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.

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.

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 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.

Overall, we enjoy using Planning Center and the apps work extremely well. Everything is customizable and extremely flexible with any kind of organizational system that you may have. They have a great Slack community as well where you can ask for help with any questions you may have.

We really enjoy using Planning Center. It is easy to use, fast, and very intuitive. The different apps help to keep the data separate and they work together really well. We use like how the apps are quick and easy to find the information that we need.

The only downside that I find is the cost. I feel that it is slightly overpriced. Everything works great but they charge you for for each app separately. In some ways it could keep costs down but it would be nice if there was an option to save when you are using every app they offer. They also charge to track donations which many companies do not.

Planning Center is easy to learn and manage. It has helped our church navigate managing over 200 members. This includes using online giving, member database, scheduling, music, emailing members, managing attendance to events and conducting background checks. Planning Center certainly has made our life easier in the office!

I like how it is versatile and allows us to plug in other services that help us navigate our business efficiently.

I wish we could have access to a live person quickly if assistance with the program is needed.

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.

Enjoy using this product. Although the simplicity does mean soome needed functionality isn't there, it's ease of use and reliability make it an excellent product and value! Can't beat their prices anywhere.

I like how Services and Music Stand work so well together. I also like the seamless integration with CCLI and Song Select. PC has done an excellent job developing integrations that actually seem as though they are part of the native app! Once you connect CCLI and Song Select, you actually don't know you're using them going forward. The same for Faithlife Proclaim.

Music Stand by Planning Center needs more core functionality. For example, you can't mark up the PDF chord sheets to save and recall later (as you can on Music Stand by Worship Extreme). This is a hassle. You also can't mark up the cord sheets and send them out to the band. They have to mark up their own cord sheets. While you can save the PDF chord sheets for each song, mark ups like highlighting and notes on the chord sheet have to marked up each and every time.

Excellent overall experience, we have never or very rarely had any service issues with the site crashing or anything like that. Just little bugs here and there which are always quickly resolved.

The seamless integration of various elements and components of our service or event. The ease of adding songs and lyrics, media elements, notes and documentation, organization of all the pieces, easy scheduling of staff and volunteers and ease of communicating to all those involved. The continued innovation and adding of features, listening well to their user base.

Some of the setup and coding of reports has a big learning curve, and some settings have been hard to find in the past, but the user support is there when we need it.

It's been really good! The reporting and volunteer management options have really helped us a ton.

The Services product is incredible. We could not imagine better.. after getting it setup that is. The reporting you can do is incredible.

The giving isn't great and the integrations leave something to be desired. We really wish they would build an actual robust email software so we could stop paying squarespace for this.

Planning Center allows me to solve frustrating team communication issues. Everyone on my team knows all the details. Songs... check. Service times... check. Rehearsal times... check. Media and lighting cues... check. It’s been a game changer for my team overall.

Team communication: planning center allows me to organize and communicate with over 150+ volunteers and staff. It’s absolutely essential for my job and for serving my team as effectively as possible.

The GUI is a tad bit intimidating at first, as is with most planning center modules. However in a few hours or days, you are up and running in no time, and there is also a vast FAQ and help section on their support page.

When I arrived at my first full-time church 10.5 years ago, I decided in my second month I was going to do a 30 day trial of a worship planning website called planningcenteronline.com that I had seen advertised and had heard some friends discuss. That was one of the best decisions I have ever made as a worship leader. The ease with which Planning Center allows me to plan worship, communicate with volunteers and do all I need to lead a powerful worship ministry is unheard of in the industry. Planning Center is one of the best tools out there!

Ease of use for both volunteers and staff. Clean, concise user interface. Easily customizable to fit your own needs.

The ONLY con I can think of is that sometimes their Music Stand app for sheet music use can be a little clunky and not load sheet music easily on a tablet or iPad.

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.

Overall, I think Planning Center is a good product...when you figure something out and it does what you want it to do, it's amazing. It's just getting to that point which is the pain for the majority of the time. Because there's a different "Platform" for each area Planning Center has, "Services" "People" "Groups" "Registrations" "Check-in's" so forth...they are similar but not 1 platform.

There is so much that Planning Center can do. I love that there is a way to get pretty much anything I want to do done. It's also the major giant when it comes to church systems and platforms.

The reason I chose this software to speak to is because of a major issue I've had with planning center which is, duplicating what I'm able to do with other people. It's quite difficult replicating ALL that Planning Center can do. In my line of work, getting multiple people to do what I do is GOLD...with Planning Center, I spend a lot of my time looking at tutorial videos and in the help menu trying to figure out how to do something that I'm almost positive it can do. So, when raising up other leaders to use Planning Center, they are often left frustrated and decide to just not. Not to mention, when I have somebody in charge of Planning Center for our ministry, they usually last no longer than a year, before they burn out. The reality is, planning and working directly with volunteers is an ANIMAL in itself. Dealing with people cancelling, forgetting, double booking, or complaining is no fun job for any scheduler...so dealing with certain frustrations with Planning Center is the last thing that individual wants. So what's the solution? Perhaps share the work-load with multiple people doing the scheduling...however, we never get to that point because of the difficulty of the program to the average volunteer. It's not impossible...but it's also not easy. I consider myself pretty computer savvy and every now and again during big events I assist the scheduler for that specific event and even though I've used Planning Center off and on for years...I'm always left frustrated.

Planning Center is a life-saver for our organization, freeing up our time to focus on the people that truly matter. Planning Center has allowed us to implement robust systems to manage a lot of our administrative work; simplifying our lives and helping keep our teams on the same page.

Planning Center offers a robust set of applications that help create a comprehensive church management platform. Combining the useful features of PC People (such as workflows, forms, database management, etc) with their Service management system (Services), Group management system (Groups), Calendar application (Calendar), Attendance tracking systems (Check-ins), Giving platform (Giving) and event registration platform (Registrations) creates a very robust set of tools that help make church management easy. Paired with the Church Center app (provided with PC People), you also gain access to a consumer facing application where church members can join groups, register for events, give, and even check-in their kids - all from one central hub. All of these separate platforms have their individual strengths, but overall combined they form an integrated church management solution that offers useful features and well-designed software that is constantly improving based on the feedback of their customers.

Planning Center is a platform that is constantly growing, which of course means that there are always areas of improvement. The beauty of PC is that they are constantly monitoring what is missing, and working on improving in those areas - so anything I list here really are minor issues that will likely be addressed in the near future. Two crucial things that they are missing are a few back-end admin tools, such as a robust security options (such as 2FA) and a simple user management interface. Currently, there is no way to enforce password security for PC users with access to people's personal information, nor is there a way to require (or even implement) 2FA. On top of this, managing people's access levels to different planning center applications cannot be managed from a simple back end admin location - rather to add (or remove) permissions you need to manually visit each separate application, access the users profile, and add/remove the permissions on an application-by-application basis. All this are mere annoyances regarding security, and are things that I believe will be addressed in PC's feature roadmap

All in one stop shop for Church Database Management

Planning Center is a great all in one suite for a church database. Their customer support is really good. They will respond to your email within an hour. They've had a slack channel that is also helpful for you to learn from others how they are using the software. The majority of their products are great. People, Services, Check-In are best in class in my opinion. Resources and Registrations are good they get the job done. One of Planning Centers best features is that they are constantly making quality improvements. Their updates keep them at the top of the ChMS game. I've witnessed others get the lead and they play it safe or drop the ball. Or they just built such a large product that its too big to update. People -Easy to import and export (this is a must feature in my opinion for any database) -Customizable (again another dealbreaker for me if a database doesnt have that) -F R E E Service - The best volunteer management software in any industry Check-In -Simple to use and straightforward -Beautiful UI

Groups and Giving are what I like least about Planning Center. We had to move on from PC Giving because after 2 years of using it they never added the ability to mass import donations or work with outside vendors. I would have loved to have been able to integrate PushPay with Planning Center. It would have saved us H O U R S. I would have loved to have our members see their entire history of giving. Unfortunately, the only way to do that is to manually re-enter every gift. That would take months to complete and we are only 10 years old as a church! Reporting could be much improved too. You can really only search by one category at a time. So if you want to look at everyone who has given to a certain fund by check you'd have to export the info to get that. Groups is still in beta in my opinion and have been since they launched in June of 2016. It's not complete or usable in my opinion. All it does is take attendance. Our groups are more than just taking attendance. Every group's system has a span of care (coaching structure) but groups don't have anything to assist you with that. It also doesn't receive many updates. The team that works on giving also works on groups so giving naturally gets all the priority. Finally, one thing that scares me about Planning Center is that some of the staff can be really arrogant. I don't know if it's because of how many users they have and managing all the requests but they don't listen well enough.

Planning Center is a great piece of software, with a lot of very powerful features for a church. It has made planning so much easier as a facility manager of my church. Also, being able to access the member's information is vital, and so much easier. As a congregation member who volunteers as a reader, usher, and worship assistant, being able to see my worship schedule and all the information I need is a great plus. I am very satisfied with Planning Center

I mainly use it to schedule rooms and events at our two campuses. Our church also has a Preschool through Jr. High, and I need to know who is using what room, and when, in order to schedule facility work, or to schedule groups who use our property for various functions. This can be complicated with the schools using the property, as well as church events, and outside groups. I can easily look on the calendar to see the schedule of events at our properties, which rooms they are using, which group, and for how long. I can easily schedule room usage, and if there is a conflict, the software shows you. Other users can also let you know of a conflict if they are planning something which would use the same room or area. We can also build our database by creating events that attendees need to sign in for. We can collect basic information, or more detailed information. For our VBS, we can keep track of kids, and their parents, so we can make triple sure that the children are being picked up by their parents, and no one else. The sign in process of attendees can be done on a mobile device as well. Control of the database of your church and school members is an absolute plus. Being able to access their information, keep their info updated, place them in groups, and send out focused email blasts is a major function which makes life so much easier for a church admin.

The integration training we received was excellent, but there is so much to learn, that you have to learn as you go, like any software or system. I would simply say that there is so much that this software can do, it all takes a lot of steps, and learning these steps takes a great deal of time and effort.

This is fabulous software for a new church. Priced to help you get organized at an affordable price. Lots of opportunities to grow into the various components offered.

The software is priced to let you only purchase the parts you need and priced according to the size of your church and how much you use it. It is such great software to start organizing a church's volunteers, donors, and calendar and can be expanded as your church and your needs grow.

Because components can be purchased separately the communication between the components is not seamless. If you add an event to the calendar and then add a registration for the event both with show up on the calendar as duplicate entries, for example. The price and flexibility are worth figuring out some of the quirks. Also, the ability to create a report for about anything is great but I wish there were some more pre-made reports for beginner users. For example, I have figured out how to create a deposit slip for a giving deposit but I wish there was just a one step button to create a deposit slip from a giving batch.

We are able to let mass amounts of volunteers know what they'll be doing, when they'll be serving, and where they'll be serving over the weekend services we have. It's a great tool for churches who have volunteers willing to jump in and be a part of a team.

I like that we can send our team members invites for weekend services and they can respond via the downloadable app. We continually use this software to see who will be showing up to services/events by who's accepted and who has declined the invites we send out. We enjoy using the service flow capability that allows us to communicate how the services will be run for each weekend. This not only allows us to communicate with those who volunteer on our teams, but they have great features like music stand to help communicate which songs will be played that need to be practiced. Every feature created is to the benefit of the participants and the administrators using it.

I think the only thing I really don't like about this software is the time it takes to get used to where all the functionality is and what can be used for different situations. It's sometimes a challenge to get newer users on their feet when jumping into this program. Particularly in understanding the structure of how data is recorded within the program.

Being able to access my sheet music on the fly with annotations I have written in is a huge game player for playing on a worship team. I used to have a huge physical folder of sheet music, and now I have everything in this app. This app eliminates the need for paper sheet music. I also like that if a team leader changes a key in a song, the new sheet music will be available (although I wish this gave you a notification that the key changed).

+ I like that I can listen to the songs through the app (YouTube player) + I love being able to make annotations on a song, and then accessing those later (provided they are in the same key) + I like that I can block out my unavailability on a calendar

- For Music Stand, Annotations on sheet music in previous keys are rarely available. This makes transposing very frustrating and time consuming - Cannot access annotations on songs in different keys from the PC online version (have to use the mobile version) - Custom zoom options are very difficult to manage (if you want to zoom in on Music Stand, it is finicky) - I should be able to access songs/annotations/sheet music from prior services I have played, but as of now I cannot - It would be really nice to have a transpose feature (A key is in A but the sheet music is in G - this technology is readily available on other websites, but Planning Center does not currently have this) - I should be able to share my annotations with other members - Should get notifications in app if the leader changes the key of a song