Church software programs: what to look for and how to choose the right one

Church software usually goes wrong one purchase at a time. Online giving gets added during a building campaign, a check-in system shows up before VBS, and eventually the same family sits in several databases that don’t agree with each other. The fix is a system where giving, people, and communication share one record, so the guest who gives, joins a group, and signs up to serve is one person in your data instead of three.

Price is the other half of the decision, and it’s harder to compare than it should be. As of October 14, 2026, published plans run from $0 for Planning Center’s free tiers to $119 a month for Tithely All Access or ChurchTrac’s unlimited plan, before processing fees. Pushpay® and Subsplash price their full platforms by quote. The pricing comparison below puts six platforms side by side, including Pushpay’s all-in-one ChurchStaq®.

For a large or multi-site church, or any church whose board asks hard questions about donor data, two more things shape the shortlist: how the platform holds up across campuses, and what a vendor can show about its security and uptime on paper.

If you lead a large or multi-site church

For a large or multi-site church that wants giving, church management, and an app under one contract, the strongest fit is the ChurchStaq platform on its Complete tier. Each campus gets its own giving designations, its own bank account, and its own branding in the app, while leadership sees reporting across every campus. Of the 10 largest U.S. churches, 7 run on the Pushpay platform.

Giving is where size changes the math. The Pushpay platform runs its own payment processing as an ISO (an independent sales organization that manages its merchant relationships directly) instead of routing gifts through a third-party processor, and its transaction success rate is 95.1%, against a 92.5% industry average. At large-church volume, that gap is a budget line. When a recurring gift fails anyway, Everygift® features prompt the donor to update the payment method and make up the missed gift.

As of October 29, 2026, here’s how four platforms that sell to large churches compare on the questions an executive pastor asks first.

You don’t have to replace your database to change how giving works. Planning Center and Rock RMS are both listed ChMS partners in the Pushpay integrations directory, so giving can run on the Pushpay platform while your staff keeps the member database it knows. What you give up is the single profile. With two systems, gifts reach the member record through a sync, and someone on your staff has to own that sync.

One system instead of a pile of spreadsheets

Every worship service, event, and outreach effort runs on records: who gave, who came, who’s scheduled, who needs a call. Church software keeps those records in one place so your staff isn’t rebuilding them from spreadsheets each week.

The integration is the point. When giving, communication, and member records live in separate tools, someone has to move data between them, and the copies drift apart. In one system, a family’s new address updates everywhere at once.

ChurchStaq works that way. It keeps one profile per person from their first gift or first visit, across giving, church management, and the church app, for churches from a single site to multiple campuses.

Features worth paying for

A feature list tells you what a system can do. Whether your staff and volunteers will use it on an ordinary Tuesday tells you more. These are the areas that carry the most weight.

Church giving and financial management

Giving funds everything else, so start here. Members should be able to give online, in an app, or by text, and set up a recurring gift once instead of remembering every Sunday. Recurring gifts are what carry a budget through the summer slump and the weeks after Easter.

Reporting matters as much as the donation form. Your finance team needs giving by fund, trends over time, and year-end contribution statements without a spreadsheet in between.

Pushpay’s church giving platform records online, app, text, cash, and check gifts in one place. Its Everygift features recover failed recurring payments, and when a donor’s card expires, the system handles the update automatically.

Church management system (ChMS) for member engagement

A church management system (ChMS) is where you see who’s connected and who’s drifting. One member database tracks attendance, small groups, and serving, so a pastor can see when a family stops checking in their kids before anyone mentions it.

Follow-up workflows can do the remembering. A first-time guest gets a welcome note, a new volunteer gets routed to a background check, and a prayer request reaches the right pastor, each triggered by the record instead of someone’s memory.

Volunteers need the same structure. A ChMS with volunteer scheduling lets team leaders assign positions, see who’s available, and send reminders without a group text chain. A shared calendar keeps church events from landing on the same night in the same room.

Pushpay’s ChMS connects each member profile to giving and serving history, with follow-up processes, kids check-in, and volunteer scheduling in the same system.

Mobile accessibility and church apps

Email open rates and social media algorithms decide much of what your people see from you. A branded church app gives them one place to watch sermons, register for events, and give, and push notifications go straight to their phones.

That covers the urgent stuff too: a volunteer shift reminder, a retreat registration deadline, a weather change to Sunday’s schedule.

Pushpay’s church app comes as the standard MyChurch app or a fully custom app branded to your church, depending on the plan.

Insights and analytics

Good ministry decisions come from data you trust. Giving trends, attendance patterns, and serving levels show where staff time should go: whether new visitors come back, which ministries are growing, and when giving dips.

The value is in acting on it. If volunteer sign-ups fall, look at recruitment before the gaps show up on a Sunday. If a communication channel isn’t reaching people, move the message somewhere it will.

Pushpay Insights puts giving, attendance, and serving on one dashboard and flags at-risk attenders, donors, and volunteers so your team can follow up early.

How to evaluate church software programs

Every vendor promises to simplify ministry. The way to test that promise is to run your church’s real work through the system before you sign.

Start with your church’s needs

Before comparing vendors, write down the two or three problems that cost your team the most time. A single-campus church and a multi-site church need different things, and so does a church whose biggest headache is giving versus one whose biggest headache is volunteers. Prioritize the software that solves your top problems, and treat everything else as a bonus. If you’re not sure where your gaps are, Pushpay’s Church Tech Check is a good place to start.

Room to grow

Ministry doesn’t stand still. A system that works for 200 people should handle 2,000 without a migration, and adding a campus should mean changing a plan rather than changing vendors. Ask each vendor what changes, and what it costs, at the next size up.

Ease of use

Pastors, administrators, volunteers, and members all touch the system, so a clean interface matters more than a long feature list. Software that’s hard to learn gets abandoned. (And abandoned software keeps billing.)

Integration with existing tools

Your church already runs on other platforms for accounting, payroll, and livestreaming. A new system that doesn’t connect to them means duplicate entry and manual exports. Ask for the integration list and confirm every tool you already pay for is on it.

Pushpay doesn’t charge extra for its integrations and offers 80+ of them, including Gusto for payroll and Resi for streaming (those subscriptions are billed separately). If your books live in QuickBooks Online, here’s how church giving platforms connect to it.

Security and compliance

For a U.S. church, the strongest security evidence is paperwork a vendor will hand over. Security pages tend to read alike, so ask each vendor on your shortlist for these:

• Card compliance: The PCI DSS Attestation of Compliance (the yearly form confirming the company’s card handling was checked against the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), and whether the company was assessed as a service provider or as a merchant.
• Who moves the money: Whether the vendor processes gifts itself or passes them to a processor such as Stripe. That decides whose systems hold card data and who answers when a deposit is held.
• Independent audits: A SOC 2 Type 2 report (an outside auditor’s test of whether security controls worked over a period of months) or a description of the external audit the vendor uses instead, plus the date of its latest penetration test.
• Your side of the work: Which security tasks stay with your church. Pushpay publishes a PCI shared responsibility matrix that spells this out.
• Breach notice: How quickly the vendor would tell you about an incident involving your data. Every U.S. state has a data breach notification law, so ask your attorney whether yours reaches your church.

If a vendor can’t produce any of these before you sign, score it that way.

Customer support and training

Even good software has a learning curve. Look for live support, onboarding help, and training your team can come back to, and check the support hours against the hours your team works, weekends included.

Pushpay’s support runs Monday through Friday, 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific, with weekend and holiday coverage for urgent issues. Pushpay’s support offering includes an implementation coach and a customer success manager, and Pushpay University offers courses, certifications, and live training.

A scorecard for your shortlist

The way to choose the right church management software is to score every finalist against the same list, with the person who’ll do each job doing the scoring. Put your two or three finalists side by side and rate each row from 1 to 5.

Agree on how much each row counts before the first demo. Once a favorite emerges, every row starts leaning toward it.

Security, backups, and uptime compared

As of October 29, 2026, no single church platform leads on every security measure, because each vendor publishes a different kind of evidence. Pushpay is a PCI-DSS Level 1 Service Provider audited by an external party every year. Planning Center holds a SOC 2 Type 2 report it shares on request. Tithely and Subsplash both state PCI Level 1 compliance, and Tithely, ChurchTrac, and Planning Center describe how often they back up data.

The table below records what each vendor states on its own security and status pages. Those are claims, so use the table as a list of documents to request.

Read the payment column first. A vendor that runs its own payment processing, as Pushpay does as an ISO, has its card handling inside its own PCI assessment. A vendor that hands processing to Stripe or a banking partner relies on that partner for much of the card-data protection. Both can be done well. Ask each vendor where card numbers are stored and which company is assessed for them.

And if your board or auditor asks for a SOC 2 report by name, ask every vendor on your list for one. Planning Center’s security page offers its report on request.

A security and privacy checklist

For a church with strong security and privacy needs, the best church management software is the one that passes this checklist with documents attached. A long security page doesn’t count until the vendor backs it up.

• Encryption: Data encrypted in transit and at rest, including backups. Ask how backups are encrypted and how long they’re kept.
• Permissions: Roles that control who sees giving amounts and, for a multi-site church, who sees another campus’s records. Ask for a demo login with a volunteer’s permissions and look at what it shows.
• Audits: A PCI attestation, a SOC 2 Type 2 report, or a description of the external audit in its place, plus the date of the latest penetration test.
• Payment compliance: Which company processes the money, its PCI level, and whether the software vendor ever stores full card numbers.
• Incident response: Who responds when a monitoring alert fires overnight, how fast the vendor notifies affected churches, and whether incident history is public.
• Data portability: Which records you can export (people, households, giving history, and attendance), in what format, and how long the vendor keeps your data after the contract ends.

Permissions and portability depend on your church as much as on the vendor. A permission model protects donors only if someone sets it up by role at launch. An export helps only if someone has tested it.

How to judge reliability and uptime

None of the six vendors puts an uptime guarantee on its security or status pages, so judge reliability on evidence you can check yourself:

1. Status page: Pushpay, Planning Center, Tithely, and Subsplash each run a public status page with recent incident history. Read the last 90 days for Sunday-morning incidents and how long each one took to resolve.
2. Stated uptime: Pushpay states 99.99% uptime, Tithely states 99.9% service availability, and ChurchTrac states 99.9999%. Over a year, 99.9% allows almost nine hours of downtime and 99.99% allows under an hour. Ask what each figure measures, over what period, and whether it’s in your contract.
3. The payment path: An app can be up while a payment gateway is down. On the Pushpay platform, Assured® Payments detects when a payment gateway is down, queues the gifts, and processes them once the gateway recovers. In 2025, the feature was active for more than 500 hours and secured $18.7 million in gifts.
4. Weekend support: Sunday morning is when an outage costs a church the most. Pushpay covers urgent issues on weekends and holidays, and Subsplash lists tech support seven days a week. Ask every vendor who answers at 9 a.m. on a Sunday.

For an outside view, ask each vendor for two reference churches your size. Then ask those churches one question: what happened the last time the system went down on a weekend?

Church software pricing compared

Prices last checked October 20, 2026, on each vendor’s public pricing page; Pushpay’s processing rates are from Pushpay. Vendors change pricing without notice, so confirm current rates before you buy. Processing fees are U.S. rates.

Church software costs anywhere from $0 to a few hundred dollars a month before processing fees, and the pricing model matters as much as the sticker. Planning Center charges per product based on usage. Tithely and ChurchTrac charge a flat monthly rate. Pushpay and Subsplash price their full platforms by quote. Rock RMS charges no license fee at all and asks for a donation instead.

Staff seats rarely drive the bill. Pushpay states there’s no limit on users or administrators, Tithely includes unlimited admin users on paid plans, and Planning Center’s People database is free for unlimited users. The exception is Planning Center Services, which is priced by how many team members access it.

Strengths and tradeoffs, platform by platform

As of October 20, 2026, the biggest differences between popular church management platforms are how they charge and what the base price includes. The table below pairs each platform’s main strengths with its main limitations and the church size it fits best.

For a closer look at individual platforms, see the best church management software for 2026 or how Pushpay compares.

Mid-size churches (200 to 1,000 people)

For a church of 200 to 1,000 people, the realistic shortlist is Planning Center, Tithely, ChurchTrac, and Pushpay. Which one is the best value depends on two things more than the subscription line: how much of your giving arrives by card, and whether you’d rather buy products one at a time or sign one contract.

Start with processing, because it scales with every gift and the subscription doesn’t. At published U.S. rates, the fee on a $100 gift works out like this:

Each tenth of a point on the card rate is $1,000 a year for every $1 million your church receives by card. What your processing fee funds breaks down what sits behind that percentage.

The other side of the ledger is recurring gifts that fail and never come back. Pushpay’s Everygift features recover failed transactions, which a per-gift fee comparison doesn’t capture.

To run it for your church, pull last year’s online giving from your current platform and split it by card and bank. Multiply each dollar total by that method’s percentage, then add the per-gift fee times the number of gifts. Add the annual subscription from the list below, and that’s the number to compare.

Text giving is its own line item on some plans. It’s included with Pushpay Giving and Subsplash Giving, costs $5 a month for a Planning Center toll-free number, and costs $19 a month on Tithely’s free Giving plan (it’s included in All Access). On ChurchTrac, text giving comes with Enhanced Messaging, a $7 monthly add-on that includes 250 messaging credits. The best text-to-give platforms for churches compares them in more detail.

Then the subscription:

• Tithely: Church Management is $72 a month at any size, and All Access (adding the app, website, and worship planning) is $119. Annual billing takes about 25% off Church Management.
• ChurchTrac: $79 a month for 500 names, $99 for 1,000, and $119 for unlimited, with 10% off for paying yearly. Count every child and guest you track, because each one is a name.
• Planning Center: People is free. Giving, Services, Check-Ins, and Groups each climb the same ladder ($15, $32, $69, $115, $179, and $239 a month), keyed to their own count. Planning Center estimates monthly donations at weekly attendance × 0.17 × 4.3, so a church averaging 500 on the weekend lands near 366 donations a month and the $69 Giving tier.
• Pushpay: the subscription comes by quote, and the processing rate depends on your total giving volume. The published terms are no setup fees, no user limits, no extra charge for integrations, check scanning from $0.29 per check, and a 1-, 2-, or 3-year contract. Pushpay reports that churches of about 1,000 people grow and secure $37,000 a year with its Everygift features.

Ask Pushpay for your processing rate in writing alongside the subscription quote. Then compare total cost (subscription plus fees on your actual mix of card and bank gifts) across every vendor on your list.

After price, the next question for a mid-size church is what happens at the next size up. Which of your current tools connect, and what changes on the bill when you add a service, a ministry, or a campus?

If check-in or volunteer scheduling is on your list for year one, ask for the Advanced tier in your Pushpay quote so both are live at launch.

Buying your first ChMS

If this is your first church management system, compare what each plan includes before you compare the prices. As of October 20, 2026, the platforms below differ most on whether child check-in, volunteer scheduling, and accounting sit in the base price or a higher tier.

Pushpay’s Core tier covers giving, people, groups, attendance, and follow-up. Advanced adds check-in, volunteer scheduling, service plans, and Pushpay Insights.

Subsplash One isn’t in the table because its price and package contents come by quote.

Price the plan at the size you expect in two years. A ChurchTrac church growing from 75 to 500 names goes from $29 to $79 a month, and on Planning Center each product climbs its own ladder as the counts rise.

Every vendor here lets you test with your own data before paying: Planning Center has free tiers on every product, Tithely and ChurchTrac offer 30-day trials, and Pushpay offers a self-guided product tour and a demo. Smaller churches can go deeper with how to choose church management software for small churches.

Running more than one campus

For a multi-campus church, the best value is the tier that keeps each campus’s money, people data, and branding separate without a second system. None of the vendors below publishes a limit on how many campuses you can run.

Total cost for a multi-site church is the subscription, plus processing on every campus’s giving, plus onboarding. Pushpay, Planning Center, and Tithely all state no setup fees, though Pushpay offers paid coaching on top.

Pushpay’s per-campus features live on the Complete tier, which keeps separate deposits and branding for each campus inside one giving and ChMS contract. On Planning Center, the question to ask is access: if campus staff shouldn’t see another campus’s records, you’ll manage that person by person. On ChurchTrac, ask early whether your structure calls for one account or one per campus, and what a second account costs.

Rock RMS says it runs 10 of the 12 largest churches in the U.S. It charges no license fee at any campus count, though you’ll still pay a hosting partner or host it yourself. For a fuller checklist, see the multi-campus ChMS buying guide and the roundup of church apps for multi-campus churches.

Free and low-cost options for startup churches

The cheapest way to start is Planning Center’s free tiers or Tithely’s free giving, and each runs out at a predictable point. The table shows where every free or entry plan stops.

Free is a fine place to start and an awkward place to leave, because giving is the hardest thing to move. Planning Center notes that recurring donations can’t be transferred into its Giving product directly, so donors set them up again. Pushpay has migration tools that move recurring givers over. Ask every vendor on your list how recurring gifts move in and out before your first donor sets one up. What you get (and give up) with free church management software covers the rest of the tradeoff.

What should a church plant pick?

The best giving software for a church plant takes gifts before launch Sunday, sets up recurring giving from the first week, and won’t force a move when you add staff or a second service.

If your plant is 6 to 18 months from public launch and affiliated with a recognized planting network, Pushpay’s church plant grant covers the full platform free for 12 months: Giving with Everygift, ChMS with kids check-in, and a mobile app. It’s the same platform established multi-site churches run, so there’s no migration later. Standard processing rates still apply.

Already launched, or planting outside a network? Planning Center offers church plants a free first year on request. Tithely gives qualifying plants All Access free for the first year (it values that at $1,500), then $119 a month. ChurchTrac builds custom quotes for plants, and Pushpay prices independent plants case by case.

Whichever you shortlist, run it through these before you sign:

• Setup speed: Can you take a gift before launch Sunday? Tithely says its giving setup takes 5 to 10 minutes, and Pushpay onboards grant churches during pre-launch. Ask each vendor for a go-live date.
• Recurring giving: Can a giver set up a recurring gift in the same flow as a first gift? Test that flow on a phone before your launch team gets the link.
• Year-two cost: Price the month the free year ends at the attendance you’re planning for. Tithely’s is $119 a month, Planning Center’s depends on which products you’re using by then, and Pushpay’s is a quote.
• Contract: Planning Center and Tithely run month to month. Pushpay’s standard plans run 1, 2, or 3 years.
• Data ownership: Ask how you’d export your people and giving history if you left, in what format, and whether recurring gifts could move with you. Get the answer in writing while you’re still small enough for it to be easy.
• Integrations: List the tools you already pay for and confirm each one connects. Tithely connects to QuickBooks Online, Planning Center runs background checks through Checkr, and Pushpay offers 80+ integrations, including Gusto for payroll.
• Growth: Ask what changes when you add a second service or a second campus, and which tier that puts you on.

For more on the giving side, see the best giving software for church plants and 5 things every church planter should know about tech.

Planning and leadership tools

Church planning software covers two jobs that vendors price differently: service planning (the order of service and who’s on each team) and leadership follow-through (follow-up processes, dashboards, and pastoral notes).

Automated volunteer scheduling

For automated volunteer scheduling you can price without a sales call, start with Planning Center Services. It fills open positions based on blockout dates, preferences, and when each person last served, and it’s free up to 5 team members.

Ease of use doesn’t show up on a pricing page. Use the trial: build next month’s schedule for one real team, send it, and watch how the tool handles the people who decline.

And no scheduler fixes a thin bench. Automation fills positions from the volunteers you already have. Recruiting the next ones is still on you, and the recruiting section of the guide to managing church volunteers covers it.

For Catholic parishes

Low-cost tools or an integrated parish platform?

For a Catholic parish, low-cost modular tools (a free or inexpensive giving tool, a basic database, and spreadsheets for sacramental records) win on monthly price. An integrated platform such as the ParishStaq® platform costs more per month and keeps giving, sacramental records, and safe environment status on one parishioner profile, with one vendor to vet. The pros and cons come down to whether your parish would rather pay in subscription dollars or in staff hours spent keeping separate tools in line.

A parish with one church, one Mass schedule, and a business manager who keeps careful spreadsheets can do well on low-cost tools. Once a school, a second worship site, or a large faith formation program enters the picture, every family exists in more places, and the hours spent reconciling them don’t appear on any invoice. Price both options with those hours counted.

Background checks and safe environment compliance

For a parish, the right setup puts each volunteer’s safe environment status on the same profile your staff uses to schedule them. That way a volunteer with a lapsed certification doesn’t land on next week’s catechism schedule because the status lived in a different portal.

The Pushpay ChMS that runs ParishStaq connects to VIRTUS through an API integration announced in March 2024. Staff can check a volunteer’s certification status and expiration date from inside ParishStaq and track diocesan compliance requirements. For background checks, the Pushpay integrations directory lists Checkr, Protect My Ministry, SecureSearch, MinistrySafe, and Safeguard from Abuse.

When you evaluate any platform’s compliance tracking, ask:

• Where status shows: On the volunteer’s profile in the ChMS, or only inside the provider’s portal.
• Expiration: Whether staff see an expiration date before a certification lapses.
• Scheduling: Whether someone without a current certification can still be put on a schedule, and who gets told if they are.
• Cost: Who pays for each background check, and whether the provider bills your parish directly.

Software tracks compliance. It doesn’t run your safe environment program. Someone on your staff still assigns training, follows up on lapses, and answers to the diocese.

Common mistakes to avoid when choosing church software

The expensive mistakes rarely show up in a demo. They show up a year in.

Choosing software that doesn’t integrate

Separate tools for giving, people, and communication mean duplicate entry, more errors, and no single view of what’s happening in your church. Pick a platform where those share one record, or confirm the integrations exist before you buy.

Overlooking mobile accessibility

Members expect to give, register, and watch from their phones. Staff and volunteers need mobile access too, for schedules, attendance, and check-in. A platform that’s awkward on a phone limits both groups.

Focusing only on price instead of long-term value

The cheapest plan in year one can cost more by year three if you outgrow it, because moving recurring gifts between giving platforms can mean asking donors to set them up again. Price the plan you’ll need at your expected size, add processing fees on your real mix of card and bank gifts, and compare that total. What free church management software costs you walks through the hidden side of starting free.

Ignoring user adoption and training

Powerful software doesn’t help if staff and volunteers won’t use it. Choose a platform your least technical volunteer can learn, and a vendor with live support and a training library your team will go back to.

Skipping over insights and reporting

Without data on giving, attendance, and serving, you’re guessing about what’s working. Make sure the reports you’ll need come standard, so you aren’t paying for custom builds or exporting to spreadsheets to answer basic questions.

Steps to successfully implement software

A good system rolled out badly still fails. Planning, training, and a phased rollout are what get software adopted.

Get leadership and staff buy-in

Before a technology change, pastors, administrators, and ministry leads need to know why it’s happening and what it changes for them. Answer the practical questions early. Will this save the admin team time? Will members find it easier to give? Who owns cleaning up the data before the move? Aligned leadership makes the rest of the rollout easier.

Demo and test options

Reading about features is different from using them. Use demos, free trials, or a pilot, and test with tasks you do every week: send a church-wide email, track a Sunday’s attendance, process a donation.

Train staff and volunteers

Break training into short, role-specific sessions instead of one full-system walkthrough. Finance learns gift entry and statements, pastors learn follow-up, and volunteer leaders learn scheduling. Vendors with training videos, live support, and a knowledge base make this easier because people can go back to them later.

Gradual rollout strategy

Switching everything overnight invites confusion. Some churches start with online giving and add member management later; others pilot with one ministry or one campus first. Either way, you get time to fix problems and collect feedback before the whole church is on the new system.

Monitor and adjust

Implementation doesn’t end at launch. Review giving reports, engagement data, and user feedback in the first few months. If a feature isn’t getting used, people usually need more training or a clearer reason to use it.

Where Pushpay fits

Pushpay is built for churches that want giving, church management, and a church app under one contract. ChurchStaq brings the three together:

• Giving: online, app, and text giving with recurring gifts and Everygift payment recovery
• Church management: attendance, groups, follow-up processes, kids check-in, and volunteer scheduling
• Church app: sermons, events, groups, and giving in one place, with push notifications
• Insights: giving, attendance, and serving trends, with at-risk people flagged for follow-up

It fits mid-size, large, and multi-site churches best, where the Complete tier adds per-campus giving, branding, and bank accounts. Pushpay serves more than 14,000 churches, and 7 of the 10 largest U.S. churches run on it.

Churches using Pushpay to strengthen engagement and giving

The clearest number is what happens after a switch. Pushpay reports that churches moving to its platform grow their recurring donors by 24% on average, which matters because recurring gifts are the ones that keep coming in the weeks attendance dips.

Next steps: see Pushpay in action

A demo is the fastest way to check fit. Bring the two or three problems you wrote down at the start, plus your current giving numbers, and ask the team to show you:

• Admin time: how gift entry, statements, and follow-up run from one record
• Engagement: how the app and communication tools reach people during the week
• Giving: what your processing rate and recurring giving setup would look like
• Growth: what changes when you add a service or a campus

Conclusion

If you’re planning a switch, plan around January. Your old system sends last year’s contribution statements, and the new one starts the year with clean giving history. Working back from that, October and November are when the decision and the data cleanup need to happen.

Get a demo to see ChurchStaq with your own numbers. Not ready for a demo? The State of Church Technology 2026 is based on responses from 1,300+ church leaders and shows how other churches are using their tech.

Frequently asked questions about church software programs

1. What is church management software, and why do churches need it?

Church management software (ChMS) is a shared database and set of tools for tracking people, giving, and volunteers. Churches use it so staff can follow up with people and run day-to-day operations from one record instead of scattered spreadsheets.

2. What are the key features to look for in the best church management software?

Look for these five:

• Giving and accounting: online, app, and text giving with fund-level reporting and contribution statements
• Volunteer coordination: scheduling, reminders, and availability in one place
• Ease of use: an interface staff and volunteers will adopt without weeks of training
• Mobile app: giving, events, and groups on members’ phones
• Communication tools: email, text, and push notifications sent from member lists

3. How can church software improve financial management?

It records every gift, online and offline, against a donor’s profile, so giving reports and year-end statements come from one place. Pushpay adds automatic recovery for failed recurring gifts through its Everygift features.

4. What is the best church management software for small churches?

It depends on budget and what you need first. As of October 14, 2026, Planning Center’s free tiers are the lowest entry point, followed by ChurchTrac at $29 a month for 75 people tracked and Tithely Church Management at $72 a month.

5. Can church management software assist in volunteer management?

Yes. Most systems include scheduling, position assignments, and reminders. Some automate the schedule itself: Planning Center Services fills positions from blockout dates and preferences, and Pushpay’s ChMS adds a family serving calendar and flags unfilled serving roles in Insights.

6. How do large churches benefit from church management systems?

They get multi-campus management, reporting across every ministry, and automated follow-up at a volume no staff could handle by hand. Look for per-campus giving and reporting, campus-level access controls, and dashboards leaders can read without an analyst.

7. What role does church software play in worship planning?

Most church platforms include service planning: building the order of service, scheduling worship teams, and sharing songs and notes. Pushpay’s service plans hold people, songs, Bible verses, and notes, starting on the ChMS Advanced tier.

8. How can a church ensure a smooth transition to new software?

Plan it in phases:

1. Assess your church’s needs and choose the right ChMS platform.
2. Get leadership and church staff buy-in.
3. Train administrative teams and volunteers by role.
4. Roll out the software gradually.
5. Monitor usage and adjust based on feedback.

9. Where can I find more information or a demo of Pushpay’s church management software?

Take the self-guided product tour or request a demo. The demo includes a free giving analysis with no obligation.

10. How much does church management software cost?

Anywhere from $0 to a few hundred dollars a month, plus processing fees on online gifts. As of October 14, 2026, Planning Center’s People database is free and its other products run $15 to $239 a month each, Tithely Church Management is $72 a month, and ChurchTrac runs $29 to $119 a month by the number of people tracked. Pushpay and Subsplash One price by quote.

11. Which church software is best for a multi-campus church?

The one that separates campus giving, deposits, and branding on a tier you can afford. Pushpay’s Complete tier includes per-campus giving designations, a bank account per campus, and per-campus branding. Planning Center tracks giving by campus in one account but sets permissions person by person rather than by campus.

12. Is there free church management software?

Yes, with limits. Planning Center People is free with an unlimited database, Tithely Giving is free apart from processing fees, and Rock RMS charges no license fee. Planning Center’s free tiers stop at 10 donations a month in Giving and 5 team members in Services.

13. What’s the best all-in-one software for a church plant?

For a plant 6 to 18 months from launch and part of a recognized planting network, Pushpay’s church plant grant includes Giving, ChMS, and a mobile app free for 12 months. Planning Center and Tithely also offer plants a free first year on request.

14. What are the pros and cons of popular church management software?

As of October 20, 2026, Planning Center is free to start and month to month, but each product bills separately. Tithely bundles everything for $119 a month at any size, with card fees of 2.9% + $0.30. ChurchTrac includes fund accounting in every plan and prices by names tracked, children included. Pushpay keeps giving, ChMS, and the app on one profile, processes gifts directly, and has no user limits, with pricing quoted by package and giving volume.

15. Which church management software is the best value for a mid-size church?

It depends on how your giving arrives. At $400,000 a year in online giving with 60% by card, published flat-rate processing fees run from $6,360 a year on Planning Center to $9,760 on Tithely. Pushpay sets its rate by giving volume, so ask for a written quote and compare totals with the subscription included. What your processing fee funds explains what sits behind each rate.

16. Which church software includes accounting?

ChurchTrac includes fund accounting in every plan. Tithely and Pushpay connect to QuickBooks Online, and Planning Center doesn’t offer an accounting product. Here’s how church giving platforms connect to QuickBooks Online.

17. Which church software platforms have the strongest data security?

It depends on which evidence your church needs. As of October 29, 2026, Pushpay runs its own payment processing as a PCI-DSS Level 1 Service Provider with an annual external audit, Planning Center offers a SOC 2 Type 2 report on request, and Tithely and Subsplash state PCI Level 1 compliance. Ask each vendor for the documents behind its claims and compare those.

18. What is the best church giving software for large churches?

For a large or multi-site church, look for direct payment processing, automatic failed-payment recovery, and separate deposits for each campus. The Pushpay platform serves 7 of the 10 largest U.S. churches and has a 95.1% transaction success rate, against a 92.5% industry average. Its Complete tier gives each campus its own bank account.

19. Can church management software track background checks and safe environment training?

Yes, through integrations. The Pushpay ChMS behind ChurchStaq and ParishStaq connects to VIRTUS for safe environment certification and to background check providers, including Checkr, MinistrySafe, and Protect My Ministry. Planning Center runs background checks through Checkr.

DISCLAIMER: this content has been generated, at least in part, by artificial intelligence.

See also:

• Mobile giving app vs. text to give for churches
• Best church management software for 2026
• Why I believe in AI for the Church, and where I draw the line