How to compare church giving kiosks and card readers

A tablet giving kiosk in the lobby, a card reader at the welcome table, and a tap disc on the back of a chair can each take a gift on Sunday morning. They don’t record that gift the same way.

Some kiosks are a web browser on an iPad, locked to your church’s giving page. Others are dedicated touchscreen units with a card reader attached.

For whoever reconciles the books, the question comes after the payment: whether the gift lands on a donor record, whether the donor gets a receipt, and whether the gift appears on the year-end statement. All three depend on the giving platform behind the hardware.

The donor record matters pastorally, too. An anonymous gift can’t be thanked, and a gift with no email address attached can’t be receipted.

This comparison covers the in-person giving options from Tithely, the Pushpay® platform, SecureGive, and Subsplash, in that order: the hardware each one supports, how a gift moves from payment to receipt to report, and what each option costs. Before you compare hardware, decide where donors will be standing when they give and whether every in-person gift needs to reach a donor record.

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Church giving kiosks and card readers compared

Which option fits your church’s in-person giving workflow?

Location narrows the field. A fixed spot in a busy lobby can justify a dedicated kiosk with a card reader, while a welcome table that moves from the lobby to the gym to an outdoor event needs something portable or nothing at all beyond a tap point and a QR code.

The donor record narrows it further. If every in-person gift has to land on a named donor’s history and statement, favor the options that send the donor to your giving page on their own phone, or kiosks that look up the donor before the payment.

The comparison at a glance

Everything in the table comes from each vendor’s public product, pricing, and help pages as of October 2026, and processing fees are billed on top of any plan or hardware cost. Vendors change prices. Confirm current figures with each vendor before you sign.

Kiosk, card reader, or tap-to-give plate?

How each option works for donors

The options in this comparison fall into five setups:

• Browser kiosk: a tablet running your church’s giving page in a web browser, locked to that page (Guided Access on an iPad, screen pinning on Android). Donors type card details on the screen unless the kiosk software supports a reader.
• Dedicated kiosk: a touchscreen unit or mounted tablet running kiosk software, with a card reader attached for tap, chip, and swipe payments.
• Payment terminal: a standalone device that takes a card or phone tap for an amount staff set in advance. Some clip onto an offering basket.
• Tap point: an NFC disc, card, sticker, or stand (sometimes called a tap-to-give plate) that opens a web link when a phone touches it. NFC, or near-field communication, is the short-range radio a phone uses for contactless payments. A tap point takes no payment. The donor gives on their own phone.
• QR codes and text giving: a code on the screen or a number to text, both of which also send the donor to your giving page on their own phone.

The first three put a shared device in the room, which someone has to buy, set up, and check before each service. The last two don’t.

Where a dedicated kiosk differs from a mobile giving link

A shared device can’t keep one donor signed in for the next person, so kiosk software clears the screen or signs the donor out after each gift. Whatever the donor saved on their own phone (a signed-in giving account, a card on file, a recurring schedule) isn’t there. Some kiosks look the donor up by phone number before the payment. Others treat every gift as a guest gift and send a receipt only if the donor types in an email address.

A mobile giving link starts from the donor’s own phone. A tap point, a QR code, or a text message opens your giving page there. If the donor gives through a signed-in account, the gift lands on their donor record with their saved payment method, their receipt, and their year-end statement.

Receipts carry a legal requirement. The IRS requires a written acknowledgment from the church before a donor can deduct any single contribution of $250 or more. A kiosk gift with no name and no email address has no one to send that acknowledgment to, and it won’t appear on any donor’s year-end statement.

Buy hardware for the gifts a phone won’t capture, and name those gifts before you buy. A gift from a guest without a smartphone is one. A donor who gives in the lobby by tapping a credit card instead of opening a giving page is another. If you can’t name the gift a kiosk captures that a tap point or QR code wouldn’t, the kiosk budget can go to ministry instead.

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Compare Tithely, Pushpay, SecureGive, and Subsplash

Tithely

Tithely fits if your in-person giving needs a free browser kiosk for guests and tap points that open your giving form, and typed card entry at the kiosk works for your lobby.

Hardware and card readers. Tithely’s kiosk runs in a web browser (Safari on an iPad or Chrome on Android) and stays locked to the giving form through Guided Access or screen pinning. It doesn’t take card readers. Tithely’s kiosk guide says the feature “is not compatible with any card readers, including Tithely Pay card readers,” and donors enter gifts on the on-screen keypad. Tithely Tap discs, introduced in February 2026, open a page of your choosing when a phone taps them.

Tithely Pay is a separate app. It works with M2 and BBPOS card readers and takes tap, chip, swipe, and mobile wallet payments. Tithely says plainly that “Tithely Pay is NOT to be used to accept donations,” because those transactions aren’t tax-deductible and don’t appear on tax statements or donor histories. It fits a bookstore or an event fee. Not the offering.

Payment flow and reporting. The kiosk serves guests and new donors who give without an account. After each gift the form clears, and Tithely recommends that existing donors give through their own accounts so their gifts link to their receipts and tax statements. Tithely’s kiosk documentation doesn’t cover fund selection, fee coverage, or recurring gifts, so ask to see each one in a demo.

Pricing to verify. Tithely Giving has no monthly fee. Card gifts cost 2.9% + $0.30, ACH gifts cost 1% + $0.30, and American Express costs 3.5% + $0.30. Tap is included with every Tithely Giving account, and churches order the discs separately at a price Tithely doesn’t publish. Tithely Pay charges 2.6% + $0.10 for a card-present payment.

Pushpay

The Pushpay platform fits if your in-person giving needs to run through the same giving page, donor records, and statements as online giving, with kiosk links, tap points, and QR codes sending donors there.

Hardware and card readers. Pushpay’s help center walks staff through creating a kiosk giving link for an iPad, and Pushpay Giving works with third-party kiosks for churches that want dedicated hardware. For tap points, VisitorTap is a partnership with VisitorReach: NFC cards and vinyl stickers placed on chairs, pews, or signage open a menu of links (VisitorReach calls it a Taptree) that includes your Pushpay giving page. For a card or phone tap without opening a giving page, tiptap payment terminals come as mini clips for offering baskets, lobby floor stands, and portable devices for outdoor events. Staff set the gift amount on a tiptap device, and the giver taps a card or phone to complete it.

Payment flow and reporting. On the donor’s phone, a gift through Embedded Giving (the Pushpay giving form on your church’s website) can take under six seconds with Apple Pay or Google Pay. Branded QR codes and pre-configured giving links open the right fund at the right amount, and text giving sends a gift to a fund without opening an app. Gifts made through the giving page, the app, QR codes, and text attach to the donor’s Pushpay account and appear on their annual giving statement. Guest giving, if your church turns it on, takes a one-time card gift without an account, requires an email address for the receipt, and still puts the gift on a year-end statement.

Springs Church, which runs a Pushpay church app, took in-person gifts with nothing but a QR code. During a service, Pastor Michael put the code on the screen and asked the congregation to give to an orphanage in Haiti.

“Everybody lifts up their phone, takes a picture of the QR code, and within 10 seconds, donations just started piling in,” said Karen Woodyard, Springs Church’s deacon ministry director. “The app made it so much easier.”

For cash and check donors, the Offline Conversion feature in Everygift® invites them to try giving online, so a donor who gives by check in the lobby can move to the same giving page as online donors.

The open question is tiptap. Collections from tiptap terminals appear in a tiptap dashboard, and givers can create a tiptap account for receipts. Ask how tiptap gifts reach your Pushpay records and year-end statements before you put terminals in the offering baskets.

Pushpay pricing is customized to your church. VisitorTap starts at $16 a month plus the cost of the cards, and custom card designs (500-card minimum) take about eight weeks to produce and ship. Pushpay customers get a discount on VisitorTap and on tiptap devices, whether purchased or rented.

SecureGive

SecureGive fits if your in-person giving needs dedicated kiosk hardware in a fixed spot, with a card reader that takes tap, chip, and swipe, and your budget covers the hardware and a monthly plan.

Hardware and card readers. SecureGive sells four kiosk lines: the iPad Series from $1,199, the Classic Series from $2,699, the Modern Series from $3,799, and the Signature Series from $5,799. Its help center covers Elo kiosks, iPad kiosks, Olea stand-alone kiosks, and Pioneer countertop kiosks. The SecureGive Kiosk iPad app supports tap, chip, and swipe payment devices and names the VP3300 reader, and SecureGive lists Apple Pay at its kiosks. SecureGive Tap is a separate NFC product, priced by quantity.

Payment flow and reporting. A donor taps Donate (or Purchase, for non-donation items), picks a giving category and an amount, and then identifies themselves. Returning donors enter a phone number. New donors enter a phone number and receipt details, and anyone can tap Donate Anonymously and add an email address for a receipt or skip it. If the church allows it, a “Help offset transaction fees?” checkbox adds the processing fee to the gift. Receipts go out by email. SecureGive says gifts sync with church management systems through its ChMS integrations, and it offers a Rock RMS gateway. Its kiosk documentation doesn’t describe recurring gifts.

Pricing to verify. The Basic plan costs 149amonth(135 a month paid annually) and covers online or kiosk giving for one campus, up to 2,000 transactions a month. Premium costs 299amonth(270 paid annually), adds mobile, text, and check scanning, and covers up to five campuses. Kiosk gifts carry lower rates than online gifts: 2% + $0.30 for credit, 1.5% + $0.30 for debit, and 1% + $0.30 for PIN debit, against 2.5% + $0.30 for an online credit gift. Hardware costs extra.

Subsplash

Subsplash fits if your church already runs its app and media on Subsplash and your in-person giving needs a kiosk link and tap points tied to Subsplash Giving.

Hardware and card readers. The Subsplash kiosk link runs in a browser on a device such as an iPad or a computer. Subsplash’s kiosk article doesn’t mention card readers. Subsplash Tap, launched in June 2025, comes as Tap Discs for seatbacks, door frames, and collection boxes and as Tap Stands for tabletops and reception desks. Each tap opens a link the church can change at any time.

Payment flow and reporting. The kiosk link signs donors out of their accounts after a completed gift or after 30 seconds of inactivity. Subsplash Giving supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, and instant ACH, a donor-covered fees checkbox, and recurring gifts on weekly, biweekly, or monthly schedules, though the kiosk article doesn’t say which of those appear at the kiosk. Staff enter cash and checks through Donation Entry, and bulk check scanning takes more than 100 checks in one scan.

Pricing to verify. Subsplash Giving has no contracts and no monthly subscription fee, and its GrowCurve pricing lowers rates as online giving volume grows, to as low as 1.9% per card gift and 0.5% per ACH gift for qualifying churches. Subsplash doesn’t publish Tap pricing.

Choose an option for your church’s setup

For a fixed, high-traffic lobby

A dedicated kiosk belongs where donors walk past it every week and someone on staff can check it before each service. Plan for power, a stable Wi-Fi connection, and a way to mount or anchor the unit, and decide who on staff restarts it if it stops working during a service.

Price the whole year. Add the hardware, twelve months of the plan, and processing on the card gifts you expect the kiosk to take, then compare that total with a browser kiosk on a tablet you already own, which adds no hardware cost beyond the platform’s normal rates.

Lower kiosk rates offset the hardware slowly. At SecureGive, a kiosk credit gift costs 0.5 percentage points less to process than the same gift online. Divide the hardware price by that difference to find how much giving has to move from online to the kiosk before the lower rate covers the hardware: about $240,000 in credit gifts for a $1,199 iPad Series kiosk.

For events, bookstores, or multiple locations

Portable options fit here. A tablet running a browser kiosk can move from the lobby to the gym, and tiptap sells portable terminals for outdoor events and campaigns. For sales, keep payments and donations apart: Tithely Pay and SecureGive’s Purchase button both take non-donation payments, which belong in a different report from tax-deductible gifts.

Phones travel best of all. When The Grove Church in Washington moved Sunday services to its parking lot in March 2020, the staff told drive-in attendees that text giving was the simplest way to give. When The Grove first moved to Pushpay, 40% of its giving already came through text. The Grove ran two campuses at the time, and Jon Rich, the church’s business and administration pastor, had made bringing both campuses onto Pushpay one of his top priorities.

For more than one campus, check the plan limits before the hardware. SecureGive’s Basic plan covers one campus and Premium covers up to five. On the Pushpay platform, per-campus giving designations sit in the Complete package. For events that also need registration or kids check-in, see how church giving platforms handle events and check-in.

For teams prioritizing existing giving workflows

A new in-person channel shouldn’t create a second set of records. If kiosk gifts land in one system and online gifts in another, someone on staff has to reconcile them by hand, and donors may get two year-end statements.

Ask whether kiosk, terminal, and tap gifts flow into the same giving platform and donor records as online gifts, and from there into your church management system. On ChurchStaq®, Pushpay Giving and the ChMS share one profile for each person, so an in-person gift made through the giving page appears beside that person’s attendance and groups. Churches keeping another ChMS can check the Pushpay integrations directory, and the church software integrations comparison covers which way data moves on each platform.

Get six answers in writing:

• Donor records: whether a kiosk or terminal gift attaches to a named donor, and how a guest gift becomes a donor record later.
• Receipts and statements: whether each in-person gift gets an emailed receipt and appears on the year-end statement.
• Funds: whether donors can choose a fund at the kiosk, and whether the fund list matches the giving page.
• Fees and recurring gifts: whether the kiosk offers fee coverage and a recurring option, or sends donors elsewhere for both.
• Reporting: whether in-person gifts appear in the same giving reports and deposits as online gifts.
• Hardware support: who replaces a broken reader or tablet, and how long a replacement takes.

Before Christmas Eve and Easter

Custom VisitorTap cards take about eight weeks to produce and ship, so tap points for Easter 2027 (March 28) need a custom-card order by the end of January. For Christmas Eve, a standard card design is the quicker setup. Book a Pushpay demo and ask to see a kiosk giving link, a VisitorTap card, and a QR code in action. Then confirm that a gift from each one lands in the same donor record and on the same year-end statement.

Not ready for a demo? Why churches are embracing tap-to-engage technology explains how NFC tap cards and stickers open a link on a phone without an app or a QR code scan.

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Questions churches ask about giving kiosks

Does a giving kiosk need a separate card reader?

It depends on the kiosk. A browser kiosk can run without one: Tithely’s kiosk mode takes card details on the screen and works with no card reader at all. A dedicated kiosk has a reader attached, such as the payment devices SecureGive’s iPad app supports. A payment terminal like tiptap is the reader, and staff set the gift amount.

Can donors use contactless cards or mobile wallets?

At some kiosks, yes. SecureGive’s kiosks take tap payments and Apple Pay, and tiptap terminals take a tap from a card or a phone. Tithely Pay’s readers accept mobile wallets, but Tithely doesn’t allow donations through Tithely Pay. On a donor’s own phone, the Pushpay and Subsplash giving pages both take Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Can donors cover fees and set up recurring gifts at a kiosk?

Fee coverage, sometimes. SecureGive’s kiosks offer an optional checkbox to cover the processing fee, while Tithely’s and Subsplash’s kiosk documentation doesn’t mention fee coverage at the kiosk. Tithely’s, SecureGive’s, and Subsplash’s kiosk documentation doesn’t describe setting up a recurring gift at the kiosk either. The documented path for recurring gifts is the giving page or app on the donor’s own phone, where Pushpay and Subsplash both support recurring schedules.

What costs should a church compare?

Four, at minimum:

• Hardware: kiosks, readers, terminals, mounts, and tap points.
• Plan fees: any monthly subscription or add-on, such as a tap subscription.
• Processing rates: the kiosk rate and the online rate, which can differ.
• Staff time: setting up, checking, and reconciling the devices each week.

What are the best giving platforms for in-person donations with kiosks or card readers?

It depends where donors give. The Pushpay platform fits churches that want in-person giving to run through the same giving page, donor records, and statements as online giving, with kiosk links, VisitorTap tap points, QR codes, and text giving. SecureGive fits a church that wants dedicated kiosk hardware with a card reader. Tithely fits a church that wants a free browser kiosk for guests and tap discs, and Subsplash fits a church already running its app on Subsplash. For deeper detail, see how the Pushpay platform compares with Tithely and Subsplash.