Which church giving platforms do the most for donor management?

Your bookkeeper needs your church’s giving records to close the month and send statements in January. Your pastors need the same records for something else entirely.

They need to know who gave for the first time at Easter. Which family started a monthly gift during the building campaign. Who gave every month for years and then stopped.

In ministry, we’re careful about reading giving data that way, and we should be. None of us went into church work to treat people like accounts, and a giving report that only ranks people by dollar amount does exactly that. But when a recurring gift stops, the record shows it whether anyone on staff noticed or not. Sometimes, it’s the first sign a family has drifted.

Sometimes it’s the only sign you’ll get.

So set card processing aside for a minute, since every platform in this comparison handles it. The better question for a demo is what the software hands your staff when a giver drifts: a name buried in a year-end report, or a list on Monday morning with a next step attached.

The six platforms compared here are the Pushpay® platform, Tithely, Planning Center Giving, Subsplash, Kindrid, and DonorPerfect. Donor records come first, then statements, reporting, and the member database, then cost and fit.

Six platforms, side by side

Donor records, statements, and integrations at a glance

Everything in the table comes from each vendor’s public product, pricing, and help pages as of October 2026. Prices move. Confirm them with each vendor.

How each platform keeps track of givers

Pushpay

The Pushpay platform hands your staff a named list and a next step.

Donor Development groups givers as first-time, second-time, recurring, at-risk, or lapsed, and its reports come with suggested actions for each group, so first-time givers can be thanked and lapsed givers re-engaged instead of everyone getting the same email. Staff can pull top donors and see giving history by individual or by household. Workflows you build can move a giver from one stage to the next. And pastors can get a weekly giving snapshot in their inbox without asking anyone to run a report.

In ChurchStaq (Pushpay Giving, the church management system, and the church app, sold together), every gift syncs to the giver’s profile. Same profile as attendance. Same profile as groups and serving. When someone’s giving changes, whoever opens that profile can see whether their attendance or serving changed with it.

Giving and the ChMS each have an AI tool. In giving, staff can type a question in plain language (which donors gave last year but not this year, say) and get the answer back as a visual. In the ChMS, since September 2026, every ChurchStaq church can generate a summary of one person’s involvement, covering attendance, groups, serving, and, for staff allowed to see it, giving. The summary ends with suggested next steps.

A check-in with someone whose attendance has slipped, for instance.

Some follow-up on recurring gifts happens without anyone on staff touching it, and that’s the part we’d look at hardest. Everygift® features in Pushpay Giving act on recurring gifts before they lapse. A donor whose card is about to expire hears about it before the expiration date. If a payment fails anyway, the donor gets an email asking them to update it and make up the missed gift. Recurring Suggestion reads a donor’s giving pattern and proposes a recurring schedule, while Offline Conversion invites cash and check givers to try giving online.

For a church averaging about 1,000 in weekly attendance, Everygift features grow and secure about $37,000 a year.

“If it doesn’t live here, it’s not true.”

That was the mantra at First Orlando in 2017, when the church moved to Pushpay Giving and Church Community Builder (now the Pushpay ChMS). The database it replaced dated to the late 1970s and had been “Frankenstein-ed over 30 or 40 years,” said Matthew Robinson, the church’s pastor of ministries and administration. Custom spreadsheets and databases built for one staff member went unmaintained once that person left. Since the move, Robinson said, giving households have doubled, from about 4,000 to about 8,000.

Households giving on a recurring basis? Up sixfold over the same stretch.

Donor Development starts in the Advanced package, not Core, and Pushpay pricing is quoted after a demo instead of published. If donor segments are why you’re looking, ask for Advanced by name.

Keeping your current ChMS? Pushpay Giving connects to Planning Center, Rock RMS, and Ministry Platform, among the partners in the integrations directory.

Tithely

Tithely hands your staff a giving dashboard, plus a member database if you’re on Church Management. Giving has no monthly fee. Church Management runs a flat $72 a month, its People database syncs with giving, and custom dashboards filter giving by date, fund, or giver type. Automations cover routine work like birthday emails and group assignments.

An at-risk or lapsed-giver list isn’t among Tithely’s published features. Ask to see how your staff would build one.

Planning Center Giving

Planning Center Giving hands your staff donor reports tied to a shared People record, and Planning Center builds everything around that record. Giving is one app in a suite built on People, Planning Center’s free church database, so every gift attaches to the same person record the other Planning Center apps use. Reports group by donor, fund, campus, pledge campaign, and payout. Donor reports pick out new and recurring givers. There’s a forecast of next month’s recurring income (handy for a finance team building next year’s budget), expired cards update automatically, and online gifts run through Stripe.

Following up on those reports falls to your staff, through workflows they set up in People.

Subsplash

Subsplash hands your staff analytics inside an app and media platform. Giving is part of Subsplash One, next to custom apps, websites, and media, and the Dashboard tracks people and giving together, with reporting on recurring gifts and individual donors.

If Sunday still brings in a stack of paper, ask to see the bulk scanner. It takes more than a hundred checks in one pass and syncs them to the database.

Subsplash’s giving page doesn’t describe donor stages or a lapsed-giver list. Subsplash is built around the app and media side of church life, and giving is one piece of that package.

Kindrid

Kindrid hands your staff a giving dashboard, and giving is what Kindrid is built around. Text, online, and in-app giving come first, with unlimited fund designations, multi-location tracking, and Church Success Coaches who help a church launch giving. Kindrid is part of Ministry Brands.

Pricing is per transaction. No subscription.

Up to 100 givers, a church pays 3% + $0.42 per card gift and 1% + $0.42 per ACH gift; from 101 to 500 givers, card gifts drop to 2.6% + $0.42. The monthly minimum is $10. Donor segments, giving statements, and cash and check entry don’t appear among Kindrid’s published features, so you’ll want a separate ChMS for the people side and a clear answer on how Kindrid and that ChMS connect.

DonorPerfect

DonorPerfect is the outlier here, because it hands your staff a fundraising CRM rather than a church platform. It has served nonprofit development teams for more than forty years. Its page for religious organizations talks about tithing programs, capital campaign pledges, and year-end giving summaries. Moves management (tracking each major donor through planned cultivation steps) is built in, and the Plus plan adds batch gift entry, automated alerts and tasks, and a QuickBooks integration. A ministry with a development office cultivating major donors is the use case it fits.

The gap is everything a ChMS tracks. DonorPerfect presents itself as fundraising software, not church management software, and that same religious-organizations page doesn’t mention households, attendance, or membership. Plans start at $119 a month, priced by custom quote.

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Statements, reporting, and the people database

From the offering plate to the giving statement

A giving statement can only include the gifts sitting in the system that runs it.

So a check someone logged in a spreadsheet, or a cash gift recorded somewhere the giving platform can’t see, won’t be on it. And the donor is the one who notices, in January.

Every platform here takes online gifts. Where they split is cash and checks. On the Pushpay platform, online, offline, and non-cash gifts sit in one place, and statements draw on all three. Tithely records cash and checks and can scan checks and envelopes, while Planning Center posts batches and matches scanned checks to donors. Subsplash scans checks straight into its database, and DonorPerfect adds batch entry on its Plus plan.

At River City Christian Church, year-end statements used to be done mostly by hand. “There were 12,000 people in the database, but we had no way of knowing who was active,” said Carolyn Melville, the church’s database administrator. “Even running a report for giving statements was horrible.” After the report came at least a day of printing on special Christmas paper and stuffing envelopes.

Now the church’s year-end statements go out from the Pushpay platform with each person’s personalized giving link.

“Pushpay saves us so much time at the end of the year,” Melville said.

Household statements are the other trouble spot. Pushpay donors who are the primary or secondary contact on a household can see household statements on the web or in the church app. Tithely sends one statement to the primary head of household by default (a toggle sends separate ones), and Planning Center can send statements to joint or individual donors.

Where donor records meet member and household records

A donor record tells you what someone gave. A member record tells you whether they’re in a group, serving on a team, or checking kids in on Sunday. Put both on one record and a drop in giving is easier to read, because you can see whether attendance dropped with it.

Or didn’t.

On ChurchStaq, giving and member data share one profile. Pushpay Insights puts giving and engagement data in a single view, and staff can pull the people who may be disengaging into a follow-up process.

Planning Center and Tithely each pair giving with a People database, and Subsplash keeps both in its Dashboard. Kindrid and DonorPerfect keep donor records outside the member database entirely, which means the connection is either an integration or a person on your staff carrying information from one screen to another.

If your ChMS is staying, ask which way the data moves. The Pushpay integration with Planning Center, for example, syncs profiles in both directions and sends donations one way, into Planning Center Giving.

Funds, campuses, and the books

Every platform here tracks gifts by fund. Fund accounting is the ledger side of that job, where each restricted fund (the building fund, a missions trip, benevolence) carries its own balance and the church can show the money went where it was given. When does that start to matter? Once restricted gifts are big enough that your finance committee, or an auditor, asks where each one went.

A giving platform feeds the ledger. It doesn’t replace it.

The Pushpay platform processes its own payments (it’s an ISO, an independent sales organization that manages its own merchant relationships), deposits the full gift amount, and invoices processing fees separately. Fees never come out of the deposit. Each deposit matches the gifts behind it, and there’s no fee adjustment to book against every deposit. From there, the Pushpay platform connects to QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, and Aplos (fund accounting software). Tithely connects to QuickBooks Online, as does DonorPerfect on its Plus plan, while Planning Center relies on CSV exports and Subsplash lets staff mark transfers as reconciled.

Multi-campus churches need campus to travel with every gift. On the Pushpay platform, each campus manages its own giving while leadership sees unified reporting across all of them, and per-campus giving designations are part of the Complete package. Planning Center reports filter by campus, Subsplash giving links can point to one, and Kindrid lists multi-location tracking.

Cost and fit

What you’ll pay

Price the whole year. Not the monthly fee.

Add the subscription, processing on card and ACH gifts, per-check scanning fees, and add-ons (Tithely’s text giving, for example, is $19 a month on its free plan). The pricing models differ more than the processing rates do. Tithely and Subsplash charge no monthly fee for giving, Planning Center scales with how many donations you take each month, Kindrid charges per transaction with a $10 minimum, and DonorPerfect starts at $119 a month. Pushpay plans are built around your church, with no setup fees and contracts of one, two, or three years.

Rates are the easiest line to compare, and they do matter. But if two platforms come in close on price, take the one that tells you who stopped giving.

A rate difference shows up on an invoice. A lapsed giver doesn’t show up anywhere.

Fit with the systems you already run

Match the platform to your situation:

• Keeping Planning Center People or another ChMS: Pushpay Giving’s ChMS integrations let donor development and Everygift features run alongside the database your staff already knows. Planning Center Giving is the in-house option for a staff that already works in People.
• Replacing the member database too: ChurchStaq, Tithely Church Management, and Subsplash One each put people and giving in one system, and ChurchStaq is the one of the three that pairs that shared record with donor stages and recurring-gift recovery.
• Running a development office: DonorPerfect.
• Adding giving without a subscription: Kindrid fits a church that wants text and online giving priced per transaction and already has a ChMS for the people side.

If most of your giving and communication already happens on phones, app integration moves up your list of requirements. Subsplash is a natural candidate there. So is the Pushpay church app, where members give, see their giving history, and open their statements. When First Orlando asked its congregation in 2022 for the largest single-week offering in the church’s history, members gave more than $1 million, and “most of our people gave on their phone through Pushpay,” Robinson said.

Switching without losing recurring givers

Recurring gifts are the hardest part of any move.

A donor’s saved card or bank account doesn’t follow them to a new platform. Planning Center says recurring donations can’t be transferred directly, and it’s the same moving onto the Pushpay platform, so every recurring donor sets up their gift again. What changes from vendor to vendor is how much help you get asking them to do it. The Pushpay team migrates donor records for churches that switch, and the Recurring Migration tool runs the transition as a campaign. Your staff gets email templates, a real-time dashboard of who has moved and who hasn’t, and automated reminders for donors who start the switch and stall.

Then there’s giving history. Statements cover the calendar year, so a midyear switch means importing the old system’s gifts or sending donors two statements (and answering every donor who asks why they got two). If you can, start January 1 and let 2027 come from one system. For the setup and training side of a switch, see how church giving platforms compare on setup.

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Questions about church donor management software

Which features help your church keep givers giving?

Recurring giving, plus the safeguards that keep recurring gifts from lapsing. Look for a reminder before a card expires, a recovery email when a payment fails, and a way to attach a recurring gift to a campaign pledge. The pledge link matters most in a capital campaign: across Pushpay churches, 58% of pledges made without a recurring gift go unfulfilled. The Pushpay platform includes all three through Everygift. Planning Center updates expired cards automatically.

Which church giving systems provide the most donor management features?

For a church, the Pushpay platform. It pairs in-house payment processing with donor stages (first-time, recurring, at-risk, and lapsed), Everygift recovery features, household giving statements, and a ChMS that keeps giving on the same profile as attendance, groups, and serving.

DonorPerfect offers deep fundraising CRM tools for nonprofit development teams, though its church page doesn’t cover households, attendance, or membership. Planning Center Giving and Tithely pair giving with a member database and donor reporting. Subsplash is app- and media-first, and Kindrid is giving-first. For deeper side-by-side detail, see how the Pushpay platform compares with Tithely, Planning Center, and Subsplash.

How do giving statements differ from transaction receipts?

A receipt confirms one gift. A giving statement totals a donor’s gifts for a period, usually the calendar year, and it’s the document donors keep for their taxes. The IRS requires a written acknowledgment for any single contribution of $250 or more, and an annual statement can serve as that acknowledgment when it lists the required details. On the Pushpay platform, donors get an emailed receipt after every successful gift and can open their annual statements on the web or in the church app.

The giving history in a donor’s login doesn’t replace the church’s statement for tax purposes.

What should your church verify about integrations and pricing?

Get these answers in writing before you sign:

• Integrations: which way data moves, how often it syncs, and what happens to a donor the system can’t match.
• Processing: card and ACH rates quoted separately, any per-transaction fee, and any monthly minimum.
• Contracts: length, cancellation terms, and when a plan change takes effect.
• Packages: which tier includes donor segments, campaign pledges, and per-campus giving.
• Migration: who moves donor records and giving history, and what help you get asking recurring donors to switch.

Ahead of year-end giving

Book a Pushpay demo for November, before year-end giving and the January statement run take over your calendar. Bring the lapsed-giver request (everyone who gave in 2025 and hasn’t given in 2026, with household and last gift date) and watch the platform answer it.

Then ask what the platform would have your staff do about each name on that list.

Not ready for a demo? The Everygift ROI calculator takes your weekly attendance and your current card and ACH rates and estimates what Everygift features would secure and grow at your church in a year.