These days, I see a barbell.
One one end, you have the enterprise giants1: Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. (Does anyone else remember when Salesforce was “free”?) These platforms were built for corporate sales and can be heavily customized for fundraising, and their sheer scale means they can absorb the cost of AI development, maintain robust API ecosystems, and keep pace with enterprise technology expectations. Organizations that go this route are typically buying a foundation and building on top of it, which requires real technical capacity (and spending), but offers a ton of flexibility.
On the other end, you have a proliferation of low-cost and “free” platforms. GiveButter, Zeffy, GoFundMe Pro, and others in this tier have changed the conversation for smaller shops. Their pricing models - often subsidized through platform fees, tips from donors (which I have some feelings about) or investor capital - make them quite attractive for organizations with straightforward needs and lean teams.
The middle of the barbell is where things get complicated.
Midsize fundraising organizations - the kind running major gifts, planned giving, grants, and corporate partnerships under one roof - have historically lived in the market defined by platforms like Raiser’s Edge NXT, Slate, and Virtuous CRM. These are serious fundraising-focused tools built by teams that understand the work. For many years they were well-built, stable, and priced affordably for their clients.
But these vendors are navigating a difficult moment. AI tooling is no longer optional as a product differentiator. Executives and boards expect it, and fundraisers are beginning to demand it. (Once you’ve seen natural language querying and predictive search bars, your outlook changes.) The problem is that building and maintaining credible AI features at scale is expensive, and midmarket CRM vendors do not have the same investor runway that AI-native startups currently enjoy. The result is that AI development costs are increasingly passed through to clients in the form of higher licensing fees, added platform fees, or bundle professional services.
Startups can give us the “millennial lifestyle subsidy” of cheap AI tools for a bit, but established vendors can’t.
One observation I’ll make is that Virtuous looks to be gaining ground here. Their responsive growth model is at least great positioning, with the focus on donor relationships vs. transaction processing, and they were well placed to add robust generative AI to their platform. That is rather different than the big pivot of the product story of Raiser’s Edge NXT, where instead of finally finishing the NXT product as a standalone CRM, NXT is suddenly headed in a different, apparently more expensive, direction.
The tension I keep returning to is that the organizations most likely to benefit from AI-assisted fundraising (prospect identification, liquidity event prediction, donor journey modeling, attrition prediction, agents to engage cool leads) are often not the ones best positioned to absorb the cost of AI features embedded in their CRM licensing.
CRM selection is a 10-15 year decision for most organizations. The ones I worry about are thinking about today’s features and today’s price, without considering what the vendor looks like on the other side of a market correction. Or planning for what their fundraising team will look like in 10-15 years.
I want to be transparent about my own biases here, in the spirit of intellectual honesty.
Although I design and lead the process, I won’t make a final CRM decision alone. We have a committee, we have a rubric, and our executive sponsors will affirm the recommendation.
But what I personally find compelling in a platform is openness. I want a robust API. I want webhooks. I want the ability to bring in our own AI agent someday. Let me connect the CRM to the tools that are best for us, rather than walling us into the ecosystem of products you build on your own timeline. It doesn’t show a lot of confidence in a product to not allow real competition.
The CRM should be the authoritative system of record for donor data, not a wall around what we can do with it. Organizations that cede openness for a bundled feature set may find themselves locked into a vendors’s roadmap rather than their own. That is a trade worth examining carefully before you make it.
The fundraising CRM marketplace in 2026 is not short on options. What is lacking is clarity about where each category of vendor is headed in the next decade. The barbell dynamic I described may sharpen. Some very largs orgs may branch off to try building their own enterprise systems. AI pricing will remain unstable until the capital environment forces more honest cost structures.
For data leaders in fundraising, the work right now is less about finding the perfect feature set, and more about honestly assessing your team’s technical capacity, your tolerance for platform risk, and how you want technology to shape your fundraising in the future. These aren’t easy questions to ask, but I hope you will.
Blackbaud CRM is still around in this space, but I haven’t heard of a major conversion to BBCRM in several years. The tide seems to be BBCRM -> Salesforce. ↩