NationBuilder is a unique nonpartisan community organizing system that brings together a comprehensive suite of tools that today's leaders and creators need to gather their tribes.

Deeply social. We don't bolt on some share buttons and call it social media - we interweave Twitter mentions of both your broadcaster IDs and your website into the administrative dashboard and activity stream. Likewise, Facebook page activities and Facebook and Meetup events are tightly tied into your nation, helping you to create a database that reflects the true scope of your nation's support across the social web. You can interact with your Facebook and Twitter supporters and prospects right from your NationBuilder control panel and collect event RSVPs and market ticketed events. NationBuilder profiles aren't some sterile and contextless lists of names and email address, but rather rich social profiles with pictures and bios linked to people's social media profiles. We also help new members of your nations find and follow their friends from Facebook and Twitter right in your nation.

Real-time activity stream. Instead of running reports once a week, NationBuilder shows recent updates from your site, Twitter, Facebook pages, events, donations, any activity happening that you should care about. This activity stream is highly filterable, and provides field organizers, finance directors, social media managers and other parts of your organization a "now time" view of activity in you nation. This real-time newsfeed is similar to a Facebook activity stream, tailored to help you track and guide the health of your nation. It’s very addictive.

Runs your whole site. NationBuilder is a unique community organizing system (COS) that empowers you to run your entire site, supporter and prospect database and donor recruitment and finance tracking from one site. You don't need an extra content management system (CMS) with NationBuilder - it is one, with rich customizable themes that make it like a WordPress for organizing. NationBuilder allows you to quickly build a slick public-facing website complete with blog pages, calendars with Google maps, petition pages, customizable surveys and much, much more. Its got a whole social customer relationship management (CRM) built right in for keeping track of everything from mail and face-to-face contacts to your social media. And yes, we use NationBuilder the platform to run NationBuilder the software company.

No tech team required. NationBuilder is highly customizable without a line of code. If you have a designer, you can create anything you like with HTML/CSS and SCSS customization of our themes. We can refer you to great designers and consultants if you don’t have one, and have free screencasts for web play or download on how you can do it yourself. NationBuilder is not for coders who love to play around with plug-ins and integrating various tools - you'll probably be happier with WordPress, Drupal, Django, or Ruby on Rails.

Campaign aware. We provide access to the voter file for political causes and campaigns, with tight database integration and easy to use call and walk lists, including a turf cutter to narrow down target voters on an interactive map. You can email and text your supporters using NationBuilder, whether yours is a nation for 100 or 1 million.

Review NationBuilder pricing and start a free trial here.

Salesforce is a CRM; it provides customer relationship management. As its name indicates, it is based on the sales cycle model. If your primary motivation for communicating with people is to sell them something, it may be the right platform. You can effectively track consumers through a sales funnel. Pricing is based on the number of users, though nonprofits can get 10 free licenses. You’ll probably have a significant upfront cost, as most people need to hire a consultant to customize Salesforce for their needs. Using Salesforce can be difficult for people who aren’t tech savvy. And their pricing makes it expensive to provide large teams access to the software, which can limit growth.

NationBuilder is an operating system for communities. The purpose is to build and sustain a community of people around a shared mission. Where Salesforce treats relationships as transaction opportunities, NationBuilder supports engagement and participation. You’ll gain a holistic view of your community with a robust people database integrated directly with your website, finances, email, and social media. No tech team or consultant is required to get started and anyone who wants to gather a community can use NationBuilder; our customers range from nonprofits to business to government. The pricing includes an unlimited number of users because it takes people to scale effectively.

Is Salesforce already embedded in your workflow? Is the idea of transferring systems daunting? You can use NationBuilder to engage your community and send updates to your Salesforce database using our open API.

WordPress is a CMS, a content management system created for blogging. To use this robust publishing tool, you’ll need to sort out the logistics of web hosting and keeping the software up-to-date. The plethora of WordPress themes need to be downloaded and installed separately. While people can comment on your writing, community engagement is not a core feature and requires integrating plug-ins. Keeping security settings updated on a WordPress site can be incredibly cumbersome. At the end of the day, WordPress is just a website.

You can run your entire organization, including your website, on NationBuilder. Every public theme features responsive design, which means your website will adapt to any size screen from desktop to tablet to mobile. Your site will do more than broadcast your message -- engagement is built into every page. Visitors can login using email, Twitter, or Facebook automatically. You can collect event RSVPs, sell tickets, accept donations, manage memberships, process invoices, and crowdsource ideas on your site. And when someone takes action on your site, the information is not stuck in a silo or spreadsheet. Your people database consolidates website engagement, social media interactions, and financial support in one place. You can target people for email, text blasts, phone calls, or in-person meetings based on past actions and demographic information.

Do you already have a WordPress site you love? You can create an action center on NationBuilder instead of moving your entire site.

We're big fans of Kickstarter and have built similar crowdfunding tools into NationBuilder. It's a great place to go to raise funds fast, but first you need a base of supporters. NationBuilder helps you recruit and organize the base of support you'll need for a successful crowdfunding effort, even if you want to do it on Kickstarter. Start a free trial now.

Ning allows you to create an affordable custom social network and can be a great platform for your fans and supporters to hang out and chat. NationBuilder does many of the things that Ning does, plus gives you a highly customizable public website, a social CRM and email and texting features. A key differentiator is that while Ning is a community platform, NationBuilder is designed to help a leader or leaders move volunteers and loosely aligned supporters towards a common goal. Ning is more about hanging out, and NationBuilder is more about action.

You can start a free trial of NationBuilder here.

If you've got money to burn and you've already learned how to use these tools, you might not want to switch. Otherwise, NationBuilder is an elegant replacement for these outdated donor management software suites. Our social CRM is designed to help you conduct donor outreach, interaction and contact logging from social media to phone and in-person contact, with rich analytics. You can print call sheets and download lists or your entire donor database easily.

But don't take our word for it, read what Tim Wayne, designer for groups like Newsom for Mayor and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, had to say about his experience with both Convio and NationBuilder.

Then, try out NationBuilder yourself with a free 14-day trial.

We have great calendar and events tools, including ticketed events and flexible email tools. Eventbrite is great if you want to do an event or two, but NationBuilder supports events as part of a richer organizing infrastructure. We also have better integration with Facebook and a robust tagging system, helping you create a true events database of your supporters and prospects. Events professionals can also use NationBuilder's social media databasing and Klout integration and search functions to target influential supporters in key geographical areas.

NationBuilder's toolkit includes transparent pricing and a 14-day free trial.

Salsa (also known as Democracy in Action or DemocracyInAction, and Wired for Change) products are a cheaper alternative to ActionKit for groups that have an in-house tech team and want to do a lot of custom coding and work with plug-ins. The product has a complex user interface and is frequently used with Drupal or WordPress for a CMS and Ning for a social network, and requires a lot of integration work as a result. They have an email-your-legislator “spank and thank” tool at the federal level, and if that is important to you, we can recommend partner solutions that fit your needs.

Salsa's products are only for progressives, and they don't have NationBuilder's voter outreach tools and data such as the voter file, call and walk lists and turf cutter. For voter outreach, people will generally use NGPVAN with Salsa. Adding up all the additional tools needed and custom integration, it ends up being quite expensive. NationBuilder's transparent pricing makes the tools of democracy open to all, and we include a 14-day free trial.

If you don't want to get your hands dirty running an online campaign and have the money to spend, look at Blue State Digital. This progressives-only web shop will create custom solutions using their own toolkit and will even write your emails for you. It does lack the voter outreach tools, texting solutions and voicemail that NationBuilder customers enjoy, but BSD will integrate with other providers for those services at a substantial cost. They are famous for running the technology operation for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

NGP VAN is available only to candidates blessed by the Democratic Party, while NationBuilder does not discriminate based on party, or any other criteria.

NGP VAN can generate district-specific campaign finance reports and integrate with official Democratic party voter file enrichment efforts. NationBuilder's voter outreach tools, however, are more up to date and user friendly. With NationBuilder, your website is integrated seamlessly with voter outreach and advocacy tools, whereas with NGP VAN, they will build you a separate site based on Drupal.

If your finance team wants NGP for compliance purposes, use NationBuilder and export your data to run quarterly reports. If you have access to the VAN through your local or state party organization, you can still use NationBuilder by importing your VAN voter file and using our action tools. We also provide a voter file free with your subscription. Check out our pricing and start a free trial here.

NOTE: Unfortunately, NGP VAN sales people regularly lie about us, saying that we will share your data with Republicans. This is not true. With NationBuilder, you own all of your own data, period. If you want to share it with another group, you have to do that yourself.

Building a highly customized CMS plus CRM using these open source tools can be quite appealing. However, it is time consuming and costly as it requires a skilled in-house or contract tech team. The code is free, but making it work the way you want it to can be a frustrating and lengthly process. In contrast, NationBuilder just works. With us, you get the benefits of the improvements for any of our customers rolling out to all at no additional cost. One of our early beta customers spent a year trying to get such a custom system working to their satisfaction, and 3 months away from their election they found NationBuilder, scrapped all their existing efforts, and were up and running with a custom theme in 2 weeks. Try it for yourself with a free 14-day trial.

Capwiz from CQ allows lobbyists and interest groups to activate their supporters and point them towards a legislative goal. NationBuilder is designed to spur grassroots action through social networks and organizing around common goals. We're also a heck of a lot less expensive. Check out our pricing and start a free trial here.

ActionKit is a great solution for huge organizations with in-house tech teams, whereas NationBuilder is meant for organizations that can't afford or don't want to deal with a tech team. ActionKit supports email, events and donations and can be customized and integrated with your current website. It is very expensive, and available only to progressive organizations. NationBuilder is available to anyone and far less expensive.