Planning Center

Avantages

Planning center is always adapting and changing to needs of the client. They take input very well and help problem solve when needed. Their customer service is incredible.

Inconvénients

There really isn’t anything that I or any of my colleagues dislike about planning center. Typically if there’s an issue, it’s easily resolved by a call to customer service.

Avantages

It makes communicating with my volunteers so much easier.

Inconvénients

The price is too much for what it offers in my opinion.

Avantages

We utilize the services app for managing peoples schedules and Sunday morning flow of service. It makes it a breeze and is such a huge help with saving time for scheduling and also planning ahead to know how to properly plan!

Inconvénients

I love everything about planning center. It was such a breeze setting up all of the volunteers at our church. And now they love using the app as well!

Avantages

The design, the backend ease of accessibility, the layout. The ease of use for both users and administrators, the amount of features that could be used each week, and also the ability to store files and songs into it.

Inconvénients

It was a bit pricey, and also the financial organizing side wasn't ideal. When it came to service flow layout, it seemed a bit awkward looking, like the agenda needed to be updated to streamline and match the rest of the platform.

Avantages

Ability to choose products a la carte for your organizations personal needs and cost efficiency

Inconvénients

Would love to see more personal customization options

Avantages

I appreciate that many of the lowest level uses for their products are free. This gives a chance to test and use before full implementation. The best part of these products is the full integration between all the different apps.

Inconvénients

Sometimes the updates happen a bit to frequently on particular apps. This is normally not a problem, but for a setup and take down church, it proves to be difficult as the new workflow needs to be figured out day off.

Avantages

The extent of features when it comes to organizing and scheduling teams is fantastic. I find it very helpful that Planning Center tells me how long it has been since a particular volunteer has been scheduled, regardless of what role they were serving. Additionally, the level of functionality on the side of the volunteer is great. They can add blackout dates and respond to serving requests directly within an email.

Inconvénients

At times, the menus can be a little clunky, and I find myself having to hunt for specific features. Planning Center's help section is fairly comprehensive though, so this usually fixes the issue for me.

Avantages

It literally is the backbone of our church planning. You can just about manage everything with it. Literally.

Inconvénients

Previously there were some gaps in workflow automations but they are heavily investing in this and coming up with things I didn’t even know I needed.

Avantages

Planning center is very user friendly. Even if you don't have any experience with building sign ups it takes a minimal amount of time to learn. The products are low maintenance and it's a great way to track volunteers for a non-profit.

Inconvénients

Pulling people off waitlists is a little tedious, but otherwise, we really love this product.

Avantages

I love that you can customize which modules you need. You can try a module for 30 days, you don't pay for large usage unless you need it. They give a grace period, where you can get the small package but if you use it more for one month, you don't have to upgrade. It keeps donor management and people database in the same place, so if someone changes their address, it is changed across all modules.

Inconvénients

Reports seem to be difficult to generate accurate results. For example, if you want to generate a report that includes everyone who gave any amount in the past year and attended an event or volunteered. We have tried this report and didn't get back proper results when run by someone other than the giving users. They don't need to know specifics on giving but should be able to add that as a criteria. Also, if someone accidentally deletes a user then there is no way to get them back even if they had giving. There should be a safeguard in place so that only giving users can delete a profile that has giving.I don't like that you cannot use VISA/MC debit for paying,

Avantages

I love that it integrates with Stripe for giving and to the church center app so we are able to host all of our events that way. It's seamless to use, easy to navigate, and has great reliability.

Inconvénients

I would love it if via their giving portion, they also allowed selling. For instance, our church has a bookshelf and we sell Bibles, etc but planning center only accepts donations and registrations, not payments for things we sell.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Planning Center

Avantages

Using Planning Center is like having the church volunteer who can do it all. The options in all its planning categories is so robust, our small team is easily able to keep track of volunteers, kids, donations, visitors, and more. We especially love the scheduling and volunteers - the categories are easy for the staff to set up, and easy for the volunteers to understand. The opt-in for volunteers to confirm or decline a role is so easy, the volunteer does not even have to be signed in. This feature makes it so very easy to schedule the workload from week to week, and make sure each member of the team has the help it needs!

Inconvénients

I feel that their "groups" function is a little lacking - there's some basic features for setting up groups and protecting host information (such as home address), but I've seen other church group software that provides much more in terms of communication, tracking, etc. Thankfully, Planning Center intends to expand upon this feature, and I trust that they will eventually.

Avantages

I think this is incredibly easy to use overall. The Scheduling software is what I use most often as I schedule teams for our weekend services. It's intuitive and there are several ways to streamline the sometimes tedious tasks of scheduling the same times every week. Additionally, this software makes it easy to keep track of how often volunteers are scheduled - which is extremely helpful because they are volunteers and I don't want them to burn out.

Inconvénients

I think there could be better training on how to use all aspects of PCO effectively. I feel like we take advantage of only 80% of what PCO is capable of doing for us, and a lot of that is simply because there are no simple guidelines for the massive amount of possibilities for building plans and scheduling teams. More in depth training - that is organized and dives into the details would be extremely helpful. Whenever I have time, I test plans and templates using our employees profiles, but it's really time consuming. I'd rather just sit down and study the system - or have easy access to detailed videos on specific topics.

Avantages

Planning Center offered many great options and could be very detailed.

Inconvénients

The software was very expensive. Each module cost additional money. During Covid and after, it became very expensive as income dropped. Unfortunately we got priced out of it. Also, there is no true customer service. It is either via email, or using the knowledge bank. We were not able to actually speak with someone to help answer questions.

Avantages

I love the fact that we can track how often we use our volunteers. The software is easy to use. We also love the Music stand feature, most of our band uses this feature

Inconvénients

Honestly, I have no problems with software, I guess I could cry about the cost, but you get what you pay for.

Avantages

I've been using Planning Center for many years with multiple worship teams, and it keeps evolving and getting better. I'm an admin with Planning Center for my current church, so I use it quite often. It stores a data base of team members that can be grouped into multiple categories (worship team, audio/lighting tech, sunday school/nursery volunteers, etc). I think PC really shines for scheduling worship services. It stores audio files, video links, and documents which can easily be linked to any new service so your team has the information (music, audio files, videos) they need to be prepared in advance. Your worship team (or for any other aspect of church functions) can be alerted when they are scheduled to serve, and they can accept or reject the invite to serve which will alert the admin so they can make sure that a person for each required position of a service or event has been filled. It can save tons of time for an administrator to put together a team and get them the resources they need. It even links to online calendars so when you accept a position for an event, it can automatically be added to your calendar (in my case Google). Overall, if your church isn't using this, you need to try it - it's a huge time saver!

Inconvénients

It can be a little confusing sometimes, and there is way more to it than we use that I wish we could turn off until we need it, but honestly it's still probably the best options out there that we've found.

Avantages

I love that planning center helps us keep everything in one place! From tracking attendance, tracking people's contact info, and even their giving! It makes it so easy to schedule volunteers and keep up to date on everything all in one place!

Inconvénients

One of the only things I don't really like is that there are not a lot of featured built into sending an email to a list. Planning center has figured out a work around to be able to send through Mailchimp to gain some of those lost features, but Mailchimp isn't always the most friendly software to use.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Planning Center is industry standard for events for a reason. I thought we could do without it, but I was so wrong! As a team, we use Planning Center every other week for our staff events, and we managed a conference of 1,000+ people using it as well. Even though the event was literally halfway around the world in another country, the team on the other end was just as familiar with the platform and used it weekly for their events. Our mutual familiarity with the program saved the day! The timer helped us keep organized and on-time as we managed 56 speakers over the course of three days. This software is a powerhouse! There's still so much more functionality to get into that I haven't even explored.

Inconvénients

Planning Center isn't necessarily the most intuitively designed platform, so there's definitely a learning curve as you get started. Be sure to do the training, or have someone familiar with it show you the ropes. The only thing that nearly tanked our event was the remote connection between the app and the countdown timer for the stage, but I think that was a Wifi issue more so than with the software itself. Overall, it has way more pro's than con's.

Avantages

Planning center seems to be designed to be easy to use first, and to have all the features second. I appreciate this because a lot of the alternatives end up being too difficult to use, PC is great for the end users.

Inconvénients

I guess the only thing is that there are a few features they don't have yet that I would like to see, like more automation and a bit more flexibility on user permission management

Avantages

Planning center is awesome! We have centralized and organized all of our production planning, volunteer scheduling and service planning in one single platform. It has become part of the every day use of our church.

Inconvénients

The hardest thing in planning center was how difficult it was to implement it. Any organization will find a hard time implementing new software that everyone needs to use, but it is much harder when you are dealing with volunteers. Once we got over that hurdle, I can't really complain about anything.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

I like having individual apps for the different functions in PCO. Each module/app is easy to use and setup. Plus they all integrate seamlessly with one another. Workflows for everyday tasks like first time guest follow up, volunteer email/communication, event registration, and attendance is extremely valuable.

Inconvénients

After using multiple church management systems, PCO has all the features we need...so not real cons for me.

Avantages

PC is a very robust system. I love that it incorporates multiple applications into one suite.

Inconvénients

I don't like that when I create an event I cannot give someone else access to edit the event. This is actually a big problem when it comes to having events approved and having an assistant make any changes. I wish they allowed you the ability to co-edit.

Avantages

When we started using Planning Center as our CMS, it made our lives so much easier as it was able to keep track of everything from our members, to events, to groups, and it even integrated with our offering, so it's such a great software that's easy to use!

Inconvénients

Planning Center is really easy to use and they provide tutorials, so there's no complaints here!