Looking for a Planning Center alternative? What to compare before you switch

Planning Center isn't a bad product. For more than a decade it's been the gold standard for church management software, and the team behind it has built something genuinely useful. But the way churches operate has changed faster than Planning Center's pricing structure has, and that's where the friction lives. Here are the five reasons we hear most often.

1. Costs that climb module by module

Planning Center's modules start free and move to paid tiers as a church grows. Each module has its own tiers, so growth shows up as several price changes rather than one. A typical 150-person church using five modules pays about $160 to $180 a month, and that number rises as you cross each module's limits, even though the software hasn't changed. That's a structural feature of the pricing model, not a flaw in the product.

2. The modular reality: six separate products

Planning Center isn't one product. It's People, Services, Giving, Check-Ins, Groups, and Publishing, each with its own learning curve, its own admin panel, and its own quirks. By the time your staff is fluent in all six, half of your team has rotated and you're onboarding new people from scratch. The cognitive overhead is real, even when the per-module bill looks reasonable.

3. No member app built for community

Planning Center has Church Center, which works well as a member portal for sign-ups, giving, and groups. But it isn't built for the everyday side of church life: group chat, daily devotionals, and a place members actually hang out during the week. Churches that want that usually pay for a separate app platform like Subsplash or Pushpay on top of Planning Center. That's a second subscription, a second admin panel, and a second support relationship.

4. The learning curve is real

Planning Center has the deepest feature set in the industry. That depth has a cost. New staff onboarding can take weeks. Volunteers sometimes need step-by-step documentation just to self-schedule for a service. Smaller churches and church plants frequently abandon Planning Center mid-implementation because they can't justify the time it takes to administrate it. If your church can't keep a dedicated ChMS admin on staff, the product is harder to love.

5. Creative production is still your problem

Planning Center doesn't help with social media graphics, sermon clips, motion bumpers, or livestream production. Those still go to your media volunteer or to an outside agency, and the output lives in a different system than your ChMS. There's no integration between the software that manages your people and the software that publishes content to your people. That gap costs churches an enormous amount of time every single week.

Before evaluating specific platforms, get clear on what you actually need. Most churches we talk to are looking for some combination of the following:

• •Flat-rate or tier-based pricing that doesn't penalize you for growing
• •All-in-one workflows for people, groups, events, giving, communication, and check-in, without six separate logins
• •A member app included in the platform, not a separate subscription
• •Integrated giving with clear, upfront processing fees
• •Built-in or bundled creative production support, not just a CMS
• •A community engagement layer for the six days that aren't Sunday
• •Modern, mobile-first UX that volunteers can actually learn in an afternoon
• •Migration support for historical data, contributions, and attendance records, without you doing the heavy lifting

HumDov Connect is the church management side of HumDov. It handles your people, groups, events, check-in, communication, and reporting, and it comes with HumDov Give, the HumDov app, and the Mission Engine. HumDov Studio is there if you want help with creative. Here's where it's different.

One subscription, not six

HumDov plans include what most churches need to run week to week. You don't add a new module when you start checking kids in or when your groups team wants sign-ups. You can start on the free plan and move up when you're ready.

Check-in for adults and kids

Members check in through the HumDov app with their own QR code, or by tapping a tag at the door. Kids check-in runs on the same system. Kids are linked to their parents' accounts, name tags and pickup slips print at check-in, and your team controls who is allowed to pick each child up. Teachers can scan a child's tag to message the parent, and guests can pre-register and check themselves in at a kiosk, so you need fewer volunteers at the door.

A member app without an extra vendor

Every plan includes the HumDov app. Your church gets its own space inside it, with group chat (voice notes included), daily Journeys, the Bible, announcements, and giving. Higher plans add your logo and colors. You don't need a separate Subsplash or Pushpay app subscription on top of your church management software.

Giving included, at standard rates

HumDov Give is included in every plan, so giving isn't another product to buy and reconcile. Processing is 2.9% + 30¢ on cards, 3.5% + 30¢ on Amex, and 1% + 30¢ on bank transfers, with no separate platform fee. Smart recurring giving, guest giving, campaigns, text-to-give, and cover-the-fees are built in, and giving statements go out automatically.

An assistant that does the follow-up

This is the part Planning Center doesn't have. The Mission Engine is an AI assistant your church names. It follows up with new people, answers common questions, and sends prayer and help requests to the right person on your team, then checks that the follow-up actually happened. Most church software fires the same automated message at everyone. The Mission Engine decides, person by person, whether and when to reach out.

An API for the tools you already use

HumDov has an API, so you can connect other tools and send in things like form submissions from your website. If something works well for your church today, you can keep it.

Creative help from the same team

HumDov Studio is our done-for-you creative team: sermon edits, short clips for social, graphics, and motion content. Because Studio and the platform come from the same team, your content goes where your members already are, without passing files back and forth over Dropbox or chasing a media volunteer.

We try to be honest about this part. If your church is over 5,000 people, has a dedicated IT and ChMS administrator on staff, runs a massive worship arts program with hundreds of volunteers per weekend, and has deeply specialized workflows wired into Planning Center's API, staying put is probably the right call. Migration costs at that scale are real, and Planning Center's API depth genuinely is best-in-class.

For everyone else, including church plants, growing mid-size churches, multi-site churches under 5,000, and faith-based communities that need a modern app experience without paying two vendors for it, HumDov Connect is built for you.

Setup and migration are two different things. Getting your church set up on HumDov takes 24 to 48 hours, and you can be up and running with your people, groups, and giving page that same week.

Migration, meaning bringing years of data over from Planning Center, is a bigger job. For most churches it takes two to eight weeks, depending on how much data you have and how clean it is. People records, households, giving history, and group rosters come across, and our team does the heavy lifting so your staff isn't exporting spreadsheets at midnight.

You don't have to switch everything on day one. Plenty of churches keep their old system running until they're comfortable with the data on the HumDov side.

The most common surprise during migration isn't technical. It's how much cleaner the data feels on the other side. Churches that have been on Planning Center for years often have duplicate contact records, dead small groups, and inactive volunteers cluttering their reports. Migration is a natural reset.