What Planning Center offers
Planning Center is a family of separate products that share one people database. Its site lists People (free), Groups, Calendar, Registrations, Check-ins, Services with Music Stand, Giving, Church Center (its app and pages for members), Publishing, Home and Chat. You subscribe to each product on its own, and most are priced by how much you use them: team members in Services, donations a month in Giving, check-ins a day, people in groups. Each has a free level, and church planters can apply for a free year.
Giving runs on Planning Center’s own processing, at rates it publishes on its pricing page. Its home page says support usually answers in about an hour.
What to look at in ChurchFoundry
ChurchFoundry is one subscription with every feature in it, priced by how many people are in your directory. Turning on check-in or giving doesn’t add another bill, so the comparison is your whole Planning Center total against one price.
Some things in ChurchFoundry aren’t on Planning Center’s product list: fund accounting that gifts post into on their own, streaming Sunday’s service to YouTube and Facebook with a sermon archive, live captions translated into your congregation’s languages, pastoral care notes and counseling, and appointments. If your church needs any of them, price what you’d add next to Planning Center. Online gifts go to your church’s own Stripe account, and ChurchFoundry takes no cut.
Moving from Planning Center
ChurchFoundry connects to Planning Center with a Personal Access Token and brings over people, households, lists and notes; Services teams, plans, schedules, blockouts and songs; groups with their members and attendance; the calendar; children’s check-ins; giving; and sermons. You see what will change before anything is saved, and running it again later adds what’s new without duplicates.
Recurring gifts don’t move. Planning Center keeps charging them until each donor cancels there, so plan how you’ll ask donors to set them up again on your new giving page.
Compare the same scope and cost
Add up the Planning Center products your church would really use at your size, from its pricing page, and set the total beside ChurchFoundry’s price for your number of people. Then put Planning Center’s giving rates on one side and Stripe’s on the other. We don’t copy other companies’ prices here, and we don’t mark a feature as missing just because we couldn’t confirm it.
Use the trials to answer the practical questions
Good tests: schedule a volunteer who can only serve the early service, check a child in and out with the pickup code, record a Sunday’s checks and see where they land in the books, and ask the least technical person on staff to find a family and update their address.
This is a vendor-written evaluation guide: we make ChurchFoundry, so weigh it that way. Planning Center is another company’s product, and we’re not affiliated with it. We read the official pages linked below on October 30, 2026.
Official sources
Products and prices change, so check each provider's current information too.
By Moriah LLC, makers of ChurchFoundry · Reviewed