No-frills church management software with online giving

“No frills” is the right instinct when you’re choosing church software. You want to get the most out of the platform you pay for, so start with what your team has the capacity to use every week and which features are nice to have but won’t get much use.

But “simple” means different things on different pricing pages. Simple can mean the smallest monthly bill, the shortest feature list, or the least weekly work for whoever runs giving, and one platform doesn’t always deliver all three. If the person who runs giving also keeps the calendar and sends the weekly email, the least weekly work is the kind of simple that lasts. Pricing pages skip weekly work.

This comparison covers Tithely Church Management (formerly Breeze), ChurchTrac, Planning Center, and the Pushpay® platform. Pricing models come first, then the giving and church management features each platform includes, then which churches each platform fits.

The four platforms at a glance

How Breeze, Tithely, ChurchTrac, Planning Center, and Pushpay differ

Five names, four platforms. Breeze is now Tithely Church Management, a $72-a-month member database that comes with Tithely’s free giving plan and, according to Tithely, the same church management experience Breeze users know.

ChurchTrac, Planning Center, and Pushpay each price differently. ChurchTrac charges by the number of names in your database and puts every feature on every tier. Planning Center charges product by product, on top of a member database that costs nothing. Pushpay pricing is quoted after a demo, in packages.

Everything in the table comes from each vendor’s public pricing and product pages as of October 2026. Processing fees are billed on top of any subscription. Prices change, so confirm current figures with each vendor before you sign.

What “simple” can mean

Each platform here leans toward a different kind of simple. Tithely’s giving plan keeps the bill small, with no subscription at all and member records for $72 a month more. ChurchTrac shows that a low price doesn’t mean a short feature list, since its $29 plan includes fund accounting, kids’ check-in, and a website builder. Planning Center starts free.

The weekly work is the kind no pricing page prints. Weekly work means the number of systems a gift passes through on the way to the bank deposit, the ledger, and the donor’s year-end statement, plus the hours someone on staff spends moving the gift from one system to the next. Count the systems and the hours in every demo.

Subscription pricing and giving fees

Flat-rate, modular, people-based, or custom

Flat-rate pricing charges the same whether your database holds 80 people or 800. Tithely Church Management costs $72 a month, with “no extra fees for growing or adding more people,” and the $119 All-Access plan adds service planning, a custom church app, and a custom website. A flat rate fits in one line of a budget.

Modular pricing starts lower and climbs one product at a time. Planning Center’s People database is free, with no record limit. Services stays free up to five team members, Check-Ins up to 10 daily check-ins, and Groups up to 15 group members, and past each limit that product moves to a paid tier sized to your church. Giving is free up to 10 donations a month, then runs from $15 a month for 75 donations to $239 for unlimited. Going over a limit doesn’t cut off service. If you exceed a product’s limit more than once, Planning Center emails to suggest an upgrade.

Modular or all-in-one? Count your products first. Modular pricing suits a church that will run two or three products for years, because you pay nothing for the products you skip. Once you’re paying for most of the modules, add up those subscriptions and compare the total with a single subscription.

People-based pricing follows the size of your database instead of your attendance. ChurchTrac’s six tiers run from $29 a month for up to 75 names to $119 for unlimited, and yearly billing takes 10% off. Ask ChurchTrac which records count toward the name limit before you pick a tier.

Custom pricing is the Pushpay model. Pushpay pricing includes volume-based discounts and processing rates tailored to your church’s giving mix, meaning how much of your giving comes in by debit card, by each type of credit card, and by ACH. The rates follow your church’s giving trends. Pushpay Giving and ChurchStaq, which adds the Pushpay ChMS and a custom church app, each come in Core, Advanced, and Complete packages, with no setup fees.

Separate software costs from transaction fees

The subscription pays for the software. Processing is charged per gift, and card and ACH gifts are priced differently: a card gift carries a percentage plus a fixed fee, while an ACH gift (a bank transfer) often carries only the fixed fee and takes several days to settle.

The processor decides when gifts reach the church’s bank account, and whether processing fees come out of each deposit or arrive on a separate invoice. When fees come out of the deposit, each deposit runs smaller than the gifts behind it, and someone on staff records the difference as an expense. Every deposit, every week. Ask each vendor when deposits land and how processing fees are billed.

Estimating annual cost from your church’s usage

Price each platform for the church you’ll be a year from now, in four steps:

1. Tier. Find the tier you’ll need in 12 months. ChurchTrac’s tiers follow the names in your database, Planning Center Giving’s tiers follow monthly donations, and Planning Center’s other products follow team members, check-ins, or group members.
2. Add-ons. Add what you’ll use beyond the base plan. Text giving costs $19 a month on Tithely’s free giving plan and is included in All-Access, a toll-free Text2Give number costs $5 a month at Planning Center, and ChurchTrac’s Enhanced Messaging add-on costs $7 a month. Count one-time setup work too, such as ChurchTrac’s optional accounting setup (from $399).
3. Processing. Ask each vendor to price your last 12 months of card and ACH giving at its rates.
4. Staff time. List the giving tasks your staff does by hand each week, such as entering checks, matching deposits, and building statements in January, and ask each vendor which of those tasks the platform takes over.

The first three steps give you a price for each platform, and the fourth tells you how many hours of weekly giving work each platform takes off your staff. Weigh price against hours.

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Giving and management features, platform by platform

Tithely Church Management (formerly Breeze) and Tithely giving

Breeze became Tithely Church Management in 2025, and breezechms.com still sells the same plan under the Breeze name.

Best for: churches where simple means one flat monthly price and a giving plan with no subscription.

Giving: Tithely’s free giving plan covers online, mobile, and text giving and an iOS and Android giving app, with no monthly fee and no contract. Text giving costs $19 a month on the free giving plan.

Church management: Church Management adds the people side. The Church Management People database syncs with giving data, so a donor’s gifts sit in the same database as their member record. Kids’ check-in prints parent and child name tags with security codes. The church calendar books rooms and equipment, with volunteer scheduling built into events, and staff can text or email a person or a whole group. Automations handle birthday emails, group assignments, and follow-ups.

Accounting: a QuickBooks Online integration.

Pricing: giving is free, Church Management is $72 a month flat, and All-Access is $119 a month. Card gifts cost 2.9% + $0.30, ACH gifts 1% + $0.30, and American Express gifts 3.5% + $0.30. There are no setup fees, and every plan starts with a 30-day free trial.

Limits: service planning, a custom app, and a custom website start on All-Access, at $119 a month, so a church that plans services in software should compare All-Access, not the $72 plan. Tithely’s current help guide says its 2025 tax statements are individual only, with no merged household option for spouses who give separately. Ask Tithely about 2026 statements.

ChurchTrac giving and church administration

Best for: churches where simple means one subscription that covers giving, people, and the church’s books.

Giving: online giving runs through Stripe, and ChurchTrac charges no platform fee on online giving. Donors set up weekly, biweekly, or monthly recurring gifts by card or ACH, choose their own start date, and pick a fund such as missions or the building fund. Text giving works through the Enhanced Messaging add-on. Contribution statements can be printed or emailed by the office, or donors can generate their own.

Church management: the feature list is the same on the $29 plan as on the $119 plan.

• Attendance: headcounts, individual tracking, printed rosters, and a live kiosk.
• Kids’ check-in: unlimited kiosks and labels with security codes, allergies, and notes.
• Volunteers: members block out dates they can’t serve and get reminders by text or email.
• Worship planning: a service outline you can rearrange song by song.
• Website and app: a website builder and native mobile apps.

Accounting: fund accounting comes with every tier, with unlimited designated and restricted funds across multiple bank accounts, plus bank sync and statement import. If your treasurer keeps the ledger in a separate program today, ask whether ChurchTrac’s fund accounting can replace that program.

Pricing: from $29 a month for up to 75 names to $119 a month for unlimited, with 10% off for yearly billing. Stripe’s processing runs 2.9% + $0.30 per card gift, or 2.2% + $0.30 at its nonprofit rate, and $0.25 per ACH gift, plus $1.50 once per donor bank account for instant verification. ChurchTrac imports your people and families for free and charges for an optional website and app build (from $477) and accounting setup (from $399).

Limits: the 2.2% card rate depends on Stripe approving your church for nonprofit pricing. ChurchTrac’s giving page also doesn’t describe how online gifts post into fund accounting, so ask to watch a week of online gifts reach the ledger during the demo. If online gifts reach the ledger without anyone re-entering them, ChurchTrac is the only platform in this comparison that can replace a separate bookkeeping program. Otherwise, keep your current program.

Planning Center Giving and its connected modules

Best for: churches where simple means paying only for the products you use, on a free member database.

Giving: Planning Center Giving handles the weekly giving work in one app. Recurring gifts come with a forecast of next month’s recurring income and automatic updates when a donor’s card expires. Funds can carry pledges and goal tracking. Staff count cash and post check batches, and scanned checks match to donors automatically. Statements go out by email or mail, jointly or individually, and donors can download their statements in Church Center. Online gifts process through Stripe on a new account Planning Center creates during onboarding. Existing Stripe accounts can’t connect.

Church management: every Planning Center product attaches to the same person in People, so a gift, a check-in, and a serving slot sit on one record without an integration between products. People is free with no record limit, and Services, Check-Ins, Groups, Registrations, and Calendar are each free up to a limit.

Accounting: CSV exports, which work with most accounting software.

Pricing: Giving is free up to 10 donations a month, then from $15 to $239 a month. Card gifts cost 2.15% + $0.30, with 1.5% more for international cards, and ACH gifts cost $0.30. There are no setup fees, monthly minimums, or cancellation fees, and a toll-free Text2Give number costs $5 a month.

Limits: what Planning Center can’t do is post giving straight into QuickBooks, because Planning Center has no QuickBooks integration and moves giving data to accounting software through CSV exports instead. CSV imports suit some bookkeepers. If yours already imports giving from a file, nothing changes; if not, the CSV import becomes a recurring task for whoever keeps the books.

Pushpay Giving and ChurchStaq

Best for: churches where simple means less weekly work on giving, with the option to add the Pushpay ChMS and church app on the same donor record later.

Giving: churches can start with Pushpay Giving on its own or adopt the full ChurchStaq platform for giving, the Pushpay ChMS, and a custom church app. Pushpay Giving and ChurchStaq each come in Core, Advanced, and Complete packages. Core Giving includes the MyChurch App, tracking for online, offline, and non-cash gifts in one place, financial reporting, and stock and crypto giving through Engiven at no additional monthly cost. Donors can give by card, ACH, Apple Pay, Google Pay, text, kiosk, or tap-to-give.

Payments are processed in-house. Pushpay Processing is an ISO (an independent sales organization that manages merchant relationships directly), and the Pushpay platform deposits the full amount donors gave and invoices processing fees separately. Donations land in your bank account the following business day.

Church management: on ChurchStaq, every gift syncs to the giver’s profile in the Pushpay ChMS, the same profile that holds attendance, groups, and serving. If you’d rather keep your current ChMS, the integrations directory lists Planning Center, Rock RMS, and Ministry Platform among the systems Pushpay Giving connects to. The Pushpay integration with Planning Center syncs profiles in both directions and sends donations one way, into Planning Center Giving and People.

Accounting: integrations with QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, and Aplos. Because each deposit equals the gifts behind it, your bookkeeper records processing fees once, from the invoice.

Pricing: custom rates and volume-based discounts, quoted after a demo, with no setup fees, a free processing cost analysis, and contracts of one, two, or three years. Check scanning starts at $0.29 a check.

At Connect Christian Church in Carl Junction, Missouri, the deciding question was what the software would cost as the church grew.

“For me, the biggest concern was return on investment,” said Kenan Klein, the church’s worship and student minister. “How is this product going to pay for itself? Because if it doesn’t, we can’t use it.”

In 2020 the church had about 200 active members and gave online through a platform with tiered pricing. Klein built a spreadsheet of that platform’s tiers, the Pushpay price breakdown, and the tools the church used. His conclusion: the tiered plan would soon stop working for the church’s goals, and the Pushpay all-in-one pricing wouldn’t change as the church grew.

Three years after the switch, Connect Christian had about 400 active members.

Limits: canceling a contract early means paying the remaining balance, and plan changes take effect at renewal. Donor development reports (first-time, recurring, at-risk, and lapsed givers) start in Advanced, and per-campus giving designations start in Complete. If donor follow-up is why you’re looking, price Advanced, not Core.

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When a focused feature set is enough

A focused setup works when one or two people run the whole office and no one outside the office needs giving data. Match the platform to the situation:

• Under 75 names in your database, with the books in the same system: ChurchTrac’s $29 tier.
• Giving now, member records later: Tithely’s free giving plan, or Planning Center Giving on the free People database.
• Already on Planning Center People: Planning Center Giving, or Pushpay Giving through its Planning Center integration if you want in-house processing and full deposits alongside People.
• Giving plus a church app, without changing your ChMS: Pushpay Core Giving, which includes the MyChurch App.

A flat tier’s extra features are free to own. Running those features isn’t. Someone still has to set up each feature, train volunteers on it, and answer questions about it, and those hours come out of the same office.

When broader ministry workflows matter

Member records and attendance tracking stop being optional once someone on staff needs to know whether a giver who stopped giving also stopped coming. Kids’ check-in every Sunday, volunteers scheduled across more than one service, and restricted funds the board asks about are signs too.

Once those signs show up, the question moves from features to records: whether a gift, a check-in, and a serving slot land on the same person record, or someone copies each one from one system to another.

Each platform handles records differently. Planning Center keeps one People record across every product and prices each product separately. Tithely’s All-Access plan puts people, giving, service planning, the app, and the website under one $119 flat rate. ChurchTrac includes the whole feature list and the ledger on every tier. ChurchStaq keeps giving, the ChMS, and the app on one profile, and its Advanced package adds donor development reports that group givers as first-time, recurring, at-risk, or lapsed, with suggested next steps for each group.

A decision checklist for church operations and finance teams

Get written answers on these six points from every vendor you’re considering:

• Annual cost: the subscription tier you’ll need next year, add-ons, and processing priced on your last 12 months of giving.
• Deposits: whether processing fees come out of each deposit or arrive on a separate invoice, and how many business days a gift takes to reach the bank.
• Statements: whether cash, checks, and online gifts land on one statement, and whether a household can get one combined statement.
• Accounting: built-in fund accounting, a QuickBooks integration, or CSV exports, and who on staff moves the file.
• Contract: length, cancellation terms, and when a plan change takes effect.
• Recurring donors: how they move to the new platform and what help your staff gets asking them to set up their gifts again.

Bring the person who’ll run giving on the new platform into every demo, because those six answers describe that person’s weekly work. Hear the answers together.

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Questions churches ask before choosing

Which platform has the lowest total cost?

Giving volume decides. On subscription alone, Tithely’s giving plan and Planning Center’s free tiers cost nothing, and ChurchTrac starts at $29 a month with every feature included. Processing rates differ by platform and between card and ACH gifts, so ask each vendor to price your last 12 months of giving, then add the subscription tier you’ll need next year. Pushpay pricing is custom to each church. The Pushpay processing cost analysis is free.

Can online giving work without a full ChMS?

Yes. Tithely’s free giving plan works without Church Management, Planning Center Giving runs on the free People database, and Pushpay Giving is sold as a standalone product that connects to Planning Center, Rock RMS, and Ministry Platform. ChurchTrac includes giving inside its subscription rather than selling giving separately. The tradeoff is that without member records, a change in someone’s giving can’t be read against their attendance.

Which features should a small church prioritize?

Recurring gifts, accurate statements, and a clean handoff to whoever keeps the books. Look for recurring gifts that survive an expired card (Planning Center, for example, updates cards automatically), statements that include cash and checks, and fund designations that match your ledger. Kids’ check-in comes next. Add check-in if your children’s ministry meets every week.

What are the top church management systems for churches that need online giving but no frills?

Tithely Church Management (formerly Breeze), ChurchTrac, Planning Center, and the Pushpay platform. Tithely offers one flat price with free giving. ChurchTrac puts giving, people, and fund accounting in one subscription priced by database size, and Planning Center pairs a free member database with per-product pricing. Pushpay Giving works differently. It fits a church that wants in-house processing, full deposits, and next-business-day fund availability, with the option to add the ChMS and app later. For deeper side-by-side detail, see how the Pushpay platform compares with Breeze, Tithely, and Planning Center.

Before the 2027 budget is set

If your church sets its 2027 budget this fall, choose the platform before the software line is approved. Book a Pushpay demo for November and ask for the free processing cost analysis on your last 12 months of giving. Then ask to watch a week of giving work in the Pushpay platform, from Sunday’s check batch to the bank deposit to a donor’s year-end statement. Ask every vendor to show the same week.

A switch timed for January 1 also keeps every 2027 gift on one platform’s giving statement.

Not ready for a demo? Best church giving platforms for small churches compares eight giving platforms by church stage, with separate advice for church plants and for established small churches.