Hours you don't have to chase volunteers for

They don't publish it. Their pricing page is a quote request asking for your active volunteer count, staff count, organisation and email. Capterra and SourceForge both list a starting price of $20 per volunteer per year, and they offer charity discounts depending on team size and project length. At that rate a 250-volunteer programme is around $5,000 a year and a 500-volunteer one around $10,000. Zelos Pro is $99/month flat whatever the roster, and the free plan costs nothing at any size.

Zelos logs the start and end of every task or shift, calculates the hours, and reports planned against actual with the difference. The record exists because the shift did. In Volunteero, volunteers submit reports of what they did. One customer, reviewing them at four stars, wrote that insights and the logging of hours are heavily reliant on volunteers, which had made KPI and impact conversations harder. If your funder reporting depends on hours being complete, that's the difference to test.

No. Access starts with a demo and a quote. The Zelos free plan is permanent, needs no card, and covers unlimited members and unlimited admins.

Yes, and this is closer than most comparisons on this site. Volunteero has native instant messaging and automated badges, much as Zelos has task chat, group chats, direct messages and gamification. The practical difference is that Zelos includes the whole set on the free plan and attaches a chat channel to each task.

No, and it's the clearest reason to choose Volunteero. Clients are proper records there, tagged, grouped and searchable the same way volunteers are, so a mission can pair a named volunteer with a named client, and the report comes back against both. Zelos has members and tasks, with no service-user object and none planned in the near term. If your service is one-to-one support, Volunteero is built for it and Zelos isn't.

Not in Zelos. In Volunteero, volunteers submit a claim with costs and evidence through the app, which your finance process then reimburses. The platform captures the claim and the receipt rather than making the payment. For UK charities reimbursing travel, having that captured against the mission is worth a lot.

No. Volunteero covers application tracking and reference collection so someone moves from applicant to cleared inside one system. They also list built-in training, though their own comparison article described native e-learning as in final testing in January 2026. Worth confirming its status if training matters to you. Zelos assumes the people in your workspace are already onboarded.

Not through Zapier. Volunteero's Zapier partnership reaches over 4,000 apps with no development work. Zelos exports profiles and task data to CSV on every plan and offers a REST API with webhooks on Enterprise.

Zelos takes about five minutes: create a workspace, post a task, invite people. Volunteero includes implementation and training from their team, described as getting you going in weeks. More support, longer to first shift.

No, for either. Volunteero is built in direct partnership with UK charities and most of its named customers are UK-based, though it lists organisations across Europe and the US. Zelos doesn't ask what kind of organisation you are and is used in more than 40 countries.

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.

Rarely worth it. They overlap heavily. The realistic question is whether you need client records, onboarding and expenses in the same system, or whether shift signup and team chat is the whole job.