9 reasons why you shouldn’t use Paypal for Churches

As churches strive to reach new heights in their ministry efforts, digital giving platforms are becoming increasingly popular. Online giving is the number one way people give to churches. With the steady rise of online giving for churches, it’s easier than ever for members and guests alike to make a recurring donation and support your mission. The question then becomes, “Which one do I choose?”

Leaders often assume that creating a seamless payment experience for donors means sticking with what’s familiar. However, using the same app to send money to friends as you do for your ministry isn’t always the best option! If you’re currently using or considering adopting PayPal for your church, let us show you that there’s a better option for your giving.

PUSHPAY VS. PAYPAL FOR CHURCHES

Ways to collect donations and tithes

Churches rely on donations from their members to pay for operational costs and fund activities that further their mission. There are tons of options for collecting donations, from traditional methods like cash offerings during services to tech-driven solutions like crowdfunding platforms. 

• Cash offerings during services
• Checks mailed or dropped off
• Online giving portals and mobile apps
• Text-to-give 
• Cryptocurrency donations
• Crowdfunding platforms
• Prepaid debit cards
• Automated recurring payments
• Fundraising auctions

But one of these options will make the biggest impact on your church’s growth and further your mission: online giving. It’s the most popular way people give to churches, and it encourages more generosity than traditional methods.

Our Digital Giving Trends report found that on average, digital givers donate 33 percent more ($200 a month through digital means versus $150 a month from non-digital means). They also donate 44 percent more often than non-digital givers (2.3 times a month versus 1.6 times a month). That’s why it’s crucial to have the right online giving solution.

9 reasons why PayPal isn’t the best giving solution

Churches may use PayPal’s online fundraising and donation platform to handle the basics of online giving, but it doesn’t support a church’s deeper need to connect and engage with their congregation. Let’s review the 9 reasons that PayPal isn’t the best option for churches.

1. It’s not designed with churches in mind.

While PayPal can send and receive payments, it wasn’t designed with the Church in mind, so it lacks the vast array of tools and features Church leaders, staff, and congregations need. And with customer service that serves all of PayPal’s different verticals, church leaders and staff can find themselves struggling to get help when they need it most. Churches may also have to pay a transaction fee if a church member sends their church donation with a credit card, rather than a debit card or directly from their bank.

2. Donors can’t direct their gifts.

PayPal doesn’t provide any way for a church member to direct their gifts to a specified fund or ministry. Without directed gifts, donors and administrators both suffer. Donors aren’t able to easily give to the causes close to their hearts. And church leaders can’t track progress or interest in specific church projects.

3. Recurring giving is restricted.

While PayPal online giving accepts recurring donations, they don’t offer more flexible giving options like setting up recurring giving on a weekly, quarterly, or annual basis. The only recurring giving option donors can choose is monthly. This rigid recurring schedule forces donors to only set up their giving for once a month or try to remember to give throughout the month (a pain point that recurring giving should alleviate). Ultimately, your local church could miss out on consistent contributions from members who want to give smaller gifts throughout the month. 

4. PayPal doesn’t connect to offline gifts.

PayPal only stores the giving data directly donated through their system. For churches getting cash or check donations, someone on your staff has to manually export data from PayPal and import it into your church management system (ChMS). And that’s not a one-time task. It’s a weekly occurrence (at least) that eats away at your team’s precious time and bandwidth.

There’s added risk with PayPal’s terms

5. Churches could lose donations during disputes.

If there’s a dispute on a donation, PayPal completes an investigation before releasing the funds. Whether it’s a pending transaction or your church has already received the funds, PayPal’s policy dictates that they will look into disputes before refunding them, which can delay your ministry’s access to important funds.

6. PayPal updated its Acceptable Use Policy.

PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy gives them the power to take up to $2,500 from an account if they deem any activities to be “discriminatory,” “intolerant,” or “hateful.” And that’s $2,500 per activity. The biggest risk is that these terms—discriminatory, intolerant, hateful—are open to interpretation. A sermon series that sparks controversy (and important conversations) could jeopardize up to $2,500 of ministry funding every week that it runs. You may as well offer them a seat on your church’s board of elders! Their policy influences your ministry choices and puts money donated in good faith by people passionate about supporting your mission at stake.

7. PayPal’s reports may miss actionable insights.

Pushpay’s Donor Development Dashboard allows administrators to track individuals’ giving history, forecast recurring gifts and online donations, view new contributions, provide annual giving statements, and review transactions. That kind of insight makes work easier for your admin team and makes it easy for leaders to nurture donors along their giving journey.

Donors may get an impersonal experience after giving

8. PayPal sends generic donor receipts.

PayPal online giving can send donors an automatic receipt. But those automatically generated receipts aren’t customizable. Without your church branding or a custom message, it lacks the personal touch crucial for nurturing donor relationships.

9. It’s not easy to express your gratitude.

Between the inability to give to multiple funds, its lack of connection to cash and check donors, and the generic receipt that PayPal sends, it’s hard to properly say “thank you” to your donors through PayPal. Churches would need to handwrite notes or export data into their ChMS to be able to personalize their thank you messages to each donor.

Is Venmo better than PayPal?

Venmo is another mobile payment app. It was founded in 2009 and has been owned by PayPal since 2013. Since it’s a separate app from PayPal, it’s worth asking, “Is Venmo right for my church?” But just like PayPal, Venmo isn’t the best giving solution for churches. Here are a few reasons why:

• It doesn’t integrate or play nice with most other platforms
• It has a similar level of risk as PayPal
• It’s geared toward sending money to friends instead of being designed for churches

Leave Venmo for paying a friend back for lunch and leave the church finances to software that’s actually made for churches.

Which giving system fits a youth or campus ministry?

The best giving system for a youth or campus ministry is your church’s own giving platform, with that ministry set up as its own fund. Students and parents can give from a phone by text, app, or a QR code on the retreat flyer. Each gift lands in the youth or campus fund the moment it’s made, and the student pastor and the finance director read the same report.

Peer-to-peer apps feel like the natural choice because students already have them on their phones. Venmo advertises a reach of more than 85 million users, and its charity profiles send each donor an official receipt automatically. The trouble starts after the tap. None of these apps gives a donor a fund to pick, recurring gifts live in the donor’s account instead of yours, and reporting stops at a list of transactions.

One opinion before the comparison, and not every youth pastor will love it. If camp deposits or mission trip gifts are landing in a staff member’s personal Venmo or Cash App today, move that money off personal accounts before you evaluate anything else. Venmo routes charities to a separate charity profile, which requires confirmed charity status through a PayPal business account plus a phone number and email address not already in use on another Venmo account.

Cash App is a harder fit. Its help center describes business accounts as being for the sale of goods or services, and it deducts 2.6% plus $0.15 from every payment received.

The phone in a student’s hand

Speed is where peer-to-peer apps earned their reputation, and for a student who already has Venmo open, they’re hard to beat. QuickGive in the Pushpay platform closes most of that distance. A gift through Apple Pay takes under six seconds, and the giver doesn’t create an account first.

Text giving covers the student who never downloaded the church app. The same way an adult texts “20 Tithes” to give to the tithes fund, a student can text an amount and the youth fund’s name to your church’s giving number.

Zelle asks the most of the donor. A church receiving on a small business account can only take payments from donors enrolled through their own bank or credit union’s app. And once a payment lands, it can’t be reversed, which matters when a fourteen-year-old’s thumb adds a zero.

Where did the camp money go?

Fund designation is the gap the finance office notices first. On a Pushpay giving page or in the church app, the donor picks the fund before giving, and a pre-configured giving link or branded QR code can open with the fund already filled in.

Venmo, PayPal’s Donate button, and Zelle don’t offer donors a fund menu. A gift’s purpose is whatever the donor writes in a note or memo, if they write anything, and a note that says “camp” doesn’t tell you which camp or which student.

Monthly support for the mission trip

A parent who wants to give monthly toward the summer mission trip needs a recurring gift that your team can see and the parent can change. The Pushpay platform lets your church turn on schedules from weekly to annual, including the 1st and 15th of the month, and the parent chooses the fund when setting it up.

The peer-to-peer options are thinner:

• PayPal Donate button: one “Make this a monthly donation” checkbox. Monthly is the only schedule.
• Venmo: scheduled payments arrived in October 2024, with weekly, every-two-weeks, and monthly options, announced for payments between friends and family.
• Zelle: no recurring feature of its own. Some banks let customers schedule repeat Zelle payments in their banking app, and some don’t.

In all three cases the schedule sits in the donor’s account. Your team sees each gift when it arrives and has no view of the schedule behind it. A parent who stops in October shows up only as a gap someone has to notice.

Reports your finance director can use

A peer-to-peer app’s reporting answers one question: what came in? Venmo charity profiles keep donation history and account statements with donor contact information, viewable in a web browser even though the profile itself can only be managed in the app. PayPal’s Activity report exports every transaction to a CSV file. Zelle payments arrive in the church’s bank account and show up in its Zelle activity next to everything else.

The questions a student pastor gets asked are harder than that. How much did the youth fund bring in this semester compared with last spring? Which parents gave for the first time during camp registration, and did any of them give again?

With a peer-to-peer app, somebody pulls the export into a spreadsheet and codes each line by hand before anyone can answer either one.

Pushpay giving reports track donations by fund and by campus and compare them against a previous time frame. A church-run college ministry and a multisite campus get the same treatment. Donor Development sorts givers into new, repeat, recurring, at-risk, and lapsed, and a weekly giving snapshot can go to the student pastor’s inbox automatically. Your finance director stops rebuilding that summary by hand each week.

Fund reports are only as clean as your fund list, though, and no software fixes that part for you. If one ministry has “Youth,” “Student Ministry,” and “Summer Camp” funds with overlapping purposes, the report splits the same ministry three ways. Settle the fund structure with your finance director before fall kickoff, and retire old funds instead of adding a new one each year.

When an app like Venmo is enough

A peer-to-peer app can work for a youth or campus ministry under narrow conditions: your church already has a confirmed Venmo charity profile, the collection is a one-time gift instead of ongoing support, and someone in finance codes every payment by hand the week it arrives.

Once parents start giving monthly or the finance office wants giving by fund without a spreadsheet, the app turns into a second job for whoever reconciles it.

The 7 essentials for church giving software

It’s not difficult to find an online giving platform for your church. But it can feel difficult to decide which one is best suited to support your unique ministry needs. Here are some essentials for your church’s giving software to get the conversation started:

1. Secure payment processing and data protection

2. A mobile-friendly, user-friendly design for your team and donors

3. Automated and customizable donation reminders and thank you messages

4. Efficient tracking of recurring donations and pledges

5. Reporting capabilities to analyze trends, growths, and results from online giving

6. Church-focused features, like donor management, recurring giving and giving statement generation

7. Integrates with your existing church software and tools

There’s a better giving platform for churches than PayPal

Join the 14,000 churches that trust Pushpay, the best PayPal alternative, for all their technology needs. Pushpay Giving offers church-focused features like:

• Donor Development Dashboard: Best-in-class donor development tools to identify stages within the giving journey and recommend next steps for each.
• Recurring giving: An easy way for donors to automatically give and more accurately plan your church’s budget.
• Experiences that delight: Engage donors with customizable thank you messages and giving statements to share the impact of their generosity.

Talk to one of our church tech experts today to learn how you can implement a world-class giving solution at your church.

At Pushpay, we believe mission-based organizations deserve great software. That’s why our team has developed the industry-leading technology for churches to manage their teams, simplify online giving, engage their communities, and ensure the success of their mission.

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FAQs

Can churches use PayPal for online giving?

Technically, yes—churches can set up a PayPal account to receive donations online. However, PayPal isn’t built for ministry needs. It’s a general payment processor designed for businesses and individuals, not for tracking donor information, managing recurring giving, or integrating with your church management software. That means more manual work for your church staff and fewer tools to nurture generosity.

Why isn’t PayPal the best online giving platform for churches?

While PayPal supports basic online donations, it lacks the essential features churches need. It doesn’t connect to offline giving, can’t segment gifts by fund or ministry, and sends generic donation receipts without your church’s branding. It’s also missing key donor management tools and church-specific reporting that help leaders track generosity trends and recurring giving. Platforms like Pushpay are purpose-built to serve churches of all sizes, helping you simplify giving and strengthen connection with your congregation.

What’s the difference between PayPal and a church giving platform like Pushpay?

The biggest difference is purpose. PayPal handles transactions. Pushpay helps churches cultivate generosity. Pushpay’s online giving platform offers flexible recurring donation options, integrates directly with your church management system, and provides secure payment processing across mobile, web, kiosk giving, and text giving. You can also manage donor information, generate IRS-compliant giving statements, and send personalized donation receipts—all in one place.

Can church members give using Cash App or Venmo?

Members can send money through both, but neither works like a church giving platform. Venmo charity profiles, available to organizations with confirmed charity status through PayPal, send donors a receipt automatically and charge the church 1.9% plus $0.10 per donation. They don’t let donors choose a fund or connect to your donor database, so someone on staff codes each gift by hand. Cash App’s business accounts are set up for the sale of goods or services and deduct 2.6% plus $0.15 per payment. A dedicated online giving platform ties every online donation to the right donor and the right fund at the moment it’s given.

Is recurring giving available through PayPal?

PayPal allows donors to set up monthly recurring donations, but it doesn’t offer the flexibility most churches need. With PayPal, donors can’t choose weekly, quarterly, or annual schedules. Platforms like Pushpay give your congregation control over how often they give and help your team forecast donations with accuracy—key for sustainable ministry planning.

Does PayPal integrate with church management software?

No. PayPal doesn’t connect automatically with your church management system (ChMS). That means your staff would need to manually export PayPal data and import it into your ChMS every week.

How can a church track online donations and donor information securely?

Using church giving software like Pushpay ensures that all donor and transaction data is securely stored and automatically tied to donor profiles. Pushpay’s giving software is PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant, which means your payment processing meets the highest industry security standards. You can also generate year-end giving statements and donation receipts directly from the platform.

What are better online giving options for churches than PayPal?

Churches should look for giving platforms that offer:

• Recurring giving: Flexible options for weekly, monthly, or annual donations.
• Fund management: Let donors choose where their gifts go—missions, youth ministry, building fund, etc.
• Mobile giving: Enable giving through a custom church app, text-to-give, or kiosk.
• Donor development tools: Track generosity trends, manage donor relationships, and encourage recurring gifts.
• Secure payment processing: Protect donor information and reduce failed transactions with tools like Everygift.

Pushpay combines all of these capabilities, helping both smaller churches and larger churches grow generosity and streamline fundraising efforts.

What’s the best way to encourage recurring donations at my church?

The key is simplicity. Make recurring giving available everywhere your church members engage—on your church website, in your custom church app, and during service through kiosk giving. Pushpay’s Everygift suite even suggests recurring giving options during checkout, helping you turn one-time gifts into ongoing support for your ministry.

What are the best church giving systems for youth or campus ministries?

The best option is your church’s existing giving platform with the youth or campus ministry set up as its own fund. Students and parents can give by text, app, or QR code, each gift is designated to that fund when it’s made, and reports show the ministry’s giving alongside the rest of the church. Peer-to-peer apps like Venmo and Zelle are familiar to students, but they don’t offer a fund menu, recurring schedules stay in the donor’s account, and reporting is limited to a transaction list.