Donarius vs WildApricot: Which is a better fit?

Deborah H.: Hi. My name is Deborah, and I am the pastor and president of a ministry. I'm going to be giving a review on Donarius. I give it a five, and for any more reviews that you'd like to see, just go below and click. The programs that I was using before I actually got involved with this program that we're discussing right now, Donarius, we were using Excel, and I just had a really hard time figuring it out myself. I found it not so easy to use. The other thing was it wasn't really geared to what we were looking for, which was church activity. That is why when we found the program that we're using now, we were so happy. It really helped us. The reason why we chose to go with Donarius is, first of all, it's very user-friendly. Also, the company itself, when I try to talk to someone, I just send an email out. They get right back to me. Another thing is it's really geared for what we're looking for, which is church-type and ministry-type activity, so it was perfect for us. Also, the price was lower than any competitor that I was looking at, so we went with it. When we first got Donarius, and they give you very simple user-friendly instructions on downloading it, so there was no problem with putting it on the computer. It took a little time just because I wanted to make sure I had everything right, but it's just inputting all the information where it needs to be. Once it's done, you're good to go. Then you just do your regular monthly reports. The only thing was just taking a little time to put everything in, but it was not difficult at all. It's so user-friendly. For those of you who are looking for a program, if you have a ministry or a church, I really think this is the program for you, because what I find, as I said before, it's user-friendly, you can bring out quarterly statements for people. You can let a person know exactly where their money has gone, into what projects, how much they gave. It's amazing. Tax receipts just print up, just like that. There's just so much. You can actually have pictures of your donors, if you want a picture. We do a support a child program, so you can put the picture of the child who they support. It's just an amazing program, and if you're really looking for something that's going to benefit your church, and be easy to use, yet very beneficial for your church operations, then I would go with this program.

Caryn: Hello, my name's Caryn. I'm the Communications Director for the Off Campus Writers' Workshop. We're an organization of about 300 and 5,400 members, using Wild Apricot for our event management and membership management. My level of satisfaction, I'm afraid to say is a one. I am not a satisfied customer of Wild Apricot. Before adapting to Wild Apricot, and I believe it was 2015, our organization was on a manual system of personal emails, storing things in folders and Outlook, keeping lists of our email addresses in an Excel sheet. It was a totally manual system, and as we added more members and needed more functionality, it just was not working out for us at all. So at that point, we went to this all in one solution, Wild Apricot. In all honesty, we didn't vet a bunch of systems. I'm sorry that we didn't. We got a recommendation from somebody whose expertise we trusted said, this is a platform that you can get everything under one umbrella that'll solve your problems. And we went for it without doing a great deal of research, basically on recommendation. Getting started was tedious. It was a lot of work that very few people had to do in a short timeframe, so it was not a pleasant experience. As far as difficulty in grasping the functions, I don't think it was over our heads. It was just the amount of tedium involved in getting up and running. I would take a test run. They do offer the opportunity to test the product before you buy. I would pay very close attention to any recommendations that you could get of customers that use Wild Apricot, and I don't know that they would ever supply those names. And I would look at 4, 5, 6 other systems, compare them all. Because once you get on one of these systems, it's very difficult to get off. So you better be happy about the choice you've made from the get-go. And for that reason, I suggest that whoever's looking at it take the time to compare it to several different alternatives that all offer the same functionality, but may have updated their system a lot more readily than the Wild Apricot owners seem to be willing to.