent off, an amount off or a fixed price, capped and dated, and signed-in members get member pricing automatically.
Little Green Light is a good donor CRM at an honest price, it publishes that price in full, it takes nothing from your gifts, and it lets you keep your own Stripe account. Those are four things we respect and two of them are things we deliberately copied.
If your organization's work is cultivating donors, tracking relationships, running appeals and reporting to a board, and money arrives as gifts through web forms, then LGL is built for exactly that and a great deal of what we build is work you do not need.
The evaluation changes when the institution has a door. A counter with a card reader, a gift shop with sales tax, a membership that carries dues and expires, a waiver a parent signs, and two EINs on two sets of receipts are all things LGL either does not document or, in two cases, tells you outright that it does not do. If most of that describes your week, the comparison is not between two CRMs. It is between a CRM and the system that runs the front of the building, and LGL's own documentation is the clearest evidence of which one it is.
On 3 September 2026 we read Little Green Light's own knowledge base and pricing page, and verified every quote 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.
On 29 September 2026 we added eleven rows—auctions, raffles, membership rules, moving a payment and event offer codes—and checked each against Little Green Light's own knowledge base on that date. Where a cell quotes Little Green Light, the quote is from Little Green Light's own page.
Corrected 30 September 2026: Clerestory sells admission by price tier, not by time slot; timed sessions can be sold as an event series.
Screenshots labeled Clerestory are from a Clerestory demo organization with test data. Screenshots labeled Little Green Light are from LGL's own knowledge base. 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.
Clerestory is an alternative to Little Green Light for non-profits that need public event registration, card readers, a gift shop with sales tax, memberships that carry dues, auctions and raffles. Little Green Light is a donor CRM, and as of 3 September 2026 its own knowledge base says it does not offer public-facing event registration and is not designed to manage auctions.
It depends on how much money moves through the system. As of 3 September 2026, Little Green Light charges a fixed monthly subscription from $45 for up to 2,500 constituents and takes no fee on gifts, while Clerestory charges nothing monthly and 3% per transaction plus Stripe processing. Clerestory's terms also allow its platform fee to be adjusted or capped at a mutually agreed rate at higher volumes.
No. As of 3 September 2026, Little Green Light's pricing page says card payments start at 2.2% + $0.30 per transaction paid to the payment processor, with no fee to Little Green Light. Little Green Light charges a monthly subscription based on constituent record count instead.
No. As of 3 September 2026, Little Green Light's FAQ says the ability to swipe a credit card is not available, and its knowledge base says Little Green Light is not designed to manage auctions, pointing to Auctria or Greater Giving. Clerestory supports card readers, silent and live auctions and raffles in the same account.
Little Green Light takes no percentage of a gift; it charges a flat monthly subscription instead, while Clerestory charges 3% per transaction plus Stripe processing. On the twenty-five capabilities this comparison checked, Clerestory does twenty-four in full and timed entry in part, and Little Green Light matches on four, including processing on the organization's own Stripe account.
