Givebear vs Givelify. Kiosks, fees and funds, side by side.

Givelify fits churches that want the simplest possible start and a bill with no fixed costs: there is no monthly fee, just a flat 2.9% + $0.30 per donation (per givelify.com/pricing, verified June 2026). Congregations whose members already use the Givelify app for another church or charity can start receiving gifts the same week, and those donors tend to like the app they already know.

Givebear fits churches that want the donor relationship on their own page: gifts arrive on the church's branded page and website embed instead of inside another company's app, donors can cover the processing cost so the intended amount arrives, a lobby kiosk takes in-person gifts with no per-device fee, and the church can export its donor records at any time.

Compared with Givelify, Givebear's kiosk for the church foyer is a 21.5-inch touchscreen with a built-in Stripe card reader, sold once at $999 to $1,099 (wall mount or battery floor stand) with no per-kiosk software subscription.

Score both platforms on who owns the donor relationship and giving data, donor option to cover transaction costs, effective cost on small weekly gifts, in-person and kiosk giving, and ChMS, accounting, and export workflow. Use last Easter or an ordinary Sunday as the test case: set up the same funds and receipt wording in a free Givebear account and check whether it produces the report your board asked for from Givelify.

Recurring gifts live inside each donor's Givelify app account and cannot be transferred to another platform, so plan a several-week announcement period asking recurring givers to re-establish their gift on the new page before the old profile goes quiet. Export donation history and donor details from the Givelify dashboard first, then update every Give button, QR code, and bulletin link that points at the Givelify profile.

Givebear imports contacts and past gifts from a CSV, so the Givelify export is the first step. Create your funds in Givebear before importing the Givelify file, since fund names in it do not create funds on their own. Saved cards move only if Givelify and Stripe support a transfer; otherwise recurring donors restart their gift on your new page, so announce the change a few weeks ahead.

Before cutover, list every place a donor can reach Givelify: website buttons, email footers, printed QR codes, and event pages. Repoint the ones you control; a printed code that sends donors to Givelify keeps working only as long as Givelify keeps that page up.

Givelify publishes one number and sticks to it: a flat 2.9% + $0.30 on every donation, with no monthly fee (per givelify.com/pricing, verified June 2026). That simplicity is real, but the $0.30 fixed component weighs heaviest on exactly the gifts churches receive most. A $10 gift costs $0.59, a 5.9% effective rate. A $25 gift costs about $1.03 (4.1%), and only at $100 does the effective rate settle near the headline number at $3.20 (3.2%).

Because Givelify offers no donor-covers-fees option, the church absorbs every cent of that. A congregation receiving 100 gifts averaging $40 each, $4,000 a month, pays $146 in fees that month ($116 in percentage fees plus $30 in fixed fees), a 3.65% effective rate that adds up to roughly $1,752 a year with nothing the finance committee can do about it. Givebear handles the same job differently: donors can cover the costs, and the platform side is a flat platform fee from 1.9% to 5.9% depending on plan (one rate online, at kiosks, and on memberships), plus Stripe card processing at cost, with no setup fee and no monthly minimum.

On Givelify, a member gives by opening the Givelify app, finding the church inside it, and completing the gift in Givelify's branded experience. That is convenient for donors who already have the app, and it is also the product's deepest structural trade-off: the donor account, the giving history, and every recurring gift live inside another company's app rather than on anything the church controls. If the church ever changes platforms, those recurring gifts cannot follow; each giver has to notice the announcement and start over by hand.

The org-side question is how contributions reach the membership database and the books, so ask what exports or integrations Givelify offers for your ChMS and accounting system before committing. A church that wants the relationship on its own turf gets a different shape with Givebear: a donation page at the church's own URL, an embed for the church website, a lobby kiosk at $999 to $1,099 one-time with no monthly device fee, and gifts that settle into the church's own Stripe account with donor records it can export any day it likes.