Best church giving platforms for small churches

Every church, big or small, has unique needs.

Only you know the specific issues of your church, the gaps in the shepherding of your flock, the types of tools that would help you lead more effectively.

As you’re evaluating your software of choice, we’d encourage you to take your time and consider which is going to serve your mission not just today, but 5 years from now.

Two kinds of small church, two different answers

Before you compare any tools, work out which church you are.

A pre-launch plant. You’re six to eighteen months from your first public Sunday service and you have a launch team rather than staff. Planning Center, Tithely, and Pushpay all run free-year programs aimed directly at you, and they don’t share the same eligibility rules. Pick based on the tools you’ll still want running in year three, because that’s when the bill shows up.

An established small church. You’ve been around a while, and you’re under 150 people, giving runs a few thousand a month. Grant programs mostly aren’t built for you. Processing fees and how much admin the platform absorbs are what matter.

Your software decision should be dictated by where you are, and where you’re hoping to go.

Church giving platform pricing and fees compared

Rates are as published by each provider at the time of writing.

The fixed fee matters more than you think. PayPal’s confirmed charity rate looks like the best number on the page until you notice the $0.49 attached to it. On a $20 gift, that combination costs about 4.5%, which is worse than The fixed fee matters more than you think. PayPal’s confirmed charity rate looks like the best number on the page until you notice the $0.49 attached to it. On a $20 gift, that combination costs about 4.5%, which is worse than every church-specific platform in the table. Small donations get punished by fixed fees, and small churches receive a lot of small donations.

Run the actual math before you decide anything. Take last year’s total donations, divide by the number of gifts to get your average donation size, then apply each platform’s transaction fees to that figure. A church receiving 60 donations a month averaging $85 pays very different transaction fees than a church receiving 12 donations averaging $425, even on identical published rates. Most small churches skip this step and choose on the headline percentage.

Three free-year offers for church plants

Three programs, all real, and none of them is the same offer.

Planning Center Giving is free to all church plants for one year, along with the rest of their software. No network affiliation required, no launch-date window, you fill out a form. Processing fees still apply, because those go to the card networks rather than to Planning Center. This is the easier program to qualify for by a wide margin, and Planning Center deserves credit for keeping it that simple.

Tithely gives church plants All Access free for a year. That’s their entire stack, custom website and branded app included, at a retail value they put at $1,500. Qualifying runs through a call with one of their church specialists rather than a form, so it’s less self-serve than the Planning Center version, and processing fees apply the whole time. After twelve months it’s $119 a month.

Pushpay Goes is narrower and deeper. Qualified pre-launch plants receive a twelve-month no-cost grant covering the full Pushpay platform: online giving with Everygift®, ChMS, and a mobile app. Standard payment processing rates apply. Eligibility is the catch. Your church needs to be six to eighteen months out from public launch and affiliated with a recognized church planting network or organization. What comes with it beyond the software is a cohort of other plants in the same phase, a Recurring Giving Playbook, and onboarding that happens during pre-launch rather than after you’re already running Sunday services.

“We didn’t want temporary tools for a permanent mission,” says Pastor Dylan Jones of NEUMA Church in Los Angeles, which Pushpay features in the program. “Having these systems in place means we can focus on shepherding people, not troubleshooting tech.”

The question isn’t which free year is better. It’s whether you’ll want to migrate a year in, when you have twelve months of giving history, a database with real members in it, and a congregation that has finally learned where the give button is. Nobody wants to spend the fall after launch moving donor records between platforms.

Tithely, Givelify, PayPal, and the other free tools

For an established small church with no grant coming, three platforms cost nothing per month.

Tithely, still written Tithe.ly across much of their own site, offers the strongest free tier in church tech. Online giving, recurring gifts, and mobile kiosk for $0 a month, with 2.9% + $0.30 on cards, 3.5% on American Express, and 1% + $0.30 on bank transfers. Year-end tax statements are included. A volunteer can have online giving live the same afternoon.

Text-to-give is the notable thing missing. It’s a $19 a month add-on, which surprises churches that assumed a free plan covered every way to give. Church management runs $72 a month, a custom app is $89 on its own, and All Access bundles everything including text giving at $119. For a church that only needs donations to arrive and receipts to go out, the free plan provides everything necessary.

Givelify takes a different approach that suits some churches and frustrates others. No monthly fees, no contract, 2.9% + $0.30 on most cards. Donors download the Givelify mobile app, search for your church by name, and give in about thirty seconds. That search-and-give experience is frictionless, and it’s why Givelify shows up in so many smaller congregations. The tradeoff is control. Your giving experience lives inside somebody else’s mobile app rather than on your own website, text giving and website embeds aren’t part of the standard offering, and the reporting is thinner than what purpose-built church software provides. There’s no custom branding on the donation flow either. Givelify also runs on cards only, so every gift pays a card rate and your recurring givers can’t move to the cheaper rail as they settle in. If your church has no website worth embedding a form into, that tradeoff is close to free. If you’ve spent money on a website, you’re giving something up.

PayPal is what a lot of tiny churches actually use, and it’s fine for what it is. Get your charity status confirmed and the rate drops to 1.99% + $0.49. Until it’s confirmed you’re at 2.89% + $0.49, which is also the rate on the plain donate button. The discount doesn’t arrive just because you have a 501(c)(3) letter in a drawer. Donors recognize it, Venmo comes along with it, and setup takes an afternoon with no help needed from anyone technical. What you don’t get is a church system. No member profiles, no way to track engagement, no fund reporting built for a treasurer, and a checkout experience branded PayPal rather than custom to your church. Giving statements will need rework before a CPA accepts them.

Free is the right call more often than vendors like to admit. If your church takes $1,800 a month in donations across forty small gifts, the difference between these platforms is a rounding error, and the best option is whichever one your volunteer can set up before Sunday.

Features that matter when nobody’s on staff

The feature lists on these websites are close to interchangeable. Recurring giving, text-to-give, QR codes, kiosk, Apple Pay. Almost every provider offers all of it, and comparing feature checkboxes is a waste of an afternoon.

Start by ignoring most of them. Multi-currency support, campaign pledging, and peer-to-peer fundraising are real features that solve real problems, none of which your church has yet, and none of which help you this year. Buying a platform for features you’ll grow into means paying today for a tool you’ll evaluate again anyway once you actually need them.

The features below are the ones where the platforms actually differ, and where the answer changes how much digital giving admin lands on your volunteers.

Three features change your workload, and none of them lead the marketing.

Donor self-service

Can donors update their own expired card, change their recurring donation amount, and download their own statement without emailing you? This is the feature that most directly determines your workload, and the donor experience it creates is the one your givers will actually remember. Every one of those tasks that lands in your inbox is fifteen minutes nobody budgeted. All the church-specific platforms support this reasonably well. Test it in a demo by doing it yourself from a donor account, not by reading the feature list.

Automatic year-end statements

In January, someone has to produce IRS-compliant giving statements for every person who gave. If your platform generates and delivers them, that’s a Saturday you get back. If it exports a CSV and wishes you luck, budget the Saturday.

Failed payment recovery

This is the feature nobody thinks about at launch and everybody discovers around month eighteen. Cards expire on a roughly three-year cycle, so a recurring donation set up during your launch month will quietly fail somewhere in year two, and most donors never notice. They think they’re still giving. Whether your platform catches that and prompts the donor to update their payment details, or just logs a failed transaction and moves on, adds up to a real number across a few years. Everygift® handles the retry and the make-up gift prompt automatically, and that recovery is a meaningful share of what churches pay for at the higher end of this market. Ask every provider on your shortlist what specifically happens when a donor’s card expires, and get the answer in writing.

Church management software and the data entry tax

Here’s the cost that never shows up in a fee comparison: the hours your volunteers spend moving data between tools that don’t talk to each other.

A giving platform that doesn’t connect to your church management software means somebody types donor names into a second system. A first-time visitor fills out a card, someone adds them to a spreadsheet, and their first donation arrives three weeks later in a completely separate dashboard with no link between the two records. Now you have two versions of one person, and no reliable way to track that one of your donors has started giving and stopped attending. Integration is the unglamorous fix.

At forty people, you hold all of that in your head and the integration question doesn’t matter. At two hundred, you don’t, and it does.

This is the strongest argument for buying online giving and church management from one provider rather than assembling the cheapest option in each category. Planning Center builds it as separate modules on one shared database, so adding Check-Ins or Services later doesn’t require migrating anything. Tithe.ly bundles giving, ChMS, and a custom app into paid plans. Pushpay puts online giving and ChMS on one platform, which is what makes a donor’s giving history, event registrations, and serving record show up on a single member profile instead of in three places.

Watch for the second data-entry problem too, the one that shows up with event registrations. If your event signups and your giving live in different tools, you’ll have members whose kids are registered for camp under one email and whose donations arrive under another, and reconciling those by hand is nobody’s idea of ministry.

One more reason integration earns its keep: digital giving adoption. When your church management software and your giving platform share one record, you can track what share of your regular attenders give digitally at all. No other single number tells a small church more, and most churches guess at it. Almost all of them guess high.

Integration doesn’t fix a follow-up problem. If nobody on your team is assigned to contact first-time donors, connected software just gives you a tidier record of the people you didn’t call.

What happens when giving breaks on a Sunday morning

Nobody evaluates customer support when they’re picking a platform, and then it becomes the only thing that matters for about ninety minutes one Sunday.

The relevant question isn’t whether a provider offers support. Every one of them offers it. It’s whether you can reach a human on a weekend, because that’s when your giving is actually happening. Planning Center answers in roughly an hour on business days and has a large public help library plus a user community. Tithely and Givelify run standard weekday business hours and offer email and chat options. Givelify’s support line is one of the few in this category where a small church can reach a person by phone quickly. Pushpay staffs weekday hours with weekend and holiday coverage for urgent, service-affecting issues, and includes an implementation coach during setup.

For a church with no staff, the practical difference is smaller than it sounds. You’re not going to fix a payment processing outage yourself either way. What you want is a status page you can check and an answer you can read to a worried treasurer on Monday. Ask about weekend coverage during the demo and you’ll learn a lot about who a platform is actually built for.

Where each platform falls down for small churches

Every option here is wrong for some church.

Skip Pushpay if you’re one of the many small churches with no staff, no network affiliation, and $2,500 a month in donations. The platform is quote-based on one-to-three-year terms and built for churches carrying more operational complexity than yours. Outside the grant program, a small church with fifteen people on its launch team is usually better served starting cheap and switching when growth makes the difference matter. That’s not the answer a Pushpay blog is supposed to give, and it’s still the right one.

Skip Subsplash unless the branded app is the actual reason you’re buying. The apps are their strength and they’re good, TV apps included. Subsplash Giving on its own costs $0 a month, though the giving-only card rate is 2.99%, the highest in the table. The 2.3% you’ll see quoted requires signing an exclusive partnership, which is a different conversation than a free giving account. Subsplash One is quote-based, priced against church size and feature mix, and for a church that only needs donations to land in the bank it’s more platform than the problem requires.

Skip Givebutter and Donorbox for a church, and this is the take I’ll get email about. Both are excellent donation tools built for nonprofits, and a church isn’t a nonprofit in the ways that matter operationally. You need fund designations, statements that satisfy an auditor, and a record of your members that survives the person who set it up leaving. Then there’s the donor-tip model: Givebutter’s $0 pricing is funded by a suggested tip at checkout, which puts a fundraising ask for a software company between your congregation and their tithe. Some pastors are fine with that. Many aren’t, and they should find out before launch rather than from an usher in week three.

Watch the ACH rate on Tithe.ly if you’re building a recurring base. That free tier is one of the better deals available to a small church, and the 1% on bank transfers is the transaction fee that grows as the recurring giving strategy you’re hopefully running starts to work.

Watch the fixed fee on PayPal and Givelify if most of your gifts are small. Percentages get all the attention. On a congregation giving $15 and $20 at a time, the flat per-transaction fee is doing most of the damage.

Best fit by church size and situation

• Pre-launch plant, in a network, six to eighteen months out: apply to all three free-year programs. Decide on what month thirteen costs and whether you’d be willing to migrate then.
• Pre-launch plant, no network affiliation: the Planning Center planter offer is open to all plants. Start there, and call Tithely to see whether you qualify for theirs.
• Established church under 100 with low donation volume: the Tithely free tier, or Givelify if you have no website to embed a form into.
• Established church already running a separate ChMS: check which giving platforms have a real integration with it before comparing rates, because the integration is worth more than a quarter percent.
• Established church pushing recurring bank-transfer giving: Planning Center Giving. That 0% ACH rate is the single biggest cost lever a small church has.
• A church whose digital ministry is mostly the app: Subsplash, with the quote in writing and add-ons itemized before you commit to twelve months.
• A church already running Pushpay Giving that’s outgrowing spreadsheets: ChurchStaq® rather than bolting a second system onto the side.
• A church whose people mostly respond to text: any platform with native text giving, which rules out Givelify and PayPal, and means Tithely’s free tier costs $19 a month more than you planned.

FAQs about church giving platforms

Sources