Planning Center vs Relius: an honest comparison

Where Planning Center shines

Let's start with what Planning Center does well, because ignoring it would be dishonest. Planning Center built the modern church software category, and they've earned their reputation.

Services Planning

This is their crown jewel. It's mature, polished, and deeply adopted by worship teams across the country. The setlist builder is intuitive, volunteer scheduling is smooth, and band members actually use it. If your primary pain point is coordinating Sunday morning production, Planning Center Services handles it exceptionally well.

Check-Ins

Their children's ministry check-in system is battle-tested, reliable, and familiar to parents. Security labels print correctly, allergies are flagged, and the flow works even when you have a hundred families checking in at once. It's a known quantity, which matters when kids' safety is on the line.

Ecosystem advantage

Planning Center has been around since 2006. That means a massive community, thousands of tutorials on YouTube, and a near-guarantee that any new hire has used it before. There's comfort in familiarity, and Planning Center has that in abundance.

Their integrations library is also extensive. From ProPresenter to Subsplash to Mailchimp, odds are your other tools already connect. For churches that have built their tech stack around Planning Center, this ecosystem is genuinely valuable and shouldn't be underestimated when evaluating a switch.

Where Relius leads

Now let's talk about where Relius offers something different --and in our view, something better for the direction ministry is heading.

AI-native features

This is the clearest differentiation. Content Studio takes one sermon and generates a week of social media posts, email snippets, and discussion questions. Sermon Planner helps you map a teaching calendar with AI-suggested themes based on your church's rhythm. Pastoral Care AI surfaces members who might be drifting before they disappear. Translation tools help you reach multilingual congregations without hiring translators.

Unified platform

Everything lives in one system. Your people data, giving history, group attendance, volunteer schedules, and pastoral care notes exist in the same database. You don't log into five apps to prep for a staff meeting. Context travels with the person, not across disconnected tools.

Pastoral care tools

Relius was designed with soul care at the center, not bolted on afterward. Care requests route to the right pastor automatically. Prayer follow-ups have built-in reminders. At-risk detection flags people who've missed three Sundays or stopped giving --not to guilt them, but to prompt a genuine check-in before they're gone.

Modern UX

Relius was designed in 2024, not 2006. It feels like the software your team uses everywhere else in their lives. Mobile works properly. Search is fast. Onboarding is quick. Your volunteers won't need a training manual to check someone in.

Pricing comparison

Let's talk money, because pricing structures matter more than most churches realize until they're locked into a platform.

Planning Center pricing

Planning Center uses a per-app, per-size pricing model. Each app (People, Giving, Check-Ins, Groups, Services, Registrations, Publishing) has its own price tier based on your database size. A small church might pay $20/month for one app, but a mid-size church using four or five apps at scale can easily reach $150-250/month. The modular approach sounds flexible until you realize you need most of the apps to run effectively.

Relius pricing

Relius uses a freemium model. The core platform is free forever -- including people management, online giving with AI-powered donation tools, events, groups, and check-ins. Ministry Pro is $60/month for pastoral care, volunteer scheduling, and unlimited communications. Ministry AI is $150/month for the full AI suite. Every tier includes unlimited members -- no penalizing churches for growth. No app bundles to calculate, no surprises when you grow.

We're not saying Planning Center is overpriced -- they offer real value. But if budget matters (and it always does in ministry), the math often favors Relius. Every dollar saved on software is a dollar available for ministry, missions, or staff.

Migration considerations

The biggest fear we hear from churches considering a switch: 'We've been on Planning Center for years. All our data is there. Migration sounds terrifying.'

Here's the honest truth: Planning Center exports data cleanly. People records, giving history, group membership, check-in data --it all comes over. Our migration wizard maps Planning Center's data structure to Relius in a guided process that takes under three hours for most churches.

Your team won't start from scratch either. If they've used any modern church platform, Relius feels familiar. Similar navigation patterns, similar terminology, similar workflows. Most teams are comfortable within a week, fluent within a month.

That said, migration has a cost beyond money: attention. Your team will spend time learning new workflows. There will be a week or two where things feel slower before they feel faster. If you're in the middle of a building campaign or a major staff transition, it might not be the right season. But if you're feeling the friction of your current system every week, that cost compounds too.

The best time to switch is during a natural transition point -- summer, between ministry seasons, or when you're already making staffing changes. Your team has more capacity to learn new systems when the operational demands are lower. Avoid switching in September or December when ministry activity is at its peak.

The honest verdict

So which platform is right for your church? Here's our genuine advice:

Choose Planning Center if:

Choose Relius if:

If you're on the fence, try both. Seriously. Do a Planning Center audit to see if you're using all the apps you're paying for. Then do a Relius demo to see if the AI features and unified approach solve problems you didn't know you had. The best decision is an informed one.

One more thing worth considering: where is the platform headed? Planning Center has a strong foundation, but its architecture was designed before AI, before unified data became the expectation, and before pastoral care tools were table stakes. Relius was built for where ministry technology is going, not where it's been. That doesn't make it universally better -- it makes it a different bet on the future.

We're not trying to be the loudest voice in the room. We're trying to be the most useful. If that's Relius for you, we'd be honored to partner with your church. If it's Planning Center, we'll respect that -- and we'll still be here if things change.