Ministry Planner vs OnStage

Ministry Planner is a web platform for church planning and administration, combining service planning, volunteer scheduling, team chat, online giving, and a church website. Its planning tools connect a teaching calendar and series library with service plans and personalized mobile run sheets. Volunteers can accept or decline assignments through secure RSVP links without creating an account or installing an app. Listed integrations include two-way sync with Planning Center, sync with Church Community Builder, Google Calendar, and Google Drive. A free tools option allows one standalone tool per church account, with limits that vary by tool; paid plans start at $49.00 per month, and a 30-day trial is listed. Online giving has no monthly fee, but each gift incurs a 0.5% Ministry Planner charge plus Stripe processing fees. The company says church data is encrypted in transit and at rest, churches can export it at any time, and it is not sold or shared. AI features include an assistant, smart imports, and engagement predictions; data is stated not to train models. A congregation app is listed as coming soon.

OnStage is a service-planning platform for churches, bringing event preparation, people, songs and team communication into one place. Teams can set up events and rehearsals, create setlists, assign people to positions and reuse event templates. Its song library handles chords, lyrics and song structures, with PDF import, annotations, key changes and capo settings. Team and event chats support messages, attachments, polls, replies and read receipts. Events, rehearsals and blockouts can sync to Google Calendar; that sync is available on iPhone, iPad and Android. The app also supports offline access during rehearsals and services, and runs on Android, iOS, macOS and web. Starter is free, does not expire and does not require card details, but is limited to five members, 200MB of storage and five events per month. Paid plans are billed monthly or yearly, with member sizes from 20 to 1,000 and different storage and event limits. The listed 20-member plan costs $10 a month; yearly billing is available at 15% off.