8 Best WordPress Giveaway And Contest Plugins For 2023

Are you looking for the best WordPress giveaway plugins for your website?

Maybe you want to run contests to grow your social media following. Maybe you want to build your email list or both.

There are a number of plugins and tools you can use but which one should you choose?

In this post, I’ll be comparing the best WordPress contest plugins so you can make an informed decision. And I’ll provide some recommendations for specific use cases towards the end.

Let’s get started:

The best WordPress contest and giveaway plugins

1. RafflePress

RafflePress bills itself as ‘The Best WordPress Giveaway Plugin’ and it’s right on the mark – which is why we’re including it as our top pick.

Using this plugin, allows you to create a landing page or widget for your giveaway in a matter of minutes with its intuitive drag and drop builder. What’s more, the plugin comes with pre-built templates inspired by the best of the most successful campaigns in history.

By using the APIs of social platforms, any bonus entries for following or visiting your social media profiles are verified, so you don’t have to confirm each action yourself.

This works perfectly alongside built-in viral sharing functionality that encourages entrants to share the giveaway with others.

If you thought that was all, RafflePress integrates seamlessly with email marketing services and Zapier to connect with even more apps.

Features:

• Drag and drop builder
• 1 click entry with fraud prevention
• Integrates with marketing and CRM
• Viral giveaway templates
• Viral sharing and refer a friend
• Landing pages for giveaways
• Mobile responsive design
• Social media integration
• Retargeting and tracking

Price:

A limited free version is available on WordPress.org. The full version starts from $49/year.

Read our RafflePress review.

2. SweepWidget

SweepWidget is a popular contest platform that integrates with WordPress via a plugin. This allows you to manage all of your contests directly from your WordPress admin dashboard. You can create viral contests/giveaways, social media contests, leaderboard competitions, and instant coupon/rewards campaigns.

Effectively increase your likes, followers, and shares across 30+ social media platforms. Collect more newsletter subscriptions by connecting with one of their 20+ email API integrations. Style and design your contest with their advanced design editor and custom CSS builder.

Once your contest is ready, you can easily embed it into any WordPress post or page with the custom shortcode (easy-to-do).

SweepWidget lets you manage all of the entries and analytics from the dashboard. Randomly or manually select winners, delete/disqualify users, track impressions and user analytics, and export entries/actions to a CSV file.

Features:

• 90+ entry methods
• 30+ social media platforms
• 103 languages supported
• 20+ Email API integrations
• Custom design & CSS
• Viral sharing
• Leaderboards
• Instant coupons/rewards
• Zapier integration

Price:

SweepWidget has a free plan that allows unlimited entries. The pro plan starts at just $29/month and offers lots of social media entry methods and API integrations.

Read our SweepWidget review.

3. ShortStack

While ShortStack isn’t a plugin as such, it’s a powerful contest platform that allows you to embed your giveaways on any platform, including WordPress.

A great all-in-one tool, ShortStack enables you to run almost any kind of contest from hashtag contests on Twitter and Instagram, to Giveaways on Facebook.

Hosting contests on Facebook can be achieved easily via an app, or you can post it straight onto your Facebook Timeline.

The apps you can use include:

• Voting Contests
• Sweepstakes
• Photo Contests

All these apps include entry restrictions and action gating.

To reach a wider audience, you can use the share widget which increases engagement through shares on other social platforms.

For Instagram, contests are simple with the use of customised forms. And if you make use of branded hashtags, your entrants won’t even need to leave the platform to enter.

There’s a great range of contest templates in Shortstack. All are designed to professional standards and easy to use with drag and drop functionality.

For more control over your designs, coders have extra CSS options. Marketers, on the other hand, have a wealth of analytics for campaign reporting.

Features:

• All-in-one campaign dashboard
• Follow-up and scheduled email
• Easily collect user-generated content
• Embeddable contests
• Campaign popups
• Hashtag promotions
• Built-in Analytics

Price:

Free version available with limited features. Paid plans start at $99/month.

4. Photo Contest WordPress Plugin

Photo Contest WordPress Plugin is a comprehensive plugin that allows you to create beautiful photography competitions quickly and easily. Your contests can be displayed within your WordPress blog or even as a standalone website for the purpose of running your contest.

This plugin allows complete voter control that enables you to adjust your competition parameters. Flexibility like this allows you to change things to suit your individual needs.

What’s more, you can control every element including:

• New submissions
• Comments
• Votes
• Image sizes, and more.

Designing your competition is easy with the ability to adjust text, crop, resize and flip images and assign photos to categories. With each vote on every photo counted for you and a full export features, it’s a marketer’s dream.

Features:

• Lifetime free updates
• Unlimited contests
• Multilingual
• 9 layers of vote protection
• Admin panel
• Voter control
• Mobile responsive design
• Gutenberg ready
• PHP 7.x compatible, SSL compatible
• Contest widgets

Price:

$39 for a regular license.

5. Video Contest WordPress Plugin

Similar to the Photo Contest Plugin, the Video Contest WordPress Plugin allows site owners to create powerful video competitions both on their own blog or as a stand-alone website.

This plugin allows you full control over every aspect of your video contests, including comments, votes, new submissions video sources and more.

With full integration with BuddyPress, you can launch contests on community sites and forums. To combat spam, the Plugin has 9 layers of fraud protection, as well as being translation ready and supporting 9 languages.

Features:

• Unlimited contests running at the same time
• 9 layers of vote protection
• Complete voter control
• WordPress 5 and Gutenberg ready
• Multilingual
• Lifetime free updates
• Contest widgets

Price:

$39 for a regular license.

6. WooCommerce Cheapest & Most Expensive Product Promotions!

The title of this plugin, ‘WooCommerce Cheapest & Most Expensive Product Promotions’ is a bit of a mouthful, so let’s call it, WCMEPP.

That being said, it’s an interesting Plugin that lets you easily create promotions for products. This means you can apply discount percentages to the cheapest or most expensive products in the cart.

Promotions are applied based on the cart total or if pre-specified products are in the cart. Once one of the conditions are detected, the plugin will detect the cheapest and most expensive items and will apply a discount.

Here’s an example of how this would work on the cheapest product:

1. Your shop is selling Product #1 for $4 and Product #2 for $2.
2. The promotion is configured to be applied to Product #1 with Max quantity 2 and Product #2 with Max quantity 4 with a discount of 100%.
3. The user on checkout has in their cart: Product #5, Product #7, Product #1 and Product #2 with a quantity of 10.
4. The plugin detects Product #2 as the cheapest and applies a discount of $8.

The discount is $8 because the item price is $2, the discount is of 100% (so it is $2) and the max applicable item quantity is 4.

Features:

• Apply discounts automatically to the cheapest/most expensive products in the cart
• User role restrictions
• WPML compatible
• apply promotion for selected products with the product restriction feature
• An automatic discount feature

Price:

$15 for a regular license.

7. WooCommerce Lottery Plugin

For WooCommerce users, the WordPress Lottery plugin is a great way to extend an already feature-rich plugin with lotteries, lucky draws and competitions.

Easy to use and setup, you can start running lotteries in less than 30 minutes. Not only do you get a new WooCommerce product type (Lottery), you can easily control how the lotteries display. Show them with other items or on a separate line.

Furthermore, you can define the number of winners and provide users with their own ‘my lotteries’ page where they can see their lottery activities. This is implemented with a simple shortcode.

With ticket number definitions and even ticket refunds, there’s a host of functionality here that can supercharge your contests.

Features:

• Integration with WooCommerce via hooks
• New Product type
• Define 1 or more winners
• Single or multiple prizes
• Ticket number definition and refunds
• Ending soon widget
• Email notifications with editable templates
• Product lottery icon
• User lottery page
• Multiple shortcodes
• WPML compatible
• Users can create and submit lotteries
• Manually pick winners/ticket numbers

Price:

$23 for a regular license.

8. Contests Plugin

Contests by Rewards Fuel, allows you to run contests from within your WordPress site or on their own hosted contests page.

With over 35 entry methods available they make it easy to host and run a giveaway, right down to confirming contest actions and picking your winners. It also manages your newsletter subscribers, automates notifications and displays your contest statistics.

More entry methods are added all the time and with Zapier you can connect with many other services such as SalesForce and Survey Monkey.

Start your contest in a matter of minutes by answering a few questions. After you’ll receive a shortcode which you can paste anywhere you like.

Features:

• Award digital prizes
• Embed contests anywhere
• Location selection
• Entry methods are verified
• Copy contests
• Plenty of customisation options
• New video contests
• 11 Languages with more being added

Price:

Contests is a completely free WordPress plugin, with no trial period or credit card required. All you need to do is sign up for a free account. There is an option to pay for additional features with plans starting at $19.95/month.

Which WordPress contest plugin is right for you?

There’s quite a bit of information there for you to digest and while you mull it over, it’s worth thinking about your specific needs for your blog.

What is it you want to achieve? What is your budget? Is this a long-term or a one-off need?

For someone who wants a complete and comprehensive contest plugin, that’s dedicated to everything related to running contests on WordPress, and if you have a reasonable budget, RafflePress is the best option. If you need a free option, be sure to check out the Lite version on WordPress.org.

If you’re looking for a more all-in-one tool that isn’t limited to being used with WordPress, SweepWidget is your best option and is very affordable.

Just remember that SweepWidget has a dedicated WordPress plugin and a free plan.

For photo and video dedicated contests, the Video Contest and Photo Contest WordPress Plugins offer some interesting features.

While Woocommerce users will appreciate the WooCommerce Lottery Plugin and WooCommerce Cheapest & Most Expensive Product Promotions.

And finally, the Contests plugin by Rewards Fuel is another good option. They have a free option but it requires you to sign up for an account, unlike RafflePress Lite.

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