Kickstarter vs Indiegogo by the numbers: traffic, backers, money

Here’s the thing. Every “Kickstarter vs Indiegogo” article on the first page of Google says roughly the same thing. Kickstarter is bigger. Indiegogo is more flexible. Fees are similar. Then a shrug and a call to action to book a discovery call with whoever wrote the post.

Nobody puts the actual numbers on the page. So I’m going to. This piece pulls verified stats from Kickstarter’s own live stats page, the Gamefound acquisition press release, SimilarWeb traffic snapshots, and reporting from BoardGameWire. I’ve cited every source in-line. If a stat isn’t sourced, it’s my opinion, and I’ve flagged it as such. I’m an official Kickstarter Expert Partner and I’ve been asked this question maybe 200 times. Let’s get to the answer with the actual data on the table.

If you want the plain-English version without the spreadsheet energy, I wrote Kickstarter vs Indiegogo in 2026 for that too. This post is the numbers underneath it.

The headline stats

Two platforms, two very different scales. Here’s what the public data actually shows.

Kickstarter (all-time, as of 2026):

• $8.6+ billion pledged to successfully funded projects since 2009
• 260,000+ successfully funded projects
• 24+ million backers
• ~40-43% overall success rate (varies daily on kickstarter.com/help/stats)

Indiegogo (all-time, per the July 2025 Gamefound acquisition press release):

• ~$3 billion raised across the platform’s history
• 38 million community members (note: this is community accounts, not backers on successful campaigns, so it’s an inflated number by Kickstarter’s stricter definition)
• 17+ years in operation (launched 2008)

Straight ratios: Kickstarter has raised roughly 2.8x the total dollars Indiegogo has, over less time. Kickstarter also uses a stricter definition of “raised” (all-or-nothing only, so unsuccessful campaigns count for zero), while Indiegogo’s number includes flexible-funding campaigns that missed their goal. In a like-for-like comparison, the gap is wider.

Monthly traffic: not close

SimilarWeb’s April 2026 snapshots give us the current picture:

• Kickstarter.com: ~27 million monthly visits, ~7 minutes average session
• Indiegogo.com: ~2.6 million monthly visits

Kickstarter’s global site rank sits around #1,171, while Indiegogo is around #13,643. That’s roughly a 10x traffic advantage to Kickstarter on any given month.

Why this matters more than the all-time total: crowdfunding is a discovery business. When a random person types “cool new gadget kickstarter” into Google and lands on the platform’s search results, that’s a warm backer. Kickstarter has 10x more of those warm arrivals every month. On a campaign that ends up 40-60% funded by platform organic traffic (per Jellop’s analysis of over 5,000 projects, paid ads contribute about 41% on average, meaning the majority still comes from the platform and the creator’s own list), that gap is the single biggest reason first-time founders pick Kickstarter.

Indiegogo is, on the traffic scoreboard, a distant second. Not zero. Just a distant second.

Success rates, and why “success” is a slippery word

Kickstarter’s overall success rate has hovered in the 40-43% range for the last few years. That means slightly less than half of launched projects hit their funding goal. The number moves a percentage point or two each way but stays in that band.

What most comparison posts miss: this varies enormously by category. Statista’s tracking, aligned with what shows on Kickstarter’s stats page:

• Theatre: ~60% success rate
• Comics: ~57%
• Dance: ~62%
• Music: ~50%
• Games: ~40-45% (huge dollars, moderate hit rate)
• Design: ~40%
• Publishing: ~35%
• Film & Video: ~37%
• Technology: ~20%

Technology, the category most first-time hardware founders default to, has the worst success rate on the platform. That isn’t because tech is bad on Kickstarter (it produces the biggest individual raises). It’s because tech attracts a lot of underprepared founders with grand goals and no list. If you’re doing a hardware campaign, you’re competing in the toughest category. Plan accordingly.

Indiegogo doesn’t publish a comparable success rate figure. Historically, their number was harder to compare because flexible funding meant a “successful” Indiegogo campaign could have missed its goal. Post-October 2025 relaunch, flexible funding is gone and all campaigns are fixed-funding, so future numbers should be more comparable. Nothing published yet.

Average pledge and campaign size

This is often more useful than the all-time total. What does the average backer actually pledge on each platform?

Kickstarter doesn’t publish an average pledge figure directly, but you can derive it from the raw numbers. Roughly $8.6bn / ~90m backer relationships (backers pledge multiple times over years) works out to something like $70-90 per pledge as a rough average, heavily skewed by hardware and games where AOVs are hundreds of dollars. Jellop’s data breakdown, covered in Kickstarter’s own creator newsletter, shows five-figure campaigns average an AOV under $200, and six-figure campaigns average an AOV over $250. That’s a useful benchmark if you’re modelling reward tier pricing.

Indiegogo’s average pledge tends to run lower for consumer products, higher for tabletop games (Gamefound’s audience skews higher-spend). Precise recent numbers aren’t published, so I won’t invent one.

If you want to work out what your specific campaign should target, my pricing calculator walks you through the AOV maths and my post on Kickstarter reward pricing covers the 3-5x COGS rule of thumb that most founders get wrong.

The Gamefound elephant

You can’t compare 2024 and 2026 Indiegogo like it’s the same platform. It isn’t.

Gamefound acquired Indiegogo on 22 July 2025 (per PRNewswire) and the upgraded Indiegogo platform went live on 16 October 2025. Flexible funding, the thing Indiegogo was best known for, was scrapped in the relaunch. InDemand was renamed Late Pledge (I’ve written about whether Late Pledge is worth it after a Kickstarter — spoiler, mostly no, unless you’re in tabletop).

The relevant numeric context, per BoardGameWire’s coverage:

• Gamefound 2024: raised over $165 million in project funding (up 49% year-over-year), total dollars including late pledge/pledge manager around $156 million
• Kickstarter tabletop 2024: $220 million raised in the games category, down 2.7% year-over-year
• Kickstarter overall trend: consecutive annual declines of 12.4% (2022), 4.3% (2023), and 2.7% (2024)

Read that again. Gamefound is now within striking distance of Kickstarter for tabletop-only dollars raised. That’s the shift. For tabletop and board games, the numbers say Gamefound (now Indiegogo) is the platform to look at seriously. For everything else, the traffic and audience data still points overwhelmingly to Kickstarter.

If you’re staring at your project and trying to work out which platform’s numbers apply to you, my £60 strategy call is the fastest way to get a specific answer rather than a general one. An hour, one honest opinion, no upsell if you don’t need one.

Geography: where the backers actually live

Kickstarter is US-heavy. Rough breakdown per historic Kickstarter blog posts and the platform’s UK-specific launch flow:

• United States: ~60-65% of backers
• UK: ~7-9%
• Canada: ~5-7%
• Rest of world: ~20-25%

That’s your addressable market on Kickstarter. If your product is priced in GBP and shipped from a UK warehouse, you’re still selling mostly to Americans, which has implications for shipping pricing and payment currency. I’ve covered how to launch a Kickstarter in the UK if you want the operational side.

Indiegogo is more international. The platform claims backers from 235+ countries, and historically had a larger share of European and Asian backing than Kickstarter. Post-Gamefound, expect that to skew further towards Gamefound’s existing tabletop audience (heavy European and North American board game community).

Fees: identical enough to ignore

Both platforms charge 5% platform fee on successfully funded campaigns. Payment processing runs roughly 3% + $0.20 per pledge on Kickstarter (via Stripe) and 3% + $0.20 per transaction on Indiegogo. In real numbers you’ll lose 8-10% gross on either platform.

If you want to model the exact fees on your projected raise, I built a Kickstarter fees calculator that runs the maths in real time. There’s also a full breakdown of the fee structure if you want the written version, and a side-by-side Kickstarter fees vs Indiegogo fees comparison if you want the exact pound-figure impact on both platforms.

Fees are not the tie-breaker. A campaign that raises £80k on Kickstarter after paying 10% in fees nets more than one that raises £40k on Indiegogo after paying 8%. Pick the platform that raises more.

What predicts success (spoiler: not the platform)

Here’s the bit consultants downplay because it undercuts the “pick the right platform” framing.

The single biggest predictor of Kickstarter success isn’t Kickstarter versus Indiegogo. It’s your pre-launch email list size. Jellop’s analysis of thousands of campaigns, the Kickstarter creator newsletter data, and my own experience across 30+ campaigns all point to the same thing. Founders with a qualified pre-launch list of 3,000-10,000+ people fund their campaigns. Founders with a list of 200 people don’t, regardless of platform. I’ve written the whole thing up in how big your pre-launch email list needs to be.

Platform choice matters. List size matters more. If you’re spending months agonising over the platform decision and you haven’t started building your list yet, you’re solving the wrong problem.

What the numbers mean if you’re choosing

Right, so what do you actually do with this data if you’re a founder trying to pick a platform this month?

Choose Kickstarter if:

• You’re launching a consumer product (hardware, tech, design, home goods, apparel)
• You’re a first-time founder relying on platform discovery for a chunk of your pledges
• You’re targeting a US or UK backer base
• You want the biggest possible warm-traffic engine (that 10x monthly traffic advantage matters)

Choose Indiegogo/Gamefound if:

• You’re launching a tabletop or board game (Gamefound’s core audience, real dollars raised)
• Your project category was refused by Kickstarter (adult, some supplements, certain gear)
• You need payment methods Kickstarter doesn’t support in your target market
• You’re extending an already-launched Kickstarter with Late Pledge, and specifically for tabletop

Choose neither (go direct-to-consumer):

• Your product is a recurring purchase (subscriptions, consumables)
• You already have a Shopify store and an audience
• You need to launch this month and haven’t built any pre-launch list

That’s the actual decision framework, backed by the numbers on the page above rather than by whoever’s sponsoring this comparison.

The turn

Here’s my honest take. The “Kickstarter vs Indiegogo” question has been quietly answered by the data for years, but consultants keep it alive because it makes for a nice fence-sitting listicle that ranks. The traffic numbers, the dollars raised, the success rate context, all of it points the same way for the majority of founders launching a physical product in 2026. Kickstarter is where the backers are.

The interesting shift is at the edges. Gamefound-owned Indiegogo is now genuinely competitive for tabletop games. That’s a real change worth taking seriously if you’re in that category. For everyone else, the platform decision is mostly a distraction from the harder question: do you have a list, a video, and a launch plan? Because the platform will send you traffic. It’s on you to convert it.

Want a hand picking the right platform?

If you’re weighing this decision right now and want an honest, project-specific opinion (rather than a hedged “it depends” from someone who hasn’t actually launched), that’s what my £60 strategy call is for. One hour on video. I’ll look at your product, your list, your goal, and tell you Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or neither yet.

If you already know you’re launching on Kickstarter and you want the campaign video sorted, my £3,000 Kickstarter video service covers that. If you want the whole campaign done properly with a track record behind it (£3M+ raised across 30+ Kickstarter campaigns, 100% funding rate on the ones I’ve personally launched), the £5,000 done-for-you package is where most founders end up.

Start with the strategy call. Cheapest way to work out which of those you actually need.