Max Hampton
PROserve Nonprofit Consultant

For years, Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) has been the trusted foundation for thousands of nonprofit organizations, providing a flexible, easy-to-use solution to managing fundraising, programs, and constituent relationships. Built on top of the Salesforce core CRM platform, NPSP has empowered nonprofits to adapt typically commercial tools to mission-driven work.

Recently, Salesforce has introduced a new chapter with Nonprofit Cloud, a purpose-built platform that reimagines how nonprofits operate within Salesforce. Unlike NPSP, which retrofits Salesforce’s commercial model to nonprofit needs, Nonprofit Cloud was re-designed from the ground up specifically for nonprofit organizations. It has totally new data models, processes, and tools aligned to support Nonprofit organizations.

In this article, we’ll walk through the key differences between NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud, explore what’s new, what’s improved, and what it means for your organization.

So, what's the difference?

NPSP was released in 2008 and is a managed package that is installed on top of an existing Salesforce Sales Cloud org. The NPSP data model is simple and straightforward, with additional functionality available via custom code or additional managed packages, such as the Program Management Module (PMM) or Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S).

NPSP still largely works off standard Sales Cloud objects, such as Opportunities, Contacts and Accounts, and Leads. Salesforce has customized those tools to tailor the verbiage and experience to how nonprofits work.

NPC was officially announced in 2023 as a new set of nonprofit solutions in an effort to better align their product development cycle with other industries. NPC's data model is more complex than what you may have experienced with NPSP, but it's also designed to be more scalable and unified. NPC also integrates many of the functions that used to require additional packages, such as Fundraising, Grantmaking Program Management, and many more on the roadmap like Volunteer Management.

Salesforce has announced all future development will focus on the new Nonprofit Cloud, but support will continue for NPSP. There is no current plan to sunset NPSP.

Why build a whole new NPC?

One of the major reasons for building a brand-new infrastructure for non-profits was the desire to allow non-profit clients to leverage other industry products. It was not uncommon, for example, to have health nonprofits using both Health Cloud and NPSP. But the data models for those two platforms were fundamentally incompatible, which often led to those clients maintaining two Salesforce orgs. The promise of NPC is that clients that need Health Cloud or Education Cloud features on top of NPC can consolidate onto a single org.

NPC also puts Salesforce's development for nonprofits onto the core platform used for all other industry products, which means that nonprofits gain access to a bunch of new features that they previously couldn't access, like OmniStudio.

People Management

The most immediate difference between the two platforms is how they manage people, households, and relationships.

NPSP uses what's referred to as the Household Account Model, where a person or contact is almost always grouped within a household of their family members, spouses, partners, etc. The household model was built to better represent the way that many nonprofits mail people. Things like year-end receipts and mailing list/invites are based on the household, and not just an individual person. However, many households end up containing just a single contact. Within NPSP relationships can be formed between contacts and organization accounts via affiliation and relationship. records.

NPC changes this quite significantly. Rather than contacts being automatically related to a household, a person exists as an individual Person Account. Person Accounts essentially combine elements from the traditional Account and Contact objects into a single, unified data structure.

Salesforce believes that person accounts better represent the way that fundraisers and programs interact with people, which is as a unique individual. The Person Account model allows for greater flexibility in how relationships are representer, which is supported by the Actionable Relationship Center (ARC), an improved version of the standard Relationship viewer available in NPSP. ARC allows you to view relationships between any object, not just contacts.

Person Accounts can still be grouped into household accounts if needed, but configuration and customization would need to be done to support those processes. Relationships can still be formed between contacts, and from contacts to other accounts, such as businesses (for example, a person can have a relationship to members of her household, to her employer, and to the company she works for).

Programs

NPC launched with Program and Case Management as its first modules. NPSP's Program Management Module (PMM) and NPC's Program Management are, as a result, the two most similar portions of the platforms. The main difference between the two comes down to verbiage. Services, events, and resources delivered to people are referred to as Services in NPSP, and Benefits in NPC, with related objects following the same naming scheme (e.g. Service Schedules/Benefit Schedules and Service Sessions/Benefit Sessions).

One major difference is that NPC's Program Management is out-of-the-box functionality, and is likely a little more well integrated when spinning up an org. By contrast, PMM is an add-on package that must be licensed and installed on top of NPSP orgs–as a result, PMM often involves some additional customization to make sure the model fits within your current organizational processes.

Address Management

One of the best NPSP features is Address management. NPSP stores assesses as separate records related to an account or contact, which enables a few features. NPSP can handle multiple addresses for tracking seasonal or historical addresses, NCOA updates through Insights Data Integrity, and address syncing so all members of a household share the same address, regardless of who you update the address on.

Address management within NPC hasn't quite caught up to NPSP. New features are in active development, but as of writing this there is no automation around address syncing or multiple addresses. NPC does come with an out-of-the-box way to store NCOA information, and other standard fields like mailing and billing address are available, with Contact Point entities used for multiple addresses.

Fundraising

Fundraising for Nonprofits in Salesforce is another area where major work has been done on the NPC side to completely redesign how gifts are recorded and interacted with.

NPSP uses an Opportunity focused approach, where an Opportunity record represents gifts, installments, and pledges, all within the same record. While this approach is great for smaller nonprofits with easier to manage fundraising programs, it has a hard time scaling beyond that without significant custom investment. Specifically, when it comes to major gift tracking or Grants, which often go through completely different processes and life cycles compared to standard donations.

In NPC, all gifts are entered as a Gift Transaction, which can represent one-time gifts OR installments. Opportunities are still utilized in NPC, but in a different way. Rather than an Opportunity representing a received gift or pledge, they're utilized in a fashion more akin to how standard Sales orgs might use them, which is to represent specifically Major gifts or Grants. Opportunities are used to track large gifts that require a more complex timescale and cultivation or solicitation steps,

In addition, soft credits, which allow nonprofits to represent donation recognition, exist as three separate objects in NPSP (Contact Roles, Partial Soft Credits, and Account Soft Credits), and have been simplified down into a single Soft Credit object within NPC. The NPC Soft Credit object supports both people and organizational soft credits without having to live as separate records, which can help to reduce administrative overhead and improves reporting functionality.

Finally, Gift Designations. Represented by General Accounting Units in NPSP, and Designations in NPC. In NPSP, General Accounting Units and Allocations connect Opportunities your fund accounts. In NPC, the data model isn't all that different, with a designation representing the fund available, supported by Transaction and Default Designations. The key takeaway here is that both products will allow you to allocate gifts to different internal accounting buckets. However, NPC has a slight advantage because designations will automatically rebalance themselves when a gift is refunded, whereas NPSP required a manual update to rebalance.

With Fundraising more so than other aspects of the platform, it's important to understand what kind of Fundraising your organization does, as well if you have any existing integrations or donation platforms when evaluating NPSP vs NPC. Many donation and accounting platforms are not yet updated to handle the new NPC data model. So, if you're heavily invested in a particular tool and accounting process, make sure they're compatible with the NPC data model if making the move.

Volunteer Management

The final topic of today's NPSP vs NPC comparison discussion is around Volunteer Management, which is on the current (and in the very near future) roadmap for NPC.

Volunteer Management in NPSP is handled via an add-on package called Volunteers for Salesforce (V4S). The package comes with several volunteer-centric components, such as volunteer schedules, jobs, and shifts. It also includes the ability to allow volunteers to sign up for available sessions.

V4S is, however, an older product. Its user interface is not modern–for example, the volunteer self-management tools aren’t mobile browser friendly.

Salesforce recently announced that an out-of-the-box-solution built on top of NPC is on the current roadmap, with the first iteration releasing in June 2025.

The June 2025 release focuses on defining the core data model, permissions, and experience cloud enablement/licensing for volunteer management. It’s a foundational release that sets the stage for future functionality.

Much of that functionality should arrive in the next major release, scheduled for October 2025. In that release, Salesforce will focus on user actions and experience for volunteer management. This includes Agentforce-enabled capacity and coverage automations, such as establishing volunteer shift capacity, matching volunteers to jobs, and bulkifying other manual processes.

The October release also highlights additional UI changes, including Volunteer Management app, and UI elements for volunteer assignment and matching.

Conclusion

There are many additional, smaller differences between NPSP and NPC. If you're a new Salesforce customer looking for a Nonprofit Solution, then NPC is most likely your best bet with Salesforce being "all in" on the development of that product.

For orgs currently using NPSP, the choice can be a bit more complicated. Making the switch from NPSP to NPC isn't just a simple flip of a switch. It's truly a re-implementation that should not be taken lightly.

Need some guidance on your best pathway forward? If you have any questions about whether your org is better suited for NPSP or NPC, don't hesitate to reach out! We’re here to help nonprofits navigate these changes while meeting your mission.