Donor CRM
Aplos
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Aplos is a fund accounting system with donor management attached, not the other way round. That distinction decides whether it’s the right purchase: if your pain is the treasurer’s spreadsheet and the audit, this is the category. If your pain is donor follow-up, it isn’t.
The rate card
Published, which is rare enough to note: $79/mo Lite, $129/mo Core, from $229/mo Advanced, and a quoted Custom tier for organizations past roughly $1M in revenue. Two users on Lite and Core, three on Advanced. Fifteen-day free trial, no credit card, month-to-month with no contract.
What each tier adds is genuinely accounting-shaped: Lite gets you balance sheet and income statement by fund plus bank reconciliation and 1099s; Core adds budgeting, accounts payable and receivable; Advanced adds budgeting by fund, grant, department and project.
Additional users and contacts cost extra. The per-unit prices are not published on Aplos’s own pages and the figures circulating elsewhere aren’t traceable to the vendor, so get them quoted rather than assumed.
The processing detail that costs real money
From the Aplos terms, in their own words: card payments run 2.9% + $0.30, ACH runs 1% + $0.30, Amex and international are typically 1% higher, and organizations that haven’t verified 501(c)(3) status pay another 1%.
The ACH rate has no cap. That is the number to check against your gift profile. A $10,000 bank transfer costs $100.30 to process here. On a platform that caps ACH — Donately caps it at $5 — the same gift costs five dollars. If you receive several five-figure ACH gifts a year, that difference is larger than the Lite subscription.
There is no QuickBooks integration, and roundups say otherwise
This is the correction most worth making on this page. Review sites and comparison posts routinely list an “Aplos + QuickBooks integration.” There isn’t one — no API connection, no sync, in either direction.
What exists is a one-time, file-based migration path away from QuickBooks. You export an account listing from QuickBooks to Excel, send it to Aplos support, and they load it, typically in two to five business days at no charge. Note that this deletes and replaces whatever is already in your Aplos account, so it is a first-week operation rather than something to try later.
Aplos steers you away from bringing historic transactions across at all — their own guidance is that most organizations export historic reports to keep on file and start clean. Converting historic activity into true fund accounting is a separately quoted implementation project.
That is the correct architecture, and it is worth understanding rather than treating as a gap: Aplos is not a system that reports into your accounting software. It is the accounting software, and it publishes a competitive comparison page against QuickBooks for nonprofits. If your bookkeeper wants to keep QuickBooks, Aplos is not an addition to that setup — it is a replacement for it.
One related detail, verified 3 August 2026: third-party integrations are not included in the Lite plan. They start at Core ($129/mo). An Aplos Lite customer gets no partner integrations at all — no Bloomerang, no Keela, no PayPal import. Aplos has no Zapier app of any kind, so there is no workaround.
Who owns it now
Aplos acquired Raisely in 2023 and Keela in 2024, and in August 2025 the three relaunched as a combined suite under a new brand, Velora. All three are still sold separately.
This matters if you’re comparing Aplos to Keela: they are the same company. Any comparison that treats them as independent competitors is out of date, and the vendor content on both sides is unlikely to lead with it.
What reviewers report
The recurring complaint is not the list price but the renewal. Two treasurers reviewing in 2023 described increases of 100% and 300% year over year. Both predate the Velora consolidation, so they may not reflect current behaviour — but ask about renewal escalation before you commit, and get the answer in writing.
Support responsiveness is the second theme, with multi-day waits reported. The third is accounting gaps that show up in practice rather than on a feature list: NSF check handling that requires duplicate entry, limited filters on contribution statements, no drill-down on some transactions.
Strengths
- Genuine fund accounting — balance sheet and income statement by fund, not a QuickBooks workaround
- Published rate card, month-to-month, 15-day trial with no credit card
- One system for the treasurer and the giving statements, which suits a one-person finance shop
Other options
- Need a fundraising CRM rather than an accounting system? Aplos leads with the books; donor management is the smaller half. If your problem is follow-up and retention, buy for that instead. Read our DonorDock write-up →
- Taking large gifts by bank transfer? Aplos charges 1% on ACH with no cap — $100 on a $10,000 transfer. Donately caps ACH at $5. Read our Donately write-up →
- Want the strongest retention reporting? Aplos reports on the books; Bloomerang reports on donor behaviour. Read our Bloomerang write-up →
Keep comparing
Aplos head to head