Planning Center Reviews

So. Much. Better.

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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).

Cons:

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.

The standard for church management software

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Alternatives Considered: Rock RMS

Reasons for Choosing Planning Center: The ease of use and enhanced options of Planning Center made it a no brainer. The modern look, feel, and functionality was a welcome change, as well.

Switched From: Servant Keeper

Reasons for Switching to Planning Center: The wide-span options of use in Planning Center made it a clear winner. The overall look, feel, and functionality was an added bonus.

Not the most user friendly

Comments: 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.

Best service planning software around

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: Realm and ChMS

Reasons for Switching to 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.

The MUST USE platform for Worship Planning!

Comments: 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!

Pros:

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!

Cons:

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.

Alternatives Considered: Elvanto

Reasons for Switching to Planning Center: Planning Center has much more features and much more integration options. Plus it is easier to use!

Planning Center for Churches

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Alternatives Considered: ChMS

Reasons for Choosing Planning Center: The ease of use was a huge selling point for us. Breeze is slow compared to Planning Center and lacks some of the functionality that Planning Center has.

Switched From: Breeze ChMS

Reasons for Switching to Planning Center: The ease of use and ease of teaching our volunteers and staff to use it was a huge selling point. Also, the lack of a contract played into our decision.

Necessary for worship/service planning, other features could integrate better

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Alternatives Considered: Elvanto

Reasons for Switching to Planning Center: Planning Center is the gold standard for worship planning, so we did not want to use a different product or 2 separate products for our database solution.

Great software!

Comments: 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.

Alternatives Considered: MinistryPlatform

Reasons for Switching to Planning Center: Ease of event registration & seamless integration into the People database of PCO. Volunteer scheduling/maintenance is robust.

Excellent Church Management Software

Comments: 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!

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

Alternatives Considered: Rock RMS

Reasons for Switching to Planning Center: We chose Planning Center over Rock RMS due to its ease of setup and not having to maintain/configure the server to run Rock RMS ourselves. In the future, we may move to Rock RMS for some apps given the greater customization and flexibility that Rock RMS offers.

Planning Center

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

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Alternatives Considered: KidCheck

Reasons for Switching to Planning Center: It was able to integrate easier with our attendance reports and the cost was less

Easy to use, but ease of use leads to fewer options, it seems

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Alternatives Considered: Worship Extreme

Reasons for Choosing Planning Center: Connection with Services and other PC products.

Reasons for Switching to Planning Center: Connection with Services and other PC products.

The only service we need to plan and execute our events

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Alternatives Considered: WorshipPlanning.com

Reasons for Choosing Planning Center: PCOs cloud based service is so much easier to use and collaborate with all our different teams. Clearly a lot less clunky to use than a single user document based software.

Switched From: Microsoft Excel

Trae Bremer

Pros:

Planning center provides a foundation to manage your church. Its a go to platform that allows to approach and manage every aspect all from one software. That's my favorite part, the fact our whole church can be managed from one program.

Cons:

I do think planning center can continue to update it's email system. Though Mailchimp is a great integration, the lack of customizing email templates and list can be updated.

Alternatives Considered: Text In Church

Reasons for Switching to Planning Center: Planning center was better in at every angle.

Planning Center Does it All!

Comments: We liked the smooth and more cost-effective check-in system with PC so much that we switched our giving platform over as well - saving us time, aggravation, and even more money!

Pros:

Our church was looking for a better, more reliable system for children's check-in than the big-name, big-ticket system we were using before and PC was the answer! Its modular setup ensures that we don't pay for features we don't use, but also leaves us with plenty of options should our needs change and we decide to expand our functionality.

Cons:

There is literally nothing that we have encountered about Planning Center that has not been easily remedied. We are completely and totally satisfied.

Great All in One Church Database System!

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

Amazing Church Management Software

Comments: Overall, Planning Center is a pleasure to use and the support team is one of the best I've ever seen. They care about their customers and strive to make sure their product works perfectly. The development of these tools is ongoing and new features arrive all the time. Planning Center is a textbook example of how to do church management software right.

Pros:

I love that Planning Center makes church management easy and fun. The web interface just keeps getting better and the developers are very active in trying to meet the needs of their customers. Its modular design ensures that it has tools available for all churches no matter how big or small. The prices are fair and you only have to pay for the parts that you use. Planning Center has transformed the way we manage our church and has improved communication between our leadership and our church body. This is a must-have tool for any church interested in improving the way they operate.

Cons:

While I know that this is a work-in-progress, I find the lack of consistency across the various modules to be an issue. When a new feature is released in one module, it can take some time for it to migrate across the entire software platform. This causes confusion to those of us who are using nearly every tool offered by Planning Center. Additionally, some modules force users to use the archaic and difficult to use Markdown coding langue to format outgoing emails. To make matters worse, there is no email preview in the Markdown editor. So, it's a mystery if the code was entered correctly until after you hit the send button. Frustratingly, some modules do provide users with a full, rich text editor for correspondence. Why don't all of them?

Comparison to WorshipTeam software

Comments: Overall, I do like Planning Center, but I am really torn, because the "Cons" chew up a ton of my time. In my previous church (5 years ago), I DID use Planning Center and thought it was great. I realize that Planning Center is the "BIG PLAYER", but there are definitely things they could improve to make the experience easier.

Pros:

1. Parts Storage - I can store my keyboard parts, lead sheets, chord sheets all in one place 2. Templates for services is very handy - saves a couple minutes each week allowing me to just add in my songs and any special things happening in the service. 3. Matrix view of plans and people - I do my people planning every 2 months, so it's nice to see 2 months worth of services all on one screen and fill in the blanks. 4. Black out dates - each team member can block out dates that they are not available, so I don't even need to bother asking them 5. Music Stand app - allows all of my musicians to be totally paperless (using an ipad), even my piano player (since I can import her music right into planning center along with my lead sheets from SongSelect). In WorshipTeam, I first have to create a PDF, and I can only create the PDF with Chord charts. I can actually turn pages for all of my musicians simultaneously using a session. 6. Notifications - I love the automatic notifications of members for upcoming services they are assigned to 7. Church Management - great tool for planning nursery workers, sunday school workers, ushers, greeters, etc. And they all get email/text reminders too! 8. Auto import of chord charts from SongSelect is great (too bad it won't also import my lead sheets) 9. I have heard of the ability to automatically create my projection slides from my weekly plan including proper sequence for each song - no mismatch of words between slides and chord charts.

Cons:

1. Transposing songs is PAINFUL! In WorshipTeam, I can transpose with one click. I don't have to manually transpose the MP3 for the song and the chord chart is automatically transposed too. In our church, we have a lot of altos and basses. Rarely do we ever do a song in the original key. 2. Library is self populated. In WorshipTeam, I have the songs I have added to the library, but also all the songs that everyone else has added. So, for contemporary songs, they are usually already in the library for my use all ready to go. When I have a substitute worship leader, they are extremely daunted by the task of adding a song to the library in Planning Center. I don't know if they will ever do it even though I wrote out a procedure for them. 3. Not sure, but I think the storage area is limited in Planning Center. So, if I have created to many alternate keys of songs, I will eventually run out of space? 4. CCLI reporting is more complicated. With WorshipTeam, a report is easily created with one click and I don't have to keep track of anything on a weekly basis.

Is Planning Center the way to go?

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Impressive Church Management Software that is constantly improving

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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

It's core programs are stellar

Comments: All in one stop shop for Church Database Management

Pros:

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

Cons:

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 Makes Scheduling Easy and Transparent

Comments: 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

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

When it comes to all-in-one church planning and management, Planning Center is second to none.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Planning Center Makes Church Management Easy

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Great at discrete tasks... not yet ready for primetime as a whole-church DB replacement

Comments: Planning Center is hard to review because it's not one product, it's actually six different products. That's both a strength and a weakness. Most people using Planning Center are used to its core functionality: Planning Center Services. This is the tool used for actually planning a worship service (complete with tech sheet, ProPresenter integration, etc) and scheduling people to be there. It also has a Check-In component, a Groups component, a Resources (room scheduling) component, and a Giving component. Supposedly, if you add them all together you get a viable whole-church database solution. It's hard to see that being the case, since a lot of the functionality you'd want to see for a whole-church database (especially around reporting, metrics, dashboards, etc) are missing. But the parts that are there mostly work well. It's impossible to overstate how far ahead Planning Center Services is from everything else in the field. Everyone I'm in contact uses Services for service planning. Their other modules, though, are all missing important features. Work is clearly being done to improve those components, but mostly it seems more like rearranging existing features than adding the ability to solve new problems. We'll keep using Planning Center Services, but have transitioned away from Planning Center Groups and anticipate moving away from Planning Center Resources. Luckily our new system integrates well with PCO, so we'll be able to keep our contact databases in sync. This is an underappreciated feature for PCO: a full API to develop and integrate against!

Pros:

Great ease of use. Excellent for planning services and scheduling volunteers. Makes it easy for volunteers to respond to schedules without having to remember account details. Solid people management.

Cons:

Everything outside of the core (service planning & scheduling) functionality seems half-baked. Very difficult to pull reports, group scheduling & attendance don't work well.

COMPREHENSIVE AND EASY TO USE

Comments: Overall, we are very pleased. However, they could be more responsive to our concerns about customization.

Pros:

We like the ability to choose the modules we need and that they are all integrated. As soon as you select a new module, data from the others is available at once. Each module is versatile and somewhat customizable.

Cons:

The developers used language that does not fit with what we are used to. That is, some of their terminologies fit better in a secular business environment instead of a church. Most of these instances are not customizable. For example, the People module has no way to designate Head of Household or to distinguish dependent children from adult children. We found a number of instances where we had to reorient our thinking to fit their use of terms.