Running a giveaway on your WordPress website is a proven way to grow your audience, increase engagement, and collect leads without spending a fortune on ads.
We regularly run giveaways on WPBeginner, including our annual birthday giveaway, to reward our readers and attract thousands of new subscribers. From experience, the difference between a successful giveaway and a frustrating one usually comes down to the plugin you choose.
The right plugin makes it easy to set up entry actions, prevent fraud, pick winners fairly, and actually turn participants into long-term subscribers. The wrong one can feel limiting, confusing, or slow down your site.
That’s why we tested the most popular WordPress giveaway plugins in real-world scenarios. In this guide, we’ll show you the best options to help you boost traffic, grow your email list, and run giveaways that reflect well on your brand.
If you’re in a hurry, you can check out our top picks for the best WordPress giveaway plugins:
| Rank | Plugin | Best For | Starting Price |
| 🥇 | RafflePress | Easy, WordPress-native giveaways with full data control | Free or $39.50 / year |
| 🥈 | Gleam | Advanced giveaways and referral campaigns | $10 / month |
| 3 | Simple Giveaways | Lightweight giveaways for beginners | Free |
| 4 | KingSumo | Quick viral giveaways with referral focus | Free |
| 5 | ShortStack | User-generated content and social campaigns | $39 / month |
What to Look for in a WordPress Giveaway Plugin
Not all giveaway plugins are built the same. Some focus heavily on social sharing, while others are better at email list growth or simple contests. The best giveaway plugins balance ease of use, performance, and growth features.
Here are the key things we recommend looking for when choosing a WordPress giveaway plugin:
- Pricing that makes sense: Watch out for tools that look cheap upfront but require expensive monthly plans to unlock basic features.
- Flexible entry actions: Look for multiple ways for users to enter, such as email signups, social follows, page visits, referrals, or bonus entries. This gives you more ways to grow your audience.
- Email marketing integrations: A good giveaway plugin should connect with popular email services so new entries are automatically added to your mailing list.
- Fraud prevention and fair winner selection: Built-in protections such as email verification, duplicate entry detection, and random winner selection help ensure giveaways are fair and trustworthy.
- Ease of setup: You should be able to create and launch a giveaway without touching code. Drag-and-drop builders and ready-made templates save time.
- Site performance: Giveaways should load quickly and not slow down your website, even when you’re getting a lot of traffic.
- Data ownership and privacy: Ideally, entries and user data should stay on your site, or at least be easy to export, so you stay in control.
How We Tested and Reviewed WordPress Giveaway Plugins
To find the best WordPress giveaway plugins, we didn’t just rely on feature lists or marketing pages. We installed and tested each plugin in real giveaway scenarios to see how they actually perform.
In addition to using RafflePress on WPBeginner for our own giveaways, we set up test contests with other popular plugins to compare setup time, entry options, performance, and overall experience.
Here’s what we focused on during our testing:
- Giveaway setup and workflow: We tested how easy it is to create a giveaway, add entry actions, customize the design, and publish it on a WordPress page.
- Entry methods and growth options: We looked at the available entry methods, including email signups, referrals, social follows, and bonus entries.
- Performance and reliability: We checked how each plugin behaves under traffic spikes and whether it adds noticeable load time or script bloat to the site.
- Data handling and exports: We reviewed where participant data is stored, how easy it is to export entries, and whether the plugin keeps you in control of your data.
- Fraud protection: We evaluated built-in safeguards like email verification, duplicate entry detection, and fair winner selection.
- Pricing and limitations: We compared free vs. paid plans to see which features are locked behind upgrades and whether pricing scales reasonably for small businesses.
Now, let’s take a look at the best WordPress giveaway, contest, and sweepstakes plugins.
1. RafflePress
RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market. It allows you to easily create highly effective viral contests and giveaways on your website.
We use RafflePress on WPBeginner to run our annual birthday giveaways, and we love how easy the plugin makes it to set up the contest and get lots of entries. For details, you can see our guide on how we run giveaways with RafflePress.
It connects with all top email marketing platforms so you can grow your email list.
You can also connect with popular social media platforms to get more followers and grow your website traffic from various social sharing actions.
RafflePress comes with a drag-and-drop giveaway builder which makes it easy to quickly build viral contests. It also has built-in templates to make the giveaway creation process even faster.
The refer-a-friend giveaway feature allows you to leverage word-of-mouth marketing by allowing users to share the giveaway on their social media profiles. This builds engagement and gets you tons of new visitors to your website.
RafflePress plugin also works with all WordPress form plugins, CRM software, social networks, and lead generation software.
You also get tons of other powerful features like fraud protection, success tracking, retargeting, social logins, email verification, prize gallery, giveaway landing pages, and a whole lot more.
The giveaway works on mobile phones just as beautifully as laptops. You can also fully customize the giveaway appearance with your own images, colors, and fonts.
RafflePress has a free version available in the WordPress.org directory, RafflePress lite, which you can try for free. To unlock the full power of RafflePress, you would need to purchase RafflePress Pro.
For more information, see our tutorial on how to run a giveaway/contest in WordPress with RafflePress.
Pricing: As mentioned above, RafflePress offers a free version that will help you get quick wins. However, if you want all the powerful features, then the Growth plan costs $199.50 / year, which is by far the best value compared to any other giveaway plugin in the market. For small businesses, their Plus plan ($39.50 / year) and Pro plan ($99.50 / year) are very well priced.
Note: WPBeginner users can get a 55% discount on their purchase by using our RafflePress coupon code: WPBEGINNER55
2. Gleam
Gleam is a popular giveaway app that works with WordPress sites. It is available as a SaaS (Software as a Service) app for website owners to create giveaways and referral marketing campaigns.
We signed up for Gleam and extensively tested it for this review. So, now we can share with you what we liked and didn’t like about using it.
Their giveaway platform is extremely robust. However, the user interface for setting up a giveaway is not beginner-friendly. There’s a setup wizard to connect your email email service social profiles and select actions for qualifying entries.
Once you have created the giveaway, you’ll be given a code snippet to paste into WordPress post or page where you want to add the contest.
Gleam also creates a separate giveaway landing page on its own website that you can use to promote the contest on social media.
All your content data is stored on the Gleam website, and there are limited export options for user data. You will also need to upgrade to the Business plan to remove their branding and logo from your campaigns.
Pricing: The Full Package plan costs $97 per month, which is what you need to unlock most of its powerful features. While they have lower-level plans, such as the Competitions plan ($10 per month) and the Rewards plan ($29 per month), they are limited in features/integrations. Their free plan is extremely limited and is not even worth mentioning.
3. Simple Giveaways
Simple Giveaways is another good option to create a giveaway on your WordPress site. It is available as a limited free version, but you will need the paid plugin to access most features.
We downloaded the free plugin for this review and went through the process of creating a giveaway. We found that it’s pretty easy to create your giveaway using their simple interface. The plugin allows you to add multiple ways to submit entries for the giveaway.
It has limited entry options and allows you to integrate Facebook, Twitter, a few email marketing services, and other WordPress plugins. It also includes fraud protection with Match CAPTCHA and basic tracking reports for your contest.
Pricing: Simple Giveaway is a free plugin. But they do have a premium version that starts at $49 per year for 1 site.
4. KingSumo
KingSumo is a premium WordPress giveaway and referral marketing plugin. It comes with a simple user interface that allows you to easily create a viral giveaway.
It includes social sharing options for Facebook, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. It also works with several popular email services to grow your email list.
The plugin version of KingSumo is a bit outdated, and they have a new SaaS giveaway product that’s being promoted on the website.
Pricing: The free version lets you get started with creating giveaways but has limited features. You can get the Lifetime plan for $49 for more advanced features like conversion tracking and more integrations.
5. ShortStack
ShortStack is a fun WordPress plugin that allows you to build contests and run giveaways, while also managing those leads all in one program.
One of its most unique features is that ShortStack lets you run a test through user-generated content. This allows you to create social proof since most people will take action when they see their family and friends doing the same thing.
They come with 80+ templates and a drag-and-drop editor so you can run beautiful contests that stay on brand. Then, you can easily embed them on a landing page or anywhere else on your website.
Pricing: The pricing plan starts at $39 per month for the Startup plan giving you access to a 2,000-stored entry limit. If you want more advanced features like photo contests, hashtag promotions, points for actions, and more, you’ll need to upgrade to a higher plan.
Which Is the Best Giveaway Plugin for WordPress?
All the solutions we mentioned above allow you to run giveaway contests on your WordPress site. However, they each differ in terms of features, ease of use, speed, pricing, and privacy.
We believe RafflePress to be the best WordPress giveaway plugin overall for all users. It is extremely easy to use and comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder.
It runs on your own website, so you have full control of the data and user interactions. RafflePress also comes with success tracking and retargeting features, which make your campaigns even more powerful. Their pricing is also by far the most affordable on the list.
For more details, see our complete RafflePress review.
We hope this article helped you find the best giveaway plugin for your WordPress site. You may also want to see our guide on how to run a viral TikTok giveaway or how to add a Facebook giveaway in WordPress.
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Moinuddin Waheed
Having contest and giveaway is a good way for increasing user engagement and excitement.
I have been to many giveaways and have shared about the giveaway and contest to many social media platforms, participated in the reviews and other stuff thusby increasing website footprints.
I participated recently in the wpbeginner black Friday sale and seeing the entries I felt that this kind of engagement can only be achieved through contests and giveaways.