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, communications, voter data, field tools, and fundraising, whereas NGP VAN, will require you to build a separate site based on Drupal, silo’ing your data or leading to complex integrations between separate systems.

And full integration of all these tools in one platform isn’t just convenient. It’s the difference between retaining your supporters and losing them. And for many of our customers, it’s the difference between winning and losing. NationBuilder improves your insights into the impact you’re having, and helps you to take action on those insights from within the software. NationBuilder is designed to help you identify, attract, and engage more readers, supporters, donors, voters, or customers.

Important Considerations: 

Still interested in NGP-VAN. Here are some important things to consider: 

• Cost: To replicate the essential functionality that NationBuilder can offer, you will need to custom build functionality and integrate with one or two (maybe more) other systems--a website and, sometimes, a separate database. This has real costs, in man hours upfront and for ongoing technical support, as well as in subscription fees to multiple vendors if integrations are required. That means your fully loaded costs are a lot higher than list price, and your ongoing costs for support are real. At NationBuilder, all functionality and access to our world-class team is included based on your plan. No hidden costs. 

• Security: Cyber attacks are a real threats and hacks are common, especially for high-profile leaders or efforts with real opponents. NationBuilder understands and can anticipate these threats.  We're equipped to handle the security of the most high-profile leaders in the world, and all of our customers get the benefit of that. Each customer has their own isolated database so you’re not vulnerable to shoddy firewalls or accidental leaks. We provide world-class DDoS protection to counter the real threat of cyber attacks by hackers trying to bring you down, keeping you organizing when it matters most. 

Scale to Grow With You

NationBuilder has reached a scale that allows us to serve everyone--from the largest institutions to the smallest campaigns. Our extensive ecosystem, includes hundreds of world class designers, developers, and apps to provide custom design and functionality for any organization, including best in class advocacy tools and integrations with crowdfunding platforms, email whippers for state and federal engagement in the US and abroad, and integrations with legacy CRMs like Salesforce and Raiser’s Edge for the largest organizations.

NationBuilder also offers special solutions for our largest Enterprise customers, including advanced features like single sign-on and secure pages via SSL. For those organizations with distributed infrastructures, including associations, nonprofits, alumni organizations, and political parties, with chapters, alliances, locals, and country offices, we’ve launched NationBuilder Network--the first product designed specifically to tackle the challenges facing distributed organizations, and unlock the unprecedented network effects that drive real impact. A real, comprehensive Network solution with controls to maintain branding, best-in-class tools for chapters, and that doesn't required hundreds or separately maintained websites or outside databases.

Need to use NGP or VAN for some things?

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.