It is always a crucial decision to make when you are trying to choose the right platform for crowdfunding. This is critical as it will decide whether you will be able to reach your funding goal or not. In most of the cases, the choice of platform ends in terms of either Indiegogo or Kickstarter. Many think both the platforms to be the same but, in actual sense, they both are different from one another and it is these differences which you should be considering when you are up to choosing the right platform for your project.
So, through this article, we intend to help you understand more about crowdfunding and to understand the differences between these platforms in a way that you can choose the best one to match your preferences.
Crowdfunding is a kind of fundraising done for causes and projects. Crowdfunding websites and the internet make it easy for people to pledge or donate money to practically fund anything.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are two of the most popular platforms in this field. Keep reading here to learn more about their comparisons.
So somewhere sometime you must have heard the term Kickstarter. You may even have some idea about its pros and cons too, but for everyone here, we will take a few moments to cover the bases.
Today, Kickstarter remains as a synonym for crowdfunding because it is the largest crowdfunding platform we have in here. It even comes with good numbers to prove its merit. The campaigns of Kickstarter have already raised more than $4 billion US dollars. So far, Kickstarter has hosted 158,000 successful projects and comes with 16 million backers.
Kickstarter is said to support 15 campaign categories. Some of the popular ones you will find in this category are music, film and video, and publishing. However, backers are really excited about categories like design, technology, and games. It has to be added that the last three categories mentioned above are said to be the most funded groups.
At the initial stage, Indiegogo was focused only on independent films, but after a year of its launch, it started to accept projects from all kinds of categories. Compared to Kickstarter, Indiegogo is said to offer more opportunities to the backers and it is said to be more of a flexible and less strict platform. Currently, Indiegogo is said to be available in more than 200 countries and covers a large number of categories. Moreover, backers get to choose here whether they wish to go with flexible or fixed models.
At any point in time, Indiegogo is said to have 7000 live campaigns and every day an average of 260 new campaigns come up.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are two of the biggest crowdfunding platforms we have! No doubt you may come across one or the other tiny differences but, we are talking about some of the distinguished ones here.
When we talk about the differences between these two crowdfunding platforms, the greatest one lies in the approach they choose toward money and the time when you will get it. Only when the campaign reaches its funding goal, Kickstarter release money. While in the case of Indiegogo, you will be offered the opportunity to go on receiving the fund as it starts coming in or just wait till you reach your fund goal.
Flexible funding may seem to be less risky for you as a campaigner but, regardless of what amount you raise, you need to be sure that you deliver the results as promised. Now when we look at things from the perspective of backers, fixed funding seems to be less risky and kind of more attractive too. In the case of Indiegogo, you will be able to get your hand on both options.
Indiegogo started to offer support for payment processing through Stripe from October 2016. Before that it only supported Paypal and freezing business accounts made it gain a lot of public attention. Paypal was not the kind of arrangement where it would like people to take funds for something that is yet to be developed. Stripe, on the other side, understands crowdfunding better and is more accommodating in nature. Kickstarter even uses Stripe for its payment processing.
Kickstarter is quite a favorite of media and so compared to Indiegogo, it gets to enjoy more coverage. The main reason for such attention is the strict quality controlled image that Kickstarter has. Only high-quality products are delivered by Kickstarter and so to find a story, journalists don’t have to go through campaign after campaign of waste information. This means if you go for Kickstarter for your campaign, you have a better chance of enjoying the press coverage. This is definitely an advantage of going for Kickstarter!
Indiegogo makes use of Vimeo and YouTube while Kickstarter makes use of its own video hosting service. YouTube is considered as the second largest search engine for videos and so it can easily help you attract new users. Getting to use YouTube means you will be able to rank high for your videos when you are running your campaign on Indiegogo. Things can be even better for you if you have a strong audience following you to share your videos crazily. In case you have no such audience, it can still be worth to ask all people you know to leave a comment on the video. All such interactions will be shown on the crowdfunding page of Indiegogo. When you are up to crowdfunding, every interaction and every comment matter and this can prove to be some kind of incentive to backers.
Earlier Indiegogo has two types of fees: 9% if you didn’t reach your goal and 4% if you did. Things changed for Indiegogo in 2015, now just like Kickstarter’s 5%, it will even charge you the same whether you reach your goal or not. On the other hand, Indiegogo has no fees for personal fundraising projects, but as we are not focusing on personal fundraising, there is no meaning in discussing in that direction.
Kickstarter comes with no limit for reward levels while Indiegogo has imposed a limit of 20. Having a limit of 20 reward levels can be enough to get backers for your campaign. Still, it can be good to have another option too if you are working on something creative.
Both in the case of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, the payment processing fees remain the same at 3%.
Remarketing is considered as quite a powerful tool when you are planning to reach the visitors who already visited your website and you do this by targeting your ads. Here remarking works by adding in pixel code into the webpage and then looks for visitors who visited the certain webpage and creates an audience based on that. Indiegogo lets you create a remarketing audience by inserting the pixel code and this does not happen in the case of Kickstarter. Indiegogo comes with a service called as Easy Retarget and this can be used for remarketing in case of campaigns for Kickstarter.
The kind of traffic site get is what comes under the unique monthly visits and it a very important factor to consider as there will be no backers without visitors. As per a statistic, it is suggested than an average of 12 million unique visitors per month is seen in the case of Indiegogo while in the case of Kickstarter, it gets around 27-28 million new visitors. Again, it has to be said that more traffic on the site does not always mean to be considered as a point every time, as both platforms come with their different strengths. Say, for example, Kickstarter enjoyed a tremendous gaming community while Indiegogo had a back of thriving technology community.
Another important difference you can spot in the case of Kickstarter and Indiegogo after the funding scheme is this. Kickstarter was only available within the limits of the US in the beginning but later, they even included Australia, the UK, and Canada. This has changed over the years and now Kickstarter has been made available in 21 countries, which even includes Hong Kong, Singapore, and Mexico. Now in the case of Indiegogo, it is available in 224 countries and this means officially available everywhere.
In the case of Kickstarter, when the campaign ends and the goal is reached, only then the backers are charged. So rather than pledge, they only show the pledging intent throughout the campaign. This means there is always a chance that the backers may change their mind and cancel the pledge by the end of the campaign. This means each campaign witnesses an average drop of 5-10% in backers. Things are different in the case of Indiegogo as it charges the backers instantly and thus maintaining their numbers.
When it comes to project registration, stricter rules are followed by Kickstarter and their staff will manually check each project to see whether it complies with their set norms or not. So, you need to stick with three rules here and they are:
Be clear in your mind that these are very strict rules to be followed. One of the recent projects on Kickstarter which was offering a laser shaving experience got suspended even after collecting more than $4 million as it was no tangible product. As Indiegogo comes with no such rules, the creators of that project registered it there and got what amount they needed and that was less than $4 million. This single thing pointed out the fact that greater flexibility was enjoyed in the case of Indiegogo and was good for project creators looking for such an option.
If you wish to go with Indiegogo, campaign owners can go with the platform named InDemand, which is actually an important extension of the crowdfunding campaign. This is generally used by the creators to keep on raising funds for the project once the campaign has ended. InDemand helps the creators to reach new audiences, expand the community reach as well as to keep on receiving the ongoing exposure they are receiving. Only if the creators manage to reach the campaign goal within its deadline and have a good relation with Indiegogo, they become eligible for InDemand.
Transition to InDemand can still be easy when you are using Kickstarter. It is important for the creators on Kickstarter to get in touch with the team of Indiegogo and it is they who can help with the transition of their campaign on InDemand. Once the creators are able to set up the campaign on InDemand, only then they will be able to make edits on payment details, the story, perks, and others. However, the amount raised in the campaign or the original funding goal cannot be edited here.
A low-standard support system is what Kickstarter comes with and so if things go south, both creators and backers will be on their own. Indiegogo is far better and lovable in this case as it comes with a responsive customer support team that will be there to help you out in trouble.
The moment backers hit the “pay” button, Indiegogo provides their contact information. In the case of Kickstarter, you will have to conduct a survey once you reach the goal. During the survey, you can ask your backers for their contact information, in case you wish to get feedback before the end of the campaign.
Both the crowdfunding platforms are good enough and it is not possible to compare one with the other. Still, when we are looking at the types of campaigns, Indiegogo has more options compared to Kickstarter. The kind of platform you want to choose completely depends on the kind of project or product you want to develop. If your project is more creative in nature and needs flexibility then you should better go for Indiegogo and if you are ready to play with the rules, Kickstarter can be good. It is always recommended that you take your time to decide the kind of funding platform you think can be good for your project. Still, if you have any doubts, you can always talk to our team for any additional help.
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