ChurchTrac vs Planning Center: Which is a better fit?

Jeff Q.: My name is Jeff. I am the senior pastor of Smoky Valley Baptist Church in Lindsborg, Kansas, and I would give ChurchTrac an absolute five rating. Before ChurchTrac, we were using an online version of Quicken and it was just very limited for our needs as far as the church goes. From all of my administrative and organizational purposes, I was using actual manual stuff. And I've got manual copies of visits that I've made, organizational type charts, that kind of stuff. And it's just cumbersome and not editable and certainly old school. So we went with ChurchTrac because the price was very competitive to every other program we've seen. And the other programs, it seemed like they had a trunk of their project that was for churches. ChurchTrac is written expressly for churches and it's like church people built it. It addresses everything we were needing, and it even opened us up to some things that we didn't know were possible. And so therefore we've kind of adapted some things ChurchTrac makes possible, online giving, online directory, just those types of things. The ability to mass email and mass text through partnering software, that's been eye-opening for us and that's really been a blessing. So getting started with ChurchTrac was very easy, and I am an old guy. I'm the guy that looks for a 14-year-old to help me with my phone. ChurchTrac was so easy to get started with. It has an iPhone component, a mobile phone component called Church Connect. And just really, it's very user-friendly. Besides that, the tutorials and the walkthroughs are just abundant on ChurchTrac's YouTube page. If I have any questions, I go through there and it's like an FAQ for people that need to see it spelled out and played out before them. And besides that, I've been a part of two of the Zoom meetings with the ChurchTrac representatives who have taken questions right there in a live format. And they've addressed all of my questions and really, I have yet to find anything I can't figure out. So it's been good. If I were to give any advice for a new user of ChurchTrac, we are a very small church. We've got 70 to 80 individuals in our church. I'm the only pastor. But I have other key individuals that I use in leadership, treasurers, deacons, that type of thing. And it's really been a blessing to me to know that I can authorize them with user access, with administrative access for different areas. In our situation, and in many churches like ours, the pastor keeps himself free of knowledge of the giving. I don't want to know who gives and who doesn't give and what they give. That just helps me to be able to shepherd and to minister to everybody equally. And so I can do that with ChurchTrac with the financial end of things. I can authorize my treasurers to know that information and I can restrict it from my own information. So that's been a real blessing. But if I had one big bit of advice, yeah, involve those other leaders. Don't just do it by yourself, and take full advantage. We're not using even a fraction of what ChurchTrac is offering at this point, and I'm looking forward to growing into it.

Allen V.: Well, my name's Allen. I'm a pastor at Reach Church and my company size is just me and managing our church. However, I would give Planning Center five stars. Before Planning Center, we used a host of options from all over the place for music service purposes. We had printed sheet music that we would hand out each week in giant binders to keep them all there. After Planning Center, of course, they have a digital system and everyone's coordinated and synced up together on our music team as well as when it came to church database functionality. Planning centers, people, is free and anything else, the only other free options you would get for this is basically an Excel or Google Sheet spreadsheet. And so the People software is quite powerful and the price is right and it helped us manage our entire system together. We also use our check-ins for youth and kids areas, and before that we also just had to have paper sign in sheets and keep them in a file folder, and now it's all stored digitally and it's much easier. I chose Planning Center, initially why I gravitated to it was simply that it's kind of an industry standard. It's really the default option that everyone uses, and I don't say that as a negative thing. It's that way for a reason. It's powerful. It's very easy to use. The entry level cost is zero. And for small church plants like ourself, we were able to get off the ground and use all of their plugins and different parts of their service for free until we grow more. And so I've used it at every church I've been at. We've had paid versions and free versions of things, and it is a powerful piece of software, easy to use, easy to train volunteers on. And again, price is right and it's the industry standard. Getting started with Planing Center is extremely easy. There's almost zero learning curve to it. The initial setup is simply putting people into a database to manage your attendance lists and things like that. From that point, you can just learn what you need as you need it, and it's quite simple and straightforward. They have a ton of knowledge base videos. They have easy to reach chat support, they have easy to reach phone support, so it's extremely easy. If you're considering getting Planning Center, I would just suggest you try. Start out with people. Like I said, it's free. There is no cost other than your time to be able to see if it's a good fit for you, and then if it is, you can add whatever fits in your budget. The sky is the limit. You can run pretty much your whole church off of Planning Center, including a customized church app, or you could just simply keep a free database to be able to email people easily in groups.