Most charity CRM guides list ten products side by side. That is useful for a first shortlist, but the decision usually comes down to two names you are weighing against each other. This article takes the three pairs UK charities actually search for. Charity Log against Charitylog, which many people confuse. CharityLog against Beacon. Access Charity CRM against Salesforce. For the full field, see our charity CRM comparison.
First, the one that trips people up. "Charity Log" (two words) and "Charitylog" (one word) are the same product: Charitylog, a UK case-management and service-delivery CRM. There is no separate "Charity Log" system to compare it against. If you have seen both spellings and wondered whether you were looking at two tools, you were not. It is one platform, most often written as a single word.
What Charitylog is built for matters more than how it is spelled. It is a CRM for service delivery. It follows clients, referrals, cases and outcomes. It suits a charity that gives services, such as an advice line, community support, befriending or housing help. It does not suit a charity whose main work is fundraising. Pricing is income-based, which suits larger operational charities. If your primary need is donor management and Gift Aid, Charitylog is not the natural fit; a fundraising CRM is.
This is the clearest fork in the road, because the two products are built for opposite jobs. Beacon is a fundraising CRM. It handles donors, campaigns and events. It also handles Gift Aid itself, and sends the claim to HMRC. Capterra rates it 4.9 out of 5 from 32 reviews, checked in July 2026. It has come first in the Fundraising Magazine charity CRM survey for several years. Its Starter plan is £37 per month (£33.50 billed annually).
Charitylog is a case-management CRM. It is stronger than Beacon at three things. Recording the service you gave. Following the path of the person you helped. Reporting outcomes to a funder. It is weaker than Beacon at fundraising work and at Gift Aid. The practical rule: if you raise money, choose Beacon; if you deliver services, choose Charitylog. Some charities do a lot of both. They end up running two systems, or they look at a build of their own. The foot of this page covers that.
This head-to-head is really off-the-shelf versus platform. Access Charity CRM is part of the Access Group's not-for-profit suite. It arrives set up for the way a UK charity works, for fundraising, Gift Aid and supporters. You buy it as a finished product, with a UK company behind it.
Salesforce takes the opposite approach. Its nonprofit programme offers 10 free licences to registered nonprofits through Power of Us, which sounds decisive until you price the rest. Salesforce is a platform, and not a finished charity CRM. Most charities pay a Salesforce partner to set it up. That costs several thousand pounds, and often tens of thousands. Somebody must then run it, either a member of staff or a consultant you keep on. The trade is flexibility for complexity and cost.
The honest read: Access Charity CRM suits charities that want a UK product that works out of the box and a supplier to call. Salesforce suits a large charity with money and skill of its own. Such a charity can shape the platform to an unusual way of working. It must also keep using the depth it pays for. For most small and mid-sized UK charities, "free Salesforce" is not the cheapest option once the true cost of ownership is counted.
Every pair above asks you to pick a side. A fundraising CRM, or a casework system. Charities that do both run two, and then join them by hand.
That split is not a fact about charities. It is a fact about how the products were built. Each vendor picked a market, built a data model for it, and cannot easily hold the other.
A shared foundation holds both. A supporter, a beneficiary, a donation, a case and an outcome are declared once, in one dictionary. A person who gives and a person who is helped are therefore the same kind of record. Your charity then gets a system built around its own work, on top of that.
We explain how a whole sector shares one foundation in bespoke software for a whole sector. We set out what such a system costs in what does it cost to own and run your own systems.
| Head-to-head | Choose the first if | Choose the second if |
|---|---|---|
| Charity Log vs Charitylog | Same product; nothing to choose between. It is Charitylog, a case-management CRM. | |
| CharityLog vs Beacon | You deliver services and report outcomes to funders | You fundraise and need native Gift Aid (Beacon) |
| Access Charity CRM vs Salesforce | You want a UK product that works out of the box (Access) | You are large, well-resourced and will use the platform depth (Salesforce) |
| Bespoke (ESRE) | Your charity fundraises and delivers services and coordinates volunteers, and no single product covers all three without compromise | |
None of these pairs may fit the way your charity works. That usually means you sit in two groups at once. Fundraising and casework, or casework and a large volunteer effort. A system built around your own processes puts them in one place, with no per-record fees and the data owned by you. You can see working examples of what we build on our demos page.
Yes. "Charity Log" and "Charitylog" are two spellings of the same UK case-management CRM, usually written as one word. There is no separate product called Charity Log.
Salesforce offers 10 free licences to registered nonprofits through its Power of Us programme, but free licences are not a free system. Most charities pay a Salesforce partner to configure it, commonly several thousand to tens of thousands of pounds, plus ongoing administration. Compare the five-year total cost, not the licence headline.
Beacon handles Gift Aid natively, including declaration management and HMRC claim preparation, and Access Charity CRM supports it as a UK fundraising product. Salesforce needs more set-up, or an app from another company, for Gift Aid, and Charitylog's strength is casework rather than fundraising.