Blackbaud: the Supported Payment Terminals page in Blackbaud's own documentation, read on 3 September 2026. The heading reads "Payment Terminal (for Blackbaud Altru and SKY Payments API)" and the text states it is currently available for Altru and the SKY Payments API.
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 Raiser's Edge NXT below is quoted from Blackbaud's own documentation, with the date we read it, and where Raiser's Edge NXT matches us we say so plainly rather than leaving the row out.
Every screenshot on this page is labeled with whose product it shows.
Blackbaud does not publish a software price. On 3 September 2026 we checked the Blackbaud pricing page and the Raiser's Edge NXT product page. Neither carries a figure, a range, or a starting-from number.
Blackbaud answers the question in its own FAQ, which we will quote rather than characterize: "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."
What Blackbaud does publish is the contract shape, and it is worth knowing before the first call. From their billing FAQ: "Contracts automatically renew on our standard 3-year term unless you contact your Renewal Representative to discuss potential contract changes." and "Reminder: All changes must be communicated at least 45 days prior to the renewal date."
A three-year term that renews itself unless you give six weeks' notice is a real commitment, and it is the sort of thing worth reading before signing rather than discovering at renewal.
Credit for this: Blackbaud publishes its card rates in full, which much of this industry does not. Blackbaud Integrated Payments in US dollars lists 2.99% + $0.30 for Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Diners Club and JCB, 3.5% + $0.30 for American Express, and a chargeback fee of "$15.00 USD".
There is also a platform fee, published on the same schedule. Raiser's Edge NXT online giving forms carry 1.5%, and the transactions it applies to are listed explicitly: single gifts on all forms, the first payment of a recurring gift, tribute gifts, membership and event registration. Future recurring payments and back-office gifts are not assessed.
That 1.5% is half our 3%, and we are going to say so plainly rather than hope you miss it. On a membership sold through an online giving form, Blackbaud's published platform fee is lower than ours.
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."
Line up what is published on each side and the shape of the problem is obvious.
Ours: 3% platform fee, 2.2% + $0.30 processing, nothing else, and supporters can cover both.
Theirs: 1.5% platform fee on online giving forms, 2.99% + $0.30 processing, 3.5% + $0.30 on American Express, plus a software license whose price is not published, on a three-year automatically renewing term.
You cannot work out what their software costs, because the license price is not published. That is not us being unfair to Blackbaud; it is the direct consequence of a tailored-pricing model. It does mean that anyone who tells you what Raiser's Edge NXT costs without a quote in front of them is making it up, and it means the number you eventually get cannot be checked against what anyone else pays.
Raiser's Edge NXT is Blackbaud's fundraising and donor-management product. It is not their admissions, ticketing and retail product. Altru is.
Blackbaud does not publish a head-to-head comparison of the two, so we are not going to pretend one exists. What they do publish is clear enough on its own. Their Supported Payment Terminals page carries the heading "Payment Terminal (for Blackbaud Altru and SKY Payments API)" and states: "It's currently available for Altru and the SKY Payments API." Raiser's Edge NXT is not named.
Timed ticketing is documented in the Altru help center: "You configure scheduled programs to sell tickets for timed events." Walk-up selling is documented in the Altru help center: "The Daily Sales screen is designed for efficiently processing walk-up sales and is configurable." Sales tax on merchandise is documented in the Altru help center: "To charge taxes during a sales process, you must add each required tax to the system and configure the rate." And Blackbaud's own product navigation describes Altru as "Ticketing and membership for arts and cultural organizations".
So an institution on Raiser's Edge NXT that wants to sell timed admission, run the gift shop, or put a card reader on a counter is looking at a second Blackbaud product, at a second price that is also not published. That is the single most expensive thing to discover late in an evaluation, and it is why this page exists.
Read the right-hand column carefully. "Not documented" does not mean Blackbaud cannot do it. It means we searched Blackbaud's published Raiser's Edge NXT documentation for it on 3 September 2026 and did not find it. Several of these rows are documented in Altru instead, which is the point rather than an oversight, and we say so where it applies.
| Capability | Clerestory | Raiser's Edge NXT |
|---|---|---|
| Optional donation added during event registration | Yes | Yes—"Additional donation is available on the form when you select Allow registrants to make additional donations under Get started." |
| Donor option to cover processing fees | Yes | Yes—"Donor cover lets donors cover the processing fee so 100% of their donation goes directly to you." |
| Memberships as a product | Yes | Yes, through a separately licensed module—"With the optional Membership Management module" |
| Price published on the vendor's own website | Yes, 3% per transaction | No |
| No minimum contract term | Yes | No—"Contracts automatically renew on our standard 3-year term" |
| 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 in Raiser's Edge NXT; documented in Altru |
| Walk-up point of sale | Yes | Not documented in Raiser's Edge NXT; documented in Altru |
| Card readers and in-person hardware | Yes | Not documented—Payment Terminal is scoped in writing to Altru and the SKY Payments API |
| Online store or gift shop | Yes | Not documented in Raiser's Edge NXT |
| Sales tax on retail items | Yes | Not documented in Raiser's Edge NXT; documented in Altru |
| Retail inventory reduced automatically by a sale | Yes | Not documented in either product |
| 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 |
| Class or workshop registration | Yes | Not documented |
| Silent auction with bidding from the guest's own phone | Yes—max bids, buy-now and outbid alerts by email | Through a partner—ClickBid, listed in Blackbaud's partner directory |
| Live auction and paddle raise recorded by bidder number | Yes—the auctioneer screen shows the winner's name as the number is typed | Not documented |
| Winners charged in one batch from cards saved at purchase or check-in | Yes—plus a pay link for anyone left owing | Not documented |
| Auction receipts showing fair market value and the deductible amount | Yes | Not documented |
| Raffle tickets sold online and at a table | Yes—singles or bundles, such as 10 for $40 | Not documented |
| 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 | Not documented |
| Move a payment between a membership and a donation, with a corrected receipt | Yes | Partly—gift splits and designations can be edited; changing a membership payment into a donation is 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 | Not documented—discounted early-bird fee tiers only |
| 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. Raiser's Edge NXT matches us on three of them, and we have left those three in plainly, because a comparison that finds the competitor lacking on everything is one nobody should trust. Their fee-coverage feature is good and goes further than ours in one respect: Blackbaud documents a Complete Cover option in which "Complete Cover™ lets Blackbaud pay the fee for each transaction up to $3,000."
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 one primary tax ID plus one alternate, set at the level of the whole environment. The wording repays a close reading: "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. To be precise about what Blackbaud does and does not say: they document one primary and one alternate. They do not publish a sentence stating that a third is impossible, and we are not going to put that claim in their mouth.
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).
This is the Clerestory kiosk mid-transaction, and it is the clearest illustration of the boundary above, because everything in it lives on the Altru side of Blackbaud's product line rather than the Raiser's Edge NXT side.
Admission, retail and a donation in one cart, on one tap, against one member record. On Blackbaud's side, the admission and the gift shop are Altru, the fundraising is Raiser's Edge NXT, and the card reader is documented for Altru.
Raiser's Edge NXT does not document auctions or raffles of its own. Its route to mobile bidding is a partner, ClickBid, listed in Blackbaud's partner directory. The Blackbaud help pages that do describe auctions belong to Blackbaud CRM, a different product.
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.
Raiser's Edge NXT is a serious fundraising system with decades behind it, deployed across the sector, and on three of the twenty-five rows above it does exactly what we do. If your organization's work is major gifts, annual appeals, prospect research and stewardship, it is built for precisely that, and a great deal of what we build is work you do not need.
Two questions decide it the other way.
Which Blackbaud product is the quote for? If the institution has a door, a shop or a timetable, the capabilities you are picturing are documented in Altru, not in Raiser's Edge NXT. Establish that before you compare any number to anything.
What does the software cost, and what does the processing cost? Ours are 3% and 2.2% + $0.30, both published. Theirs cannot be computed from anything published, because the license price is not published. That is not a small difference when you are the one who has to defend the number to a board, on a three-year term that renews itself.
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, rather than being something you have to discover you are allowed to ask for.
On 3 September 2026 we read Blackbaud's own help center, knowledgebase, billing FAQ, published fee schedule and user-guide pages for Raiser's Edge NXT and Altru, 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 Blackbaud's 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 Blackbaud's own help center, user guides and partner directory on that date.
Two things we deliberately did not claim. Blackbaud's documentation names no third-party payment gateway for Raiser's Edge NXT, which is not the same as saying one cannot be used, so there is no row asserting that. And we did not date the 1.5% platform fee, because the published schedule carries no effective date.
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 Blackbaud are from Blackbaud's own 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.
Clerestory is an alternative to Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT that puts admission, memberships, the gift shop, auctions, raffles and donations in one system, for 3% per transaction with no contract. Raiser's Edge NXT is Blackbaud's fundraising product, and as of 3 September 2026 Blackbaud documents timed ticketing, walk-up sales and sales tax in Altru, a separate product.
The software cost of Raiser's Edge NXT cannot be worked out, because Blackbaud does not publish the software license price. Blackbaud publishes a 1.5% platform fee on Raiser's Edge NXT online giving forms, which is half of Clerestory's 3%, and card processing at 2.99% + $0.30 as of 3 September 2026. Clerestory's platform fee is 3%, Stripe's processing is 2.2% + $0.30, and supporters can cover both.
Yes. Blackbaud's published fee schedule, which carries no effective date, lists a 1.5% platform fee on Raiser's Edge NXT online giving forms, covering single gifts, the first payment of a recurring gift, tribute gifts, membership and event registration. Future recurring payments and back-office gifts are not assessed, and the software license is priced separately by quote.
Yes. As of 3 September 2026, Blackbaud's billing FAQ says contracts automatically renew on a standard 3-year term, and changes must be communicated at least 45 days before the renewal date. Clerestory has no contract and no minimum.
Blackbaud documents a Complete Cover option in which Blackbaud pays the processing fee for each transaction up to $3,000, which goes further than Clerestory's fee coverage. Blackbaud's 1.5% platform fee on online giving forms is also lower than Clerestory's 3%.
