Varbase and VarGive Are Now on Microsoft Marketplace

Vardot is now a published independent software vendor on Microsoft Marketplace, with two platforms live: the Varbase Enterprise Platform and the VarGive Enterprise Donations Platform.

Both are transactable offers, which means an organization can now contract and pay for either one through its existing Microsoft agreement. For a lot of the institutions we work with, that is the difference between a decision that moves this quarter and a decision that waits for a vendor onboarding cycle.

What Is Varbase?

Varbase Enterprise is an enterprise Drupal distribution built on Drupal CMS as an extension rather than a fork.

Varbase 11 runs on Drupal 11 as a three-layer recipe stack: Drupal core recipes, then 13 Drupal CMS recipes, then 26 Varbase recipes. It does not replace the Drupal CMS layer; it depends on it, which keeps the platform on Drupal's official roadmap with zero forks and 100% core and contributed code.

The layer Varbase adds is governance. Editorial workflow moves through three states: Draft, Published, and Archived, with scheduled publishing, content lock, revision comparison, and a soft-delete trash. AI capability ships as discrete recipes rather than a global switch, so alt-text generation, assisted taxonomy tagging, and the CKEditor writing assistant each reach an editor only when an administrator applies the recipe that grants it, against an AI provider key your organization holds. Prompt-safety and PII rules, AI logging, and full revision history come with it.

Varbase fits institutional portals, government platforms, publishing sites, and multilingual estates, including Arabic and right-to-left layouts.

What Is VarGive?

VarGive Enterprise is an open-source donation platform for global NGOs and nonprofits running fundraising across multiple markets, currencies, and languages.

VarGive charges zero platform commission on donations, with an optional donor-covered processing fee, so fundraising growth does not raise the vendor bill. Currencies and languages are configured per market and per campaign, with GeoIP routing, market-specific domains, and right-to-left support.

Salesforce is a proven, supported integration, with other CRM workflows handled through API and export patterns. The platform is PCI-DSS compliant, stores no full card numbers, and it deploys on cloud, managed hosting, or on-premises infrastructure depending on requirements.

Vardot built UNHCR's global donations platform on this architecture. Across deployments, VarGive has processed more than 70 million US dollars and published more than 3,000 campaigns, with teams standing up crisis and evergreen campaigns in 15 to 30 minutes.

What Does Marketplace Availability Change for Your Procurement Team?

Both Vardot listings are transactable SaaS offers, which means Microsoft handles the money. Rather than routing you back to the vendor's own sales process, Microsoft bills you, collects payment, and remits it to the publisher, all under the agreement you already hold. For your procurement team, that removes the supplier onboarding step, and nothing else.

A transactable Marketplace purchase runs on paper your organization has already signed. Your legal team reviewed the Microsoft agreement. Your finance team already has Microsoft set up as a supplier. The platform appears as a line on an invoice that already arrives, from an entity already in your system.

What that removes in practice is supplier registration with its vendor forms and compliance questionnaires, a separate legal review cycle on a new master agreement, and a new payment relationship for finance to establish and audit.

How Do You Buy Varbase or VarGive Through Marketplace?

Through a private offer, which is how most enterprise Marketplace agreements are structured.

A private offer is a tailored deal with negotiated pricing, terms, duration, and configuration, extended to one named customer who accepts it inside their Microsoft portal. It carries everything a direct negotiation would. Microsoft handles the invoicing behind it. The public listings establish that the offers exist and are transactable; the actual agreement is built for the organization signing it.

Implementation, migration, and support are available through the same channel. Microsoft transacts professional services only through private offers rather than the open storefront; they are delivered virtually, and the buying entity needs a billing account with a sold-to address in the US, UK, or Canada. Many international organizations already hold a US billing account even when the programme runs elsewhere, so this is usually a question of identifying the right entity.

One thing to know if Azure spend commitments are part of your evaluation: neither listing carries Microsoft's Azure benefit-eligible badge, so a purchase does not draw down an Azure consumption commitment. Microsoft limits that benefit to licences used exclusively in Azure, and both platforms are built to run wherever your policy requires. If the commitment matters in your case, raise it early, and we will work through what is possible.

How Does a Marketplace Purchase Compare to a Direct Contract?

The difference is entirely in the contracting route. What you buy, where it runs, and what you pay are the same either way.

Our View: This Is a Reused Approval, Not a New Storefront

Vardot's POV: For the buyers we serve, a marketplace listing is a legal and vendor-onboarding shortcut long before it is a payments channel, and that inverts who it helps most.

In nonprofit, intergovernmental, and public-sector programmes, the delay is rarely the price. It is supplier registration, legal review, procurement thresholds, and the internal case for adding one more vendor to an approved estate.

None of that work disappears in a marketplace transaction. What happens is that the organization reuses an approval it already granted to Microsoft.

The benefit therefore lands hardest on the organizations with the most rigid procurement, which is the opposite of how marketplace listings are usually pitched. The standard pitch is aimed at cloud-native buyers for whom procurement was never the constraint. The organizations that stand to gain the most are the ones with the longest approval chains, and those are the organizations we build for.

It is worth being clear about the boundary. Marketplace procurement is a commercial route, not a technical one. Nothing about buying Varbase or VarGive through Microsoft changes what the platform is, where it runs, or who owns the data.

Is Marketplace Procurement the Right Route for Your Organization?

It fits best when supplier onboarding is your bottleneck rather than budget approval. Three questions will tell you which one you are, and all three are answerable from facts you already hold.

1. Do you hold a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement or Microsoft Customer Agreement that procurement and legal have already approved? If yes, the contracting groundwork is already in place. If not, a direct contract is the simpler path, and we are happy to take it.
2. Is your bottleneck vendor onboarding, or the internal business case? Marketplace procurement compresses supplier setup. If you are still building the case internally, this is useful later rather than now.
3. Are you buying the platform subscription, the implementation, or both? These can travel the same route or separate ones, and we will recommend which.

Vardot contracts both ways. Most of our work is still contracted directly, and we will recommend whichever route gets your platform live sooner.

Vardot is a Drupal Diamond Certified Partner and a Gold Sponsor of the Drupal AI Initiative, with 200+ platforms launched and a 4.9/5 rating across 60 verified Clutch reviews. We build for organizations whose work has real-world consequences, including UNHCR, UNICEF, Georgetown University, and Médecins Sans Frontières.

If you hold a Microsoft agreement and a platform decision is waiting on procurement, the next useful step is an Align session on the procurement path itself, before scope. Bring your agreement type and your billing geography, and we can map the fastest route to a live platform in one conversation.