Rafflecopter shut down in October 2025 after 15 years. For a lot of organizers — bloggers, small business owners, nonprofits, teachers running classroom prize draws — it was the first tool they ever used to run an online giveaway. Simple, reliable, and free to get started.
Its closure was a reminder of something easy to overlook when a tool just works: what happens when it doesn’t anymore.
What Rafflecopter got right
Rafflecopter made online giveaways accessible. Before tools like it existed, running a contest online meant cobbling together forms, spreadsheets, and manual processes that most people didn’t have the time or skills for. The embeddable widget changed that. You set up a giveaway in minutes, participants entered through a familiar interface, and you picked a winner when it closed. For a generation of bloggers and small brands, that was exactly what they needed. It also helped normalize the idea that giveaways could be a legitimate marketing tool — not just for big brands with big budgets, but for anyone with an audience and something to give away.
What the search for a replacement reveals
When Rafflecopter closed, its users started looking for alternatives. Most of the options they found — Gleam, RafflePress, SweepWidget — focus on entry collection: social media actions, email signups, viral sharing mechanics.
Those are all useful things. But searching for a replacement also surfaces a question worth sitting with: what do your participants actually see when you announce a winner?
Most giveaway tools produce a result. Not all of them produce a record — something participants can open and check themselves, that shows how many entries were in the pool, when the draw ran, and that the result hasn’t been changed after the fact.
For a small blog giveaway with a handful of entries, that probably doesn’t matter much. For a nonprofit fundraiser, a company-wide employee draw, or a social media promotion with thousands of entries, it starts to matter quite a bit.
The difference between a result and a proof
A verified draw isn’t just about picking a random winner. It’s about being able to show your participants — and anyone else who asks — exactly how it happened.
That means the entry list was locked before the draw ran. The selection used a genuinely random process. The result is timestamped. And the record is permanent — nobody can edit it after the fact, including the organizer.
That kind of transparency builds trust in a way that a screenshot of a winner’s name doesn’t. It’s the difference between saying “we picked a winner fairly” and being able to show it.
Moving forward
If you’re looking for a Rafflecopter replacement, the right choice depends on what you actually need. If entry collection — social actions, email integrations, viral mechanics — is the priority, tools like Gleam or RafflePress are worth looking at.
If the draw itself is what matters — a fair, verifiable selection your participants can trust — RandomPicker has been doing that since 2009. Free for up to 100 entries, no credit card required.
You can also use both: collect entries in one tool, run the verified draw in RandomPicker. They solve different parts of the same problem.
Rafflecopter served its users well for a long time. Finding the right replacement is less about matching its features and more about being clear on what you need a giveaway tool to do.
