8 Kickstarter Alternatives You Should Know About

Indiegogo

Indiegogo is without a doubt Kickstarter's biggest competitor right now. The crowdfunding service raised a $15 million round of funding earlier this year and used it to expand into several new markets abroad, including Canada, the U.K., France and Germany. Indiegogo bills itself as "the largest global crowdfunding platform" which putspressure on Kickstarter to build up its own international presence. Both Kickstarter and Indiegogo ask aspiring entrepreneurs to set fundraising goals and offer rewards in exchange for various funding amounts. A big difference between the two, however, is that Indiegogo offers startups the option to collect the money even if they don't hit their fundraising goal. In these cases, Indiegogo takes a bigger cut of the money transferred.

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Kickstarter is virtually synonymous with crowdfunding, and it's not hard to see why.

Since the platform launched in 2009, Kickstarter has raised $368 million for projects that met or passed their goals and has helped launch nearly 80,000 projects in total. In fact, one month after launching in the U.K., Kickstarter had already generated more than $3 million worth of pledges from 45,000.

[More from Mashable: Indiegogo Expands International Crowdfunding Features]

Just as importantly, there have been several blockbuster success stories ranging from Double Fine's adventure game, which raised more than $3 million in a month to the Pebble watch, which raised more than $10 million by the end of its Kickstarter campaign.

However, there are dozens if not hundreds of crowdfunding tools online and more will certainly launch in the future now that President Obama has signed the JOBS Act, which loosens restrictions on startups raising money from individuals online. Recently, several of these crowdfunding websites have started to gain traction and funding of their own.

We've rounded up a few crowdfunding services that could give Kickstarter a run for its money in the future, as well as some of the services that have applied a new twist to Kickstarter's model.

Image courtesy of Flickr, 401(K) 2012.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/8-kickstarter-alternatives-know-021722340.html

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