Bring in help without upgrading your plan

On annual billing, Basic is $34/month, Essential $75/month and Royale $125/month; billed monthly those become $39, $89 and $149. There's also a free plan limited to 50 volunteers, one administrator and three events a month. Zelos Pro is $99/month flat, and the free plan has no member or admin limit.

Unlimited on every Zelos plan, including free. On VolunteerMark, the free and Basic plans allow a single administrator, and unlimited administrators start on Essential at $75/month.

Up to 50 volunteers, one administrator, three events a month, three flexible schedule positions a year, the volunteer mobile app, import and export, and volunteer service certificates. Two limits matter most. A flexible schedule position is their term for a task with no set date or time, and you get three a year. Fixed schedule positions, timed work shifts, aren't on the free tier at all, so the three monthly events are for general participation rather than staffed shifts. The Zelos free plan has no member or admin limit and lets you post any number of tasks and shifts, with 25 running at once.

They're priced closely, $99 a month against $75, so it comes down to how coordination happens. Zelos Pro gives every task its own chat channel, with push notifications and email updates and no monthly cap on either, plus points and leaderboards. VolunteerMark Essential gives you kiosk check-in, service certificates, white-labelling and a subdomain, and reaches volunteers by email plus 100 SMS a month, with no chat. If your volunteers need to talk to each other about a shift, that's the deciding difference.

Yes. Built-in two-way messaging is on every plan including free: a chat channel per task, plus group chats and direct messages, with push notifications and email updates on task changes. VolunteerMark emails volunteers from its Essential tier and sends SMS with a monthly allowance, 100 messages on Essential, 250 on Royale, with no chat on any plan.

No. VolunteerMark includes a sign-in and sign-out kiosk from its Basic tier at no extra charge. Zelos logs the start and end of each shift and reports planned hours against actual, but it records a scheduled shift rather than an arrival at the door.

Yes, on the Enterprise plan, which includes a branded app in the App Store and Google Play. VolunteerMark offers white-labelling from its $34 Basic tier, which is considerably cheaper if branding is your main requirement.

Not as a ready-made document. Zelos tracks hours and task completion per member and exports to CSV, which most teams use for reporting. VolunteerMark generates volunteer service history and certificates on every plan including free, so if volunteers need proof of hours for school or court-ordered service, that's a real advantage.

Yes. Used by coordinators in more than 40 countries, with a multi-language interface where each member picks their own, per-member time zones, and GDPR compliance by default from being built in Estonia. VolunteerMark offers on-demand translation from its Essential tier.

There isn't one, but there are limits. The free plan includes unlimited members, unlimited admins, unlimited custom profile fields, full self-signup, built-in messaging, push notifications, gamification, smart targeting and CSV export. The caps are 25 concurrent active tasks, a 100-task archive and 10,000 chat messages.

Possible but rarely worth it. They cover much the same ground. The realistic choice is one or the other, based on whether you need kiosk check-in and service certificates, or several coordinators and a chat channel on every shift.