Having used almost every Planning Center product, there is nothing else that I would recommend. Our entire team uses it weekly for worship, planning, check-ins, de-briefing through reports, congregant database, volunteer team emails, and so much more. Planning Center does a fantastic job and only keeps improving.

The ease of use is its best feature. Ease in adding people, features, reports, etc. is unmatched in the industry. Also, Planning Center has a modern look and feel that many of its competitors lack. The worship software with the SongSelect integration, planning tools, database, key management, ability to add various media, etc. it is a must-have product for any church that values communication, strategic planning, and excellence. Every Planning Center Product that I have and continue to use remains the standard for church management software.

Running reports in "People" is cumbersome and time-consuming to get to the exact information you are looking for. It takes a thorough amount of trial and error to extrapolate the intended data by getting the variables just right.

I was the XP at a church that used Planning Center. I went to another church that used one of their main competitors. After 18 months, we are on Planning Center. I'm much happier and the rest of the staff is much happier. I think that pretty well sums it up.

When we switched from our previous software to Planning Center, I worked with our staff to see how it was going. The responses I got were always akin to "well, it is frustrating learning a new system...but this is better than what we were on." Basically, in one or two days our staff was less frustrated with Planning Center than they were continually with a system we had been on for three years. As we've been on it longer, the frustrations have decreased and the benefit to our church has increased. Moving to Planning Center has been the best organizational choice we've made in a long time. Oh, and it is about $100 (33%) cheaper each month. And that's on month-to-month vs an annual contract with the old guys. And when our online giving agreement runs out and we switch the Planning Center giving, we'll save another $200 or so a month. And their support is incredible, typically responding within an hour (vs 2 business days on the old platform).

To my understanding, Planning Center set out to make a great stand alone tool for Check Ins, a great tool for Registrations, a great tool for Giving, etc...to do this, they set up separate development teams for each module. I understand this, having worked with some tools that started as a great online director or great giving tool or great event tool and tried to expand to do much more. The result is often complicated bloat. I do think Planning Center's model largely avoided this because each thing has to stand on its own. In my estimation, I'd like to see some tweaks to certain modules, but overall each of them accomplishes what I need. The one drawback to this, though, is that the tools don't integrate quite as tightly as I'd like. Everything talks back to their People module, but sometimes it would be good to have them talk to each other a little more. E.g., when we set up an event in Check In, we also have to go into the Calendar module to set up the event to request the room. This can be a bit of a hassle. To be fair, it does seem like they are moving in this direction with new features, so hopefully their biggest weakness (to me) will continue to shrink! But, again...this is minor compared to the frustrations I've had with other systems. I've been on ones that I hated even logging into because I knew I was going to get mad. I genuinely like using Planning Center.

At this point, it is used in a minimal way, to lay out our order of service and schedule 2 ministry teams out of the 10+ teams that serve at each of our services.

Makes scheduling and organizing our order of service very simple for the administration team. When an item such as teaching changes from 30 minutes to 40 minutes, the modifications are easy to implement without having to recalculate the time of day from one item to the next. When that same item is moved someplace else in the order of service it's a simple drag and drop and all times for the service are automaticallly adjusted.

Not a great tool for our volunteers. The scheduling module is a little difficult to train volunteers to use. They all give it a shot but most revert to using excel spreadsheets. Report templates, unless you are an html programmer, aren't flexible enough to give me the layout I am looking for. We tried to use it to check in our children but the unreliability of connecting and printing name tags caused huge delays, aggravated our parents and frustrated the volunteers. I am advised they have resolved that problem, however, due to their prior experience our children's church isn't willing to give it another chance.

I love this app and will continue to keep using it to its fullest potential. It makes our life at our church so much better using this!

We utilize the services app for managing peoples schedules and Sunday morning flow of service. It makes it a breeze and is such a huge help with saving time for scheduling and also planning ahead to know how to properly plan!

I love everything about planning center. It was such a breeze setting up all of the volunteers at our church. And now they love using the app as well!

Around Services and Check ins, Planning Center has been exceptional with customer service and helping us sort through issues. Their tutorial videos are also great. We didn't have great luck with customer service around the financial module, hence the choice to go another direction with our overall database while continuing to use Services.

Planning Center Services automates really helpful admin and communication work and allows teams to learn and grow with all of the resources they need. From an administrator's perspective, the ability to schedule and view services in matrix mod and keep track of multiple teams of volunteers with various limitations and requests using the preferences and blackouts is easily worth the monthly cost. Services is the backbone of planning center, and there's good reason that it's the standard in mid-sized and larger churches. The interface is intuitive and easy for volunteer users to figure out, and they do a great job of continuing to innovate features and usability.

While the other modules across planning center have great integration, our church found that the finances side lacked necessary features, meaning we are now running a separate database/CRM while still running planning center services. We wanted to be able to add financial information (givings) into the database without the person entering the data seeing previous data - essentially the ability to enter data blindly. I suspect many other churches are running different databases as well as planning center services, and the multi-system approach isn't ideal, so it would be nice to have a more responsive development team as planning center's interface is generally well built and user friendly.

I love using Planning Center and do not plan on switching anytime soon. It has blessed our church and helped me do my job so much more effectively!

Planning Center is a wonderful platform to create services, organize your volunteers, and create/edit songs! You are able to add lyrics and chords AND transpose both chord sheets AND .mp3's that you can upload (if you have the right copyright)! Users can easily see their schedules and decline/block out dates they know they will be out of town. You can integrate this with ProPresenter for easy service creation and lead your teams to success!

The only thing I wish Planning Center could do is replace the current membership and online giving platform we currently use. It's getting close but for church management it falls just shy.

We actually like Planning Center a lot. It has its issues, but overall it's nice to be able to integrate every area of our church in one database. I do like that it's a sliding pricing structure and you can choose what you need and what you don't. I wish it were cheaper, but I get it.

The worship planning software (Services) is unmatched as far as I can tell. It pretty much contains everything we would want in a database solution, the Giving portion is fairly easy to use, Groups and Registrations both work pretty well and our congregation doesn't seem to have a lot of trouble with signups through those. Scheduling volunteers is very simple through Services. Their customer support seems to be pretty consistent and helpful.

2 things: 1. The individual modules for Planning Center, though I like that you can select which ones you need and don't need, don't seem to integrate super well with each other. The fact that you need to re-import people from the database portion into the other modules can be annoying, and the navigation among them as a whole doesn't seem to be totally cohesive. 2. (My biggest pet peeve) It is ENTIRELY too easy for people to add themselves as a duplicate. We've had 5-6 profiles with the exact same email and name, and people can just create a new profile over and over again. If this could be solved, I would honestly be a lot happier with Planning Center.

Overall, we love Planning Center. It's easy to use & the team there is super friendly and helpful when needed. We wish it was more customizable, but overall, we love all of their products and use them frequently.

We love how intuitive PCO is. It's easy to navigate & use, with very little extensive training required. It's the "Apple" of software. It is seamless for volunteer & attendee management, and it makes sign ups, giving, groups, etc. a breeze.

It's not quite a customizable as we would like. All solutions are out of the box, and there's not the option to really change or amend things (functionality, reporting, etc.). I also wish the API, specifically for registrations, was open to developers so we could connect that into our main church database.

Overall my experience with Planning Center has been a fantastic one, and I'm looking forward to using their current and new products in my church now and in the future!

Planning Center offers a fantastic suite of software that makes behind the sences tasks for church management a breeze.

The pricing for some of their products is a little higher than what can be found from the competitors, but it is almost always made up in their excellent customer service.

Works for our scheduling needs week to week, able to email reminders of the positions scheduled seamlessly

The options to customize and add tabs that meet your scheduling needs are all there, available and ready to use

The kids check in option requires a laptop/desktop and cannot just use a tablet which we prefer to do

Overall, it's an excellent tool and I would highly recommend it. It's a must-have for anyone planning events, especially those in Houses of Worship.

It makes planning an event flow very easy and intuitive. It's a simple process to upload files and media to attach when creating an event flow, and it's easy to add additional notes and comments to aid in transitions. The timing features make it easy to track session lengths, and PCO Live is a great way to communicate real-time updates to users.

The Teams feature could be developed a bit more. When managing a checklist, there's no way to skip over items and come back to them later...everything must be completed linearly. In addition, it's difficult to go back and make edits after the fact or even view past progress and notes.

The overall experience with PCO is a good one. It is robust and continually has new, helpful features being added. It is a fantastic tool for tracking and managing people resources, donations, volunteers, and communication. I would highly recommend PCO for any church looking for a full featured ChMs without an oversized price tag.

Planning Center Online (PCO) is a scalable church or organizational software that adapts with your needs and provides great features that meet nearly all of the organizational needs. PCO offers event organization, people management, resource management, a donation platform, volunteer scheduling, and groups management. All this along with a solid communication platform and several third party integrations make PCO a powerful tool for any church or organization.

There are some features lacking such as built-in texting capabilities or whole-organization integration such as web site and app. The PCO app is not branded and lacks in features but most parts of PCO will integrate into other website platforms such as Wix.

We started using Planning Center 10 years ago for our service planning. A few years after that, we migrated our kids' check-in system to Planning Center, then our Groups. Now we are transitioning away from CCB and PushPay to go all-in on Planning Center for every aspect of our database management.

Planning Center's interface is intuitive, attractive, and friendly to users who are intimidated by traditional technology applications. Planning Center just works, which cannot be said for the majority of players in the world of church management software. Lists are powerful and integrations flexible. Mobile apps are robust.

There are still missing pieces in the Giving App, especially as it relates to importing previous contributions and handling non-deductible transactions. But Planning Center is constantly evolving, and I am confident that within a couple of years their donor management will be up to full spec.

I love how we are able to use Planning Center for everything from groups to database management to planning services, etc. Also, each hub communicates with each other so information transfer across the different aspects of it.

I do wish that we could customize the look of the public view of the groups or events.

Since we switched to entirely managing our church database through Planning Center, we have much better buy in for online sign ups and registrations and all our data is linked and much more accurate and up to date. Young and old learn how to use it quickly.

Professionally developed platform with advanced features that are also well thought out and user friendly for both back end and front end users. They are regularly adding features and developing their host of apps.

Some of their products are more basic, but they focus on where it counts.

Quality way of maintaining a database of church members that integrates well into scheduling them to serve, checking in their kids, or having them sign up for events or small groups. Nothing else quite like it out there in the market right now!

I love that it has a variety of different tools that are not only practical but have swiftly become necessary to running ministries in the church. I can't imagine using another software for scheduling teams, checking in kids, or organizing our small groups. This truly is a robust central point for our database management at our church, and it's in a whole other category than any other church management software because of its significantly lower price point.

Perhaps it's because of the price point, but where Planning Center fails in its ability to stay innovative and continually becoming more intuitive in its design and structure. I can't tell you how many times, even after years of use, I have spent dozens of minutes trying to find a certain feature or settings option that still evaded my insight for where it should go. Also, despite regular suggestions for updates to make the software stronger, I rarely see them innovating. If they didn't hold such a strong monopoly, I would not be surprised to see them ousted by a more aggressively advancing competitor.

I love almost everything about PCO, I've used many different CMSs over the last few years, and PCO has been the best. Their best apps are: The original "Services" is fantastic and the most polished. Works great not just for (all though especially for) worship team. It is also great for Children's/kids church, greeters, ushers, refreshment team, really any team! The next best is also their fantastic "check-ins" works great! they have thought through these well and made excellent improvements. Fast, reliable, intuitive, versatile, really just great. The third best and it starts to fall off pretty quickly from here, is their "People" app, it works well, they have mad significant improvements and honestly I think the reason this one does not seem to work as well as i wish it would is because of the other apps they've created... I'll try to explain. "Giving" seems to really frustrate my finance ladies. One works for several churches and she is not a fan of how things work in PCO, especially if you collect money through Text, or registrations... it seems to become very difficult to resolve on her end... i don't really know finance though, so i can't be more help there. "Registration" and "Groups" are all great efforts that seem to have too much crossover and convolution with each other but also "Check-ins". It can be hard to tell if a group should be entered into "groups" or "check-ins" or both.Such as Youth Ministry? Group or Check-in? Both take/track attendance, each in different ways with plusses and minuses each way. But good luck getting a useful report out of either them. Also if you use "Registration" to collect funds for an event, it's great for tracking that, but your finance office will hate you because it doesn't seem to report with everything else, so it adds a bunch of extra steps, i thought we were doing it wrong so they called PCO and basically got a "Sorry that's how it works." These apps all allow you to enter new people into the "People" app, and you also expect to find useful info on member activity in "People" but you really can't find much useful info on individual, just "Lists" of people. Reporting (in "People" or in the apps themselves) fails to be as useful as you need because of the overlap and convolution... want to know who didn't attend this week? No way to find out. Missed 3 times in the last 6 meetings? No way to find out. Want to see how attendance is going in each of your small groups in the church. sorry.

listed in my review

also listed in my review

I've been using Planning Center since all they had was the Services app. Now with the recent additions of everything else you need to manage church administration needs, I'm even more impressed. The best is you can tell everything was built by people who know what it means to work in a church environment. Not only does everything just work, but it's built with volunteer training in mind. It's intuitive and easy to teach others how to use. And you only pay for what you need/want with so much grace in their billing. Multiple times we had more check-ins than our plan was set up for and they sent a nice email to let us know and that they would never cancel our services but that if we were going to consistently go over the number, we should consider upgrading. What a stellar way to handle it! I've a team PCO guy for life!

It can be a little glitchy sometimes I've noticed when you have a lot of volunteers scheduled in one plan. Sometimes names will disappear or notifications will change. But it's few and far between.

It offers almost every feature you can imagine necessary for your church, regardless of your position. As a leader, you have the ability to set up a plan for an entire service, including music sets, speakers, sermon notes, etc. with as much or little detail as you like. You can then share this with any or all members of your team for their reference. Chain emails can be sent for reminders of meetings, worship rehearsals, or other information. For worship pastors, you are also able to attach chord charts, song files, and list of members for future worship sets, allowing everybody to have access to practice materials and be on the same page. There is also an ability to create your own chord charts for songs you've written, along with personal notes for your band to follow directly from you. For the congregation, there is a hub for offering/donations that can be done completely electronically. Members can also have their own profiles to check in, register for church events, and more. The best part of all of this is that it's all categorized, making every feature streamlined and easy to setup, use, and view. Most software becomes complicated when jam-packed with as many features as Planning Center, however the folks here have done a fantastic job of laying everything out in a logical and easy-to-use way, for the most part.

While most features are streamlined, some are buried underneath others, and thus require a bit of digging to figure out every last odd-and-end in the program (of which there are a lot). This isn't detrimental, but it is good to know that you'll have to be willing to invest a little bit of time to truly master everything.

My overall experience with Planning Center has been extremely positive, making the pesky harder parts easier to overlook. I use it daily and I am still finding new ways to help streamline my workday and make sure guests get the best connections.

Planning Center has been extremely easy to use. I came into it with no formal training, so I relied heavily upon Planning Center University videos, ticket inquiries, and learning from colleagues. The fact that I can say I am extremely comfortable with Planning Center and considering one of the Administrators, is a testament to how easy it is to use. I've only been using it for 6 months! The entire collection of Planning Center (services, people, etc.) are integrated seamlessly. This seamlessness provides a platform I can use to connect guests to other departments and look up information at the drop of a hat. When I am on the phone with a client, I need to be able to gather information, input information, and send it off in a workflow; Planning Center enables be to do just that. Groups that meet can use Groups to manage their guests (check-ins, registration) and the bonus is that if I am not in that particular area, I can still see a guests history! This helps in my area of connections. I want to connect people to where they haven't been involved. Also, I want to make sure no one falls through the cracks and Planning Center ease of use and seamless connectivity ensures no one does! Planning Center is the first thing I open to begin my workday.

During the time I have been using Planning Center, I have noticed that there are a lot of options/steps (ways to edit/implement, different areas to keep track of, etc.) the options, while great for creating something tailored to my needs, can also seem daunting and easy to lose track of.

If I didn't have a tool like this to keep everything together and organized, I probably would not still be in the ministry. PCO has helped me stay organized and lead my teams better than I ever could have on my own.

Scheduling volunteers and planning worship services - these two things drew me to PCO back in 2007. This was before it was a full featured CMS and even then I was recommending it to churches as a superior worship planning tool.

Now that it is much a much more full featured CMS, it can be a little less intuitive to use at times. I find that my team members often are unable to intuitively learn how to do some specific things - like building lists and flows in the People database. Good thing they have great tutorials and customer support.

It makes scheduling team members for your church simple and easy. Honestly, I don't know how we could go without it at this point. It's such a time saver, and the best way to share songs and files with the team. There is a phone app that works really well too, with only a few minor limitations compared to the computer/browser version.

I've been using Planning Center for many years with multiple worship teams, and it keeps evolving and getting better. I'm an admin with Planning Center for my current church, so I use it quite often. It stores a data base of team members that can be grouped into multiple categories (worship team, audio/lighting tech, sunday school/nursery volunteers, etc). I think PC really shines for scheduling worship services. It stores audio files, video links, and documents which can easily be linked to any new service so your team has the information (music, audio files, videos) they need to be prepared in advance. Your worship team (or for any other aspect of church functions) can be alerted when they are scheduled to serve, and they can accept or reject the invite to serve which will alert the admin so they can make sure that a person for each required position of a service or event has been filled. It can save tons of time for an administrator to put together a team and get them the resources they need. It even links to online calendars so when you accept a position for an event, it can automatically be added to your calendar (in my case Google). Overall, if your church isn't using this, you need to try it - it's a huge time saver!

It can be a little confusing sometimes, and there is way more to it than we use that I wish we could turn off until we need it, but honestly it's still probably the best options out there that we've found.

Planning Center allows me to keep all of my teams and schedules organized with very little headaches along the way. I use Planning Center multiple times each week and use it to keep track of a large database of volunteers. Within seconds I can see what areas we are weak in volunteer wise and schedule accordingly. I have had very little issues with Planning Center, but anytime I need help, their customer service teams are phenomenal.

Planning Center allows me to keep all of my teams and schedules organized with very little headaches along the way. I use Planning Center multiple times each week and use it to keep track of a large database of volunteers. Within seconds I can see what areas we are weak in volunteer wise and schedule accordingly. I have had very little issues with Planning Center, but anytime I need help, their customer service teams are phenomenal.

On rare occasions there are features that are difficult to navigate. For example, I was recently changing someone's availability within their profile and the dropdown for possible service times wasn't showing the service times it should have. There was a menu I had missed that changed this dropdown to be correct. The Planning Center team fixed the issue for me quickly and taught me how to do it myself in the future so I am definitely not complaining, I would just say there is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to navigating all of Planning Center's options.

We love Planning Center and it has revolutionized our church's organization.

We can literally keep all our church info under one umbrella. We schedule all of our volunteers for worship, coffee ministry, early childhood, sound, kid's wing... everything with Planning Center. We would be lost without Planning Center. We are able to see when our volunteers are scheduled in other departments. We use the kid's check-in app. We have even recently used the "Registrations" app for some of our sign-ups, it's a little pricey but pretty efficient. We run so much of our church with Planning Center.

It definitely sometimes has weird glitches where some volunteers will not receive emails sent to them all time, or worship team members getting unscheduled. We are not entirely sure if it's Planning Center's fault or some weird planning center fairy messing with us.