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.
What does Little Green Light cost?
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.
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.
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."
Two different shapes, not two different numbers
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.
Clerestory vs Little Green Light, feature by feature
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 | Yes | 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 |
Clerestory does all fourteen. 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.
The sentence that tells you most about the product
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 timed admission all day, every day.
Memberships are the row most museums will stop at
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".
What one sale looks like
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.
Waivers
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.
Which is the better fit for your organization?
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. Timed admission, 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.
How we checked
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.
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.
