Why churches are switching from Planning Center

The conversation that keeps coming up

We've had some version of this conversation dozens of times over the past year. An executive pastor or church admin reaches out, usually starting with something like: 'We've been on Planning Center for years. It's fine. But we keep running into the same walls.'

The walls are different for each church, but the themes are consistent. Data lives in too many places. Getting a complete picture of a member requires logging into multiple apps. Pastoral care is tracked in spreadsheets because the platform doesn't have the right tools. And the team spends more time managing the software than the software saves them.

These aren't angry ex-customers. They're pragmatic leaders who loved what Planning Center did for them five years ago and are now asking whether it's still the right fit for where they're headed. That's a fair question for any tool. And it's a question every church should ask periodically, regardless of which platform they're on.

Planning Center solved the organization problem

Credit where it's due: Planning Center built the modern church software category. Before Planning Center, most churches were running on paper sign-up sheets, Excel spreadsheets, and a lot of institutional memory. Planning Center gave churches real tools for scheduling volunteers, planning services, managing groups, and processing check-ins.

That was transformational. Churches went from 'we don't know who's coming on Sunday' to 'we have a system.' For many churches, Planning Center was the first piece of software their team actually adopted and used consistently. That's a significant achievement.

But organization was the starting point, not the destination. The churches reaching out to us aren't looking for a better way to organize. They're looking for tools that help them do ministry -- catch people before they drift, multiply their communication efforts, surface pastoral needs they'd otherwise miss. Those are different problems, and they require different architecture. You can't bolt care intelligence onto an organizational tool and expect it to work the same as a platform designed around pastoral outcomes from the beginning.

The modular model creates hidden friction

Planning Center's architecture is modular -- separate apps for People, Groups, Giving, Check-Ins, Services, Registrations, and Publishing. Each app does its job. But as churches use more apps, a friction pattern emerges: the apps don't always share data the way you'd expect.

An executive pastor preparing for a staff meeting might need to check attendance trends (Check-Ins), review giving patterns (Giving), see which groups are struggling (Groups), and check on new guest follow-up (People). That's four apps, four logins, four different interfaces. The context about a single member is scattered across all of them.

A unified platform solves this by design. When people data, giving history, group attendance, volunteer schedules, and pastoral care notes all live in the same database, context travels with the person. You don't stitch information together from multiple sources -- you see the whole picture in one place.

This matters most for pastoral care. When a pastor is visiting a family, they need the full context: attendance history, giving patterns (not the amounts, but the trend), group involvement, previous care notes, and any flags from the care team. Assembling that from five separate apps before a hospital visit is not a good use of a pastor's time.

AI is changing what's possible

The biggest shift in church technology isn't better interfaces or faster databases. It's AI. And the churches that are switching platforms right now are largely switching because they want AI capabilities that their current tool wasn't designed to provide.

This isn't about replacing humans with robots. It's about practical time savings. A sermon that took your communications team three hours to repurpose into social posts, email content, and discussion questions can now be drafted by AI in minutes. The team still reviews, edits, and approves -- but the starting point is 80% done instead of a blank page.

The distinction that matters: these features need to be native to the platform, not bolted on as an afterthought. When AI is built into the core architecture, it has access to your church's data -- attendance patterns, communication history, member profiles -- and can provide genuinely useful suggestions. A separate AI tool that doesn't know your church is just a generic writing assistant.

This is a timing question as much as a feature question. AI-native platforms are being built right now. Churches that switch early get to shape the tools through feedback. Churches that wait will eventually switch to the same tools, but without the advantage of having influenced how they were built for ministry context.

The cost conversation

Planning Center's per-app pricing model can add up, especially for mid-size and growing churches that use most of the apps at scale. Each app has its own price tier based on your database size. A church using five apps at scale can easily reach $150-250 per month.

That's not unreasonable for the value provided. But when churches compare it to an all-inclusive model where every feature is included in a single tier, the math often favors simplicity. No calculating which apps you need. No surprises when you add a sixth module. No per-member pricing that penalizes growth.

More importantly, the hidden cost of the modular model is staff time. If your team spends 30 minutes per week switching between apps, pulling data from multiple sources, and reconciling information, that's 26 hours per year of administrative overhead that a unified platform eliminates.

Churches considering a switch should calculate their real cost of ownership -- not just the subscription price. Factor in the hours spent managing workarounds, the integrations you're paying for to connect apps that should share data natively, and the opportunity cost of your admin team spending time on software logistics instead of ministry.

Migration is the fear. Reality is easier.

The number one reason churches stay on a platform they've outgrown is migration anxiety. 'We've been on Planning Center for eight years. All our data is there. Switching sounds like a nightmare.'

Here's what actually happens: Planning Center exports data cleanly. People records, giving history, group membership, check-in data -- it all comes over. A guided migration process maps the data structure from one platform to another in a few hours, not weeks. The technical part of migration is the easy part.

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