Planning Center

RATING:

4.7

(1121)

About Planning Center

Planning Center is an all-in-one church management system designed to help you and your team communicate, organize information, coordinate events, and connect with your congregation. With a suite of different products on a connected platform, you can use different tools for different ministry needs while keeping your team and congregation informed about what's going on. Services provides an effortless way to schedule volunteers, Registrations simplifies the event signup process, and People offers automations to follow up with visitors. You can use Check-Is to quickly and securely check in students and volunteers, Calendar to plan and post events for church-wide visibility, Giving for easy online donations and pledge campaigns, Groups for small group organization and m...

Awards and Recognition

FrontRunner 2023
Software Advice's FrontRunners report ranks top products based on user reviews, which helps businesses find the right software.

Planning Center Pricing

A 30-day free trial is available after which the product is available on module-based pricing outlined below. Calendar (10 rooms, unlimited events) - starts at $14 Check-ins (50 daily check-ins) - starts at $14 Giving (100 monthly donations) - starts at $14 Groups (125 group members) - starts at $14 Publishing - starts at $14 Registrations (20 event attendees) - starts at $14 Services (25 team members) - starts at $14

Free trial: 

Available

Free version: 

Not Available

View resources for events

Planning Center Reviews

Overall Rating

4.7

Ratings Breakdown

Secondary Ratings

Ease-of-use

4.5

Customer Support

4.5

Value for money

4.5

Functionality

4.5

Most Helpful Reviews for Planning Center

1 - 5 of 1,121 Reviews

Adam

11 - 50 employees

Used more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

5

Reviewed December 2020

It's the standard for church software for a reason

User Profile

Christopher

Verified reviewer

Religious Institutions, 51-200 employees

Used weekly for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed May 2022

Great software!

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.

PROS

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.

CONS

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.

Reason for choosing Planning Center

Ease of event registration & seamless integration into the People database of PCO. Volunteer scheduling/maintenance is robust.

Vendor Response

Hi Christopher, Thanks for your kind words! You mentioned feedback regarding our lack of customization and API concerns for Registrations specifically. Our Support Team is a great resource for help in that area. Hit the '?' icon in the upper-right of the screen when you are looking at your List. Send us a message and our team will jump in to help! We welcome feedback and feature requests, too. Thanks!

Replied July 2022

Anonymous

11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

4

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed October 2020

Best service planning software around

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.

PROS

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.

CONS

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.

Reason for choosing Planning Center

Services fit all of our needs well when it came to service planning and Sunday morning volunteer management, and there didn't seem to be any other products that could compete in terms of functionality and ease of use.

Tara

Non-Profit Organization Management, 2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

3

EASE OF USE

2

VALUE FOR MONEY

3

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

4

FUNCTIONALITY

2

Reviewed April 2021

Not the most user friendly

Planning center makes it easy to keep church records and maintain a database. Not only can you use it to schedule and email volunteers, but it also has an add on that allows you to background check volunteers as well. It is very helpful to have this tool included in the software. My main complaint about the product is that it is difficult to create teams Volunteers and the service planning tool is awkward when applied to children’s ministries.

PROS

There is a great system for tracking attendance and check-in‘s at Sunday services. It can be a very helpful database for church management with lots of different functionalities.

CONS

The “Services” is not user-friendly at all. The menus are not intuitive, and it takes lots of trial and error to achieve the desired result. This area of the program could use a major overhaul to make it more functional and helpful.

Vendor Response

Hey Tara! Thanks for taking the time to share the review. We're sorry to hear you are running into issues with the volunteer management portion of Services. Our support team is standing by today and ready to assist with any pain points you are running into. Would you be up for emailing us at support@planningcenter.com? We look forward to hearing from you.

Replied April 2021

Mitchell

Religious Institutions, 2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed November 2023

Incredible Software to help Manage your team!

PROS

We love how easy it is to add people to the program, how intuitive it is to create services plans and items and adding people into various positions, and we love how you can upload the music and chord charts for each song so that volunteers can easily rehearse and practice on their own!

CONS

It is a little more on the expensive end of the market; however the features they include mostly off set this. We also wish it could do more.

Vendor Response

Thanks for your kind words, Mitchell! We always appreciate hearing from our customers!

Replied November 2023