ACS Facility Scheduler vs AltarDesk

ACS Facility Scheduler is a hosted tool for coordinating church facilities, people, events, and resources. Users can check room, equipment, and people availability by day, week, or month, using one calendar or combining several. Reservations can include setup and teardown time, recurring or multi-day events, and events at multiple locations; separate rooms can also be combined as one schedulable resource. Events may be pending or approved, and canceled events retain their information. Administrators can set who can view or add events and who can edit or approve them. Calendars can sync to Microsoft Outlook, which must be open during synchronization. The included Broadcast web application shows published events on building monitors up to six months ahead and reflects schedule changes. Standard reports include event and resource lists, calendars, request forms, and planning calendars. ACS maintains the hosted application and lists backups, secure data transfer, server maintenance, and 24-hour network support for server connection. Web and Windows access are listed; Windows installation requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4.7 or higher. Pricing is on request, and there is no free plan.

AltarDesk is a church management platform for member records, donor statements, schedules, safeguarding and giving. Its member portal and app let people update their details, view rota duties, give and access giving statements. Paid plans include Gift Aid and GASDS management, direct HMRC claim submission and contactless giving. Bank statement imports support Lloyds, HSBC, NatWest, Barclays and Monzo; member giving uses Stripe card payments. The free plan covers up to 15 people and includes 500 MB of storage. The displayed tier for up to 75 people costs £17 a month and includes 2 GB of storage. Member and giving records are held in UK data centres, while sermon video and audio remain in the church’s own Google Drive. AltarDesk says connections use TLS 1.3, stored data is encrypted with AES-256, and organisation records are isolated with row-level security. It also says it does not sell church data, share it with advertisers or train AI models on it. At a plan’s member cap, a church must move to a higher plan before adding people.