Paper raffle books have funded community causes for a century, and digital raffles have spent the last decade taking their place. Most comparisons of the two read like adverts: digital wins every category, buy now. The truth is more useful. Online raffles win most comparisons for most organisations, but not all of them, and knowing exactly where each format is stronger tells you which to run, and how to run it well.
Here is the honest comparison.
The side-by-side
Where online genuinely wins
Reach and the sales window. A paper raffle sells to the people you physically reach. An online raffle sells to everyone your emails, social posts and QR codes reach, for weeks. Across GalaBid campaigns attached to events, up to 40% of sales can arrive before the event itself, revenue that mostly does not exist in a paper-only raffle.
The money and the records. Digital sales reconcile themselves: every ticket, buyer and dollar is recorded at the moment of sale, refunds and fees are itemised, and the post-raffle report is a download rather than an evening with a cash tin. This is also where compliance quietly gets easier, which deserves its own section below.
What happens after. The most underrated difference: a digital raffle ends with a contactable list of every purchaser. Thank-yous, impact updates and next year's early access all depend on that list, and it is the engine of our whole guide to encouraging repeat raffle buyers. A shoebox of stubs ends with none of that.
Trust. Numbered digital tickets, a certified random draw and instant winner notification answer the question every raffle buyer quietly holds: is this fair, and will I actually find out if I win? For raffles sold beyond your immediate community, that trust infrastructure is close to mandatory.
Where traditional still wins
No connectivity, no problem. A paper book works at a cattle station gate, in a venue with no signal, and in the hands of a seller with no smartphone. If your raffle lives entirely in settings like that, paper's simplicity is real.
The lowest-tech buyer. Some supporter bases, particularly older and fully offline communities, will hand over cash for a paper ticket but will not transact on a phone, even assisted. If that describes most of your buyers rather than a minority of them, meet them where they are.
The tiny raffle. For a 30-ticket raffle at a single morning tea, drawn from a bowl an hour after selling starts, any system is overhead. Paper is fine. (Though it is worth knowing that a digital raffle now takes minutes to set up and costs nothing to launch, so the threshold where "too small to bother" applies keeps dropping.)
The tactile moment. Tearing a ticket and dropping the stub in the barrel is theatre, and at some traditional events the barrel is part of the culture. You can keep the theatre and lose the admin, more on the hybrid below.
The compliance differences nobody mentions
Both formats are regulated as lotteries, but the practical compliance burden differs:
Record-keeping. Most permits require records of tickets sold, proceeds and winners, often retained for years. Paper raffles meet this with disciplined manual process; digital raffles meet it automatically, with the Raffle Tickets and Winners report as a standing audit trail. If your raffle is large enough to face a return or audit obligation, this difference alone can decide the format.
Ticket content rules. Many jurisdictions specify what must appear on a ticket: price, draw date, permit number, total tickets. Printed books must get this right at the printers; digital tickets carry it programmatically.
Where you can sell. Online sales are the more regulated channel in some jurisdictions, with rules about selling across state or national borders, and a few places restrict online raffle sales outright while permitting paper. This is the one compliance area where paper can be the simpler path, and it is jurisdiction-specific: check our charity raffle compliance checklist by country and confirm with your regulator.
The draw. Regulators expect a genuinely random, verifiable draw. A witnessed barrel draw satisfies this; so does a certified random number generator with an automatic record. What satisfies it least is anything in between.
The decision framework
Choose online if any of these are true: your supporters are spread beyond one room or one town; you want pre-event sales; your raffle is large enough that records matter; you want the buyer list afterwards; or your team is small and reconciliation hours are precious. This is most fundraisers, most of the time.
Choose paper if all of these are true: your raffle is small and hyper-local, your buyers genuinely will not transact digitally even with help, connectivity is absent, and the compliance burden at your size is trivial.
And if you are torn because your event has both crowds? That is not a reason to run both systems.
The hybrid trap, and the better answer
The tempting compromise is paper books at the event plus online sales for everyone else. In practice, two systems means two ticket pools, two records, and a draw that has to merge them, which is exactly where errors and disputes breed; combined paper-and-digital pools generally cannot be merged into a single digital draw, and shouldn't be.
The better answer is one digital raffle sold through every channel: online buyers use the link, event buyers scan the QR code, and cash buyers are served by volunteers who enter the sale on the spot so the purchaser still receives a numbered digital ticket by email or SMS. One pool, one record, one draw, every payment preference covered, including the supporter who only carries cash. Our guide to selling raffle tickets at in-person events covers the full setup.
The bottom line
Online raffles win on reach, records, compliance at scale, and everything that happens after the draw; paper retains a genuine edge only in small, offline, hyper-local settings. If your raffle has ambitions beyond one room, run it digitally and bring the room along with QR codes and volunteer selling.
Set up your raffle free on GalaBid's raffle platform, with instant digital tickets, certified draws and the audit trail built in.