Kickstarter vs Indiegogo: The Honest 2026 Comparison

In October 2025, Indiegogo stopped being the platform everyone had spent a decade comparing Kickstarter to.

Gamefound bought it in July 2025 and relaunched it on 16 October. Flexible funding, the single feature Indiegogo was best known for, was scrapped. InDemand was renamed Late Pledge and quietly stopped being promoted. Most comparison articles still describe the old platform, which makes them worse than useless: they push you towards features that no longer exist.

So, Kickstarter vs Indiegogo? For the overwhelming majority of founders launching a physical product, Kickstarter. Not because Indiegogo is bad, but because the thing you’re buying with your platform fee is an audience, and Kickstarter has more of one. I’m an official Kickstarter Expert Partner, I’ve helped raise over £3 million across more than 30 campaigns, and I’ve personally launched on Kickstarter and run a post-campaign Indiegogo page on top of it. This is the answer I’d give you over a coffee, including the bits that cost me work.

The short version, side by side

Read that table and the honest conclusion is that the two platforms have converged on nearly everything that can be written down. Fees match. Funding model now matches. Payout speed matches.

What doesn’t match is who’s already standing in the shop.

Fees are a wash, and the wrong thing to decide on

Everyone starts here, so let’s kill it quickly.

Kickstarter takes 5% of successfully funded campaigns, plus Stripe processing at 3% + $0.20 per pledge for standard pledges, and 5% + $0.05 for micropledges under $10. Indiegogo takes a 5% platform fee on collected funds plus 3% + $0.20 per transaction. On either platform you’ll lose somewhere between 8% and 10% of gross once failed pledges are counted.

That’s a difference of roughly one percentage point, in a decision where the platforms differ by multiples on the thing that matters.

A campaign that raises £80,000 on the busier platform and pays 10% nets £72,000. The same campaign raising £40,000 elsewhere and paying 8% nets £36,800. Choose the platform that raises more, not the one that skims less. If you want the pound-for-pound breakdown at £10k, £30k and £100k, I’ve done the sums in Kickstarter fees vs Indiegogo fees.

Audience and discovery: the actual difference

Here’s what your 5% is really buying.

Kickstarter has a population of people who browse it recreationally. They open the app, they scroll a category, they back things they weren’t looking for. That behaviour barely exists anywhere else in crowdfunding, and it’s why the category you file under genuinely matters, something I’ve gone through in how to choose a Kickstarter category.

Jellop’s analysis of 5,207 Kickstarter projects found that paid ads contribute an average of 41% of pledges. Which means the other 59% arrives from somewhere else: Kickstarter’s own browsing, its category newsletters, Projects We Love placement, and the creator’s own list. That 59% is the asset. It’s not guaranteed, and a bad campaign gets none of it, but the ceiling exists.

Indiegogo has traffic too. There’s just less of it, and a smaller proportion of it is in a backing mood. Post-Gamefound the platform has leaned into tabletop and board games, which is Gamefound’s home turf and where its remaining strength is concentrated. For a smart lamp, a leather wallet, a pair of headphones or a coffee gadget, the backers are on Kickstarter.

If you want the platform to help you find buyers rather than just process payments, that’s the whole argument, and it’s not close.

All-or-nothing is no longer a difference

This used to be the philosophical split. Kickstarter was all-or-nothing: hit your goal or nobody gets charged. Indiegogo let you choose flexible funding and keep whatever you raised.

Gone as of October 2025. Every Indiegogo campaign is fixed funding now.

Good riddance, frankly. Flexible funding was mostly a trap. Founders set a low, comfortable goal, raised a fraction of what delivery actually required, and then spent eighteen months trying to manufacture something that was underfunded by design. All-or-nothing forces an honest answer to “what does this really cost”, which is why your funding goal deserves more thought than almost any other number on the page.

Weighing this decision right now with real money behind it? The £60 strategy call is an hour on your specific project. Most people leave it knowing which platform and, more usefully, whether they’re ready to launch at all.

Late Pledge: the argument I used to make and no longer do

I need to correct something here, because I’ve given the opposite advice in the past and so has half the internet.

For years, the clean answer was: launch on Kickstarter, then run Indiegogo InDemand afterwards to keep pre-orders flowing during production. I did exactly that. I launched Lifelong Deo 1.0 on Kickstarter, moved to InDemand when the tail slowed, and raised about £15,000 more that way. It worked because Indiegogo actively promoted those pages: marketplace placement, editorial, newsletter.

That engine is gone. InDemand became Late Pledge in the October 2025 relaunch, and post-campaign pages no longer get the marketplace or the editorial push. What’s left is a page you drive every visitor to yourself, on a fresh URL with no backer history, for an 8% platform fee because your campaign didn’t originally launch there. Plus up to 15% on anything Indiegogo does drive.

Point that same traffic at your existing Kickstarter page instead and you keep the social proof, the SEO tail and the fee. The full argument, including the two edge cases where Late Pledge still just about makes sense, is in is Indiegogo Late Pledge worth it after Kickstarter.

So the “Kickstarter first, Indiegogo second” play that made Indiegogo genuinely useful has largely stopped working. That’s the biggest change in this comparison in five years.

Indiegogo vs Kickstarter: when the answer flips

I said I wouldn’t fence-sit. Here’s where I’d tell a founder to go the other way.

You’re launching a tabletop or board game. Gamefound’s audience is now baked in, and that crowd is real. Worth genuinely weighing rather than defaulting. If you’re UK-based, read launching a board game Kickstarter in the UK alongside it, because the shipping maths often decides this for you.

Kickstarter refused your project. It happens. Certain categories get bounced: adult products, some supplements, anything weapons-adjacent. If you’re unsure which side of the line you’re on, check whether you can sell it on Kickstarter before you build anything. Indiegogo’s approval criteria are looser and it’s a legitimate fallback.

You need a payment method Kickstarter doesn’t support. The relaunched Indiegogo carries 20-plus payment methods and covers markets Kickstarter still doesn’t. If your audience is concentrated somewhere Kickstarter serves badly, that’s a real reason.

You already launched on Indiegogo before. Your backers have accounts, the friction is low, and Late Pledge keeps the 5% rate for campaigns that originated there. Continuity has value.

Four situations. If none describes you, the answer is Kickstarter, and spending another fortnight researching it is procrastination dressed as diligence.

The third platform this comparison keeps missing

If you’re launching a tabletop game, “Kickstarter vs Indiegogo” is arguably the wrong matchup in 2026. The real one is Kickstarter vs Gamefound.

Gamefound didn’t absorb Indiegogo into itself. The two sites still run separately: Gamefound stays the specialist tabletop platform, Indiegogo keeps carrying tech, film and the broader creative categories, and the two now share backend systems. Gamefound campaigns also get surfaced on Indiegogo for extra exposure, which is the part most founders don’t realise they’re choosing between.

So a board game creator weighing this up has three doors, not two, and the middle one is usually the least interesting of them. If your project is tabletop, compare Kickstarter against Gamefound directly and treat Indiegogo as the distribution channel sitting behind Gamefound rather than a destination in its own right.

For everything that isn’t a game, Gamefound isn’t your platform and the comparison collapses back to the two in the table above.

Payouts, currency and UK founders

Both platforms pay out through Stripe on a similar clock: Kickstarter about 14 days after close, Indiegogo about 15 business days. Not a deciding factor.

Currency is slightly more interesting if you’re British. Kickstarter has a UK launch flow with GBP as the campaign currency, so backers are charged in pounds and the payout lands in a UK account in pounds, no FX layer for you or your accountant. I’ve written up the full timeline in how long Kickstarter takes to pay out, and the wider UK-specific setup in how to launch a Kickstarter in the UK.

Indiegogo also supports local currency. The practical difference is smaller than the difference in who’ll see your page, which brings us back to the same point.

The difference between Kickstarter and Indiegogo, in one line

Same fees, same funding model, same payout speed, different number of people browsing.

Everything else in this comparison is detail hanging off that sentence. The platforms have converged on mechanics and diverged on audience, and audience is the only one of those you can’t fix with a better campaign page.

Which is why “which platform” is usually the wrong question to be agonising over. The founders who fail rarely fail because they picked the wrong platform. They fail because they launched to nobody, on either one. Building the pre-launch list is worth more than every word above, and I’ve put the honest numbers on that in the pre-launch email list size that actually funds a campaign.

Key takeaways

• Indiegogo scrapped flexible funding in October 2025; both platforms are now all-or-nothing.
• Fees are within a percentage point: 5% platform plus roughly 3% processing on both.
• Kickstarter’s advantage is organic discovery, not price or features.
• InDemand became Late Pledge and lost its marketplace and newsletter promotion.
• Post-Kickstarter Late Pledge costs 8% and now sends you no traffic of its own.
• Choose Indiegogo for tabletop, a Kickstarter rejection, or unsupported payment methods.

Want a hand deciding?

If you’re stuck on this right now, it’s an hour’s conversation, not a fortnight’s research. The £60 strategy call covers which platform fits your project, and more usefully whether your launch is actually ready.

I’d rather you launched on the right platform in six months than the wrong one next Tuesday. And if the honest answer is “neither yet”, I’ll tell you that, which is cheaper for both of us than finding out on day 12 of a flat campaign.