You’re probably not choosing between CRMs.
Most teams like yours run on a spreadsheet, an email tool and somebody’s inbox. That stack is free, familiar and genuinely fine at first. Here is where it starts to cost you, job by job — and further down, how pplCRM compares to the named tools you might be weighing.
Three files hold three versions of the same person, and nobody is sure which one is current.
One record holds the household, the emails, the gifts, the knocks and the notes. Update it once; it’s correct everywhere.
Export a CSV, upload it to the email tool, clean the bounces, repeat next month. Unsubscribes live only in the email tool.
Segments come straight from the live list, and every unsubscribe and do-not-contact is honored automatically.
Your mail shares a sending reputation with thousands of strangers on the same platform, including the spammers.
You send from your own verified domain. The reputation you build is yours alone.
Requests live in whoever’s inbox they landed in. Follow-up depends on memory and flags.
A shared inbox gives every message an owner and a due date; nothing waits on one person remembering.
Paper lists in the car, re-typed into the sheet at night, if it happens at all.
The volunteer companion is offline-first for both canvassing and deliveries — every knock and drop-off queues on the phone and syncs back to the live report when signal returns.
One column headed “Ward”, meaning something different in every file you were handed, overwritten the next time somebody re-imports.
Every boundary covering an address is held against the household at once: riding, ward, congressional district, precinct. Each screen calls them by the word your own race uses.
The master file lived on their laptop. So did the passwords.
History belongs to the workspace, not a laptop. Access ends with one click; the story stays.
Free, plus the hours spent reconciling files and the mistakes that slip out in between.
Free forever for unlimited contacts and 1,000 email subscribers. Paid plans price by the people you email, never the size of your list.
Comparing us to a tool you already know?
They are capable tools, and feature lists change. So these charts follow three rules to stay honest: the pplCRM column states only what ships today, every claim that another product lacks something links to that product’s own public documentation, and each chart shows the date we last checked. Where a competitor does something well, the chart says so.
Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.
The tools you already have open
Mailchimp, HubSpot and the spreadsheet are excellent at their own jobs. Organizing streets, households and volunteers is not their job, and their own documentation says so.
Cut any list into turfs that stop at your boundary lines; phones and printed walk sheets share one walking order.
One address, several residents, one record — with every electoral area the address falls in held against it.
Published official maps selectable in a click; every located household knows its areas, in your race’s own words.
Account-less companion apps: a personal link plus a one-time code, one admin approval per volunteer, revocable from every phone.
Emailable subscribers only. The whole voter file is free to store, on every plan.
Checked against each product’s public documentation on August 11, 2026.
The political platforms
The tools a campaign manager will name. NGP VAN is the US Democratic ecosystem’s standard and this chart says so; the structural differences are who can use each tool, what ships bundled, and what happens after the knock.
Turfs are cut along your race’s own boundary maps — polling division, riding, ward — and never cross a line. Included, not an add-on.
Elections Canada federal ridings, Elections Ontario and Elections Alberta provincial maps, and US congressional and state legislative maps — selectable in a click, free.
A personal link plus a one-time code, in the phone’s browser. No app store, no volunteer passwords; one admin approval per volunteer.
A “wants a sign” answer at the door becomes a request; approved requests are cut into delivery outings volunteers drive with the offline companion app.
CRA charitable plus federal, BC, Alberta and Ontario political regimes, gap-free numbering, cancel-and-replace — with the Elections Ontario and Élections Québec carve-outs stated plainly.
Emailable subscribers. Contacts and households are unlimited on every plan — a voter file is free to store.
Checked against each product’s public documentation on August 11, 2026.
The community and donor tools
The tools a non-profit or congregation is likely already using. Where they are strong — Planning Center’s households and Canadian receipting are real — the chart concedes it.
Visits and drives run as turfs and hour-sized routes, with account-less phone pages for the volunteers who walk and drive them.
CRA official receipts with gap-free numbering and cancel-and-replace corrections; donors outside a regime get giving summaries marked as exactly that.
Every newsletter is scored before it leaves; a score below 50 cannot send, and an AI content review runs on every check.
Connect Gmail or Microsoft 365 and mail flows both ways; every message gets an owner and a service-level clock, and one click turns it into a task with a due date.
One list with the field, the mail and the money attached — built for organizing work specifically.
Checked against each product’s public documentation on August 11, 2026.
Three things no chart cell can capture.
Whichever tool you are weighing, these three are structural — they will still be true after everyone’s next release.
Already on one? The switch guides for Breeze, Planning Center, NationBuilder and Mailchimp show exactly what to export, what maps — and what does not come across.
Platforms that price by database size charge you for every name you collect. Here contacts and households are unlimited on every plan; you pay only for emailable subscribers.
Pay month to month — or annually for 2 months free, your choice — and everything exports to plain CSV on every plan. A tool you can leave anytime is a tool you can trust with your list.
No sales call, no demo video. The free workspace opens with sample data already in it, so you evaluate with your own hands.
See the difference on sample data.
The free workspace opens with people, households, turfs and an inbox already in it. Compare with your own hands; no card required.