Churchease vs Planning Center

Churchease is church management software for organizing people, giving, events, and communication, with AI features for pastors. It is intended for churches from new plants to multi-campus organizations, and every plan includes unlimited members without per-member pricing. New churches get 30 days of Growth features at no charge and without a credit card, then can continue on Starter for free. Starter covers people and group management, announcements, messaging, a dashboard, portal, and Power Query. Standard adds prayer requests, testimony sharing, events, service planning, attendance, check-in, volunteer management, and follow-up tools. Growth adds giving and accounting, children’s ministry, automation, forms, multi-campus management, priority email support, and AI features: Shepherd's Briefing, Giving Narrative, and Form Response Summarization. Giving tools include recurring donations, text-to-give, split gifts, pledge tracking, reconciliation, reports, and tax statements. Giving uses Stripe with a 0.5% platform fee on top of Stripe processing. Email to the congregation is included on all plans; SMS is a paid add-on. The service is available on web, iOS, and Android. The member app supports giving, event registration, check-in, directory access, prayer requests, testimonies, and announcements.

Planning Center is a church ministry platform with products for people management, events, worship planning, donations, groups, and church apps. People centralizes membership information and ministry activity such as attendance, giving, and volunteering. Services supports worship planning, volunteer scheduling, team communication, and rehearsal tools. Other listed capabilities include group management, event registration, child check-in, and SMS messaging. Free plans are listed for Calendar, People, and Services: Calendar includes one room, People has an unlimited database and reporting, and Services includes five team members and 100 MB of storage. The pricing note lists paid access from $5/mo and a 30-day trial; a member limit of 75 is also listed. Services plans include unlimited feature access, teams, service types, and plans, with pricing based on the number of people accessing the system. The Services app supports iOS and Android phones and tablets, but not Windows devices. Integrations include SongSelect, PraiseCharts, Checkr, Mailchimp, Zapier, and third-party tools; an open API is also available. Planning Center states its products suit churches of any size.