Most churches on Planning Center should stay on Planning Center. It is a deeper, more mature product than Flock, and if you are in the United States, taking card and ACH gifts, and running worship rotas every week, nothing here will improve your Sunday. The case for a Planning Center alternative is narrower and more specific than the comparison posts usually admit: it comes down to how your members actually pay, and what currency you get billed in.
This page is written by the team building Flock, so read it as an interested party. Everything about Planning Center below was checked against their own pricing page on 26 August 2026, and the figures are theirs, not our summary of them.
How Planning Center charges, and why the bill creeps
Planning Center is modular. You pay per app, and each app has its own tier ladder that steps up with the size of your church. People, the member database, is free with unlimited records. The rest have small free allowances and then start charging: Giving is free to ten donations a month, Check-ins to ten check-ins a day, Groups to fifteen group members, Services to five scheduled team members, Calendar to one room.
That model is honest and it is also why the bill creeps. A church that wants attendance, giving, groups and events is buying four ladders at once, each priced on a different dimension. Independent write-ups put a typical 150-person church using several apps at roughly $160 to $180 a month.
Flock prices the other way round: one plan, every module included, priced on active members. Whether that is cheaper depends entirely on how many modules you actually want. For one or two, Planning Center will usually win. For most of them, the single plan wins, and that is the clearest arithmetic case for a Planning Center alternative.
The two things that decide it, if you are not in the United States
Payment rails. This is the real fork in the road. Planning Center Giving takes credit and debit cards, ACH bank transfer in the US, BECS direct debit in Australia, and international cards. There is no USSD. If your members give by bank transfer from their banking app, or by USSD from a feature phone, Planning Center has no rail for that, and cards alone will quietly cost you a portion of your offering every week.
Flock takes card, bank transfer and USSD through Paystack. On the free plan a giver sees your account details, transfers, and submits the reference so the gift lands in your records rather than only in your bank app, and someone on the team confirms it. Card and USSD payments are on the paid plans.
Currency. Planning Center prices in US dollars. Flock prices and bills in Naira. If your income is not in dollars, a dollar subscription is a foreign exchange position you did not ask for, and it moves against you without warning.
Those two paragraphs are the entire argument. Everything else is preference.
Where Planning Center is straightforwardly better
Any comparison that skips this is selling, not helping, and it is the quickest way to spot a Planning Center alternative page written to convert rather than to inform.
- Volunteer and worship scheduling. Planning Center Services is the best product in the category and it is why many churches are there at all. Flock has no equivalent. Not a thinner version, none. If your rota is the thing that hurts, stop reading.
- The free member database is unlimited. Flock's free tier caps at 85 active members and a single staff seat. On names alone, Planning Center's free tier is more generous than ours and it is not close.
- Depth and ecosystem. Years of iteration, a large integration surface, and a support and training footprint a young product does not have.
When a Planning Center alternative is the right call
- Local giving rails. Card, bank transfer and USSD, with bank transfer working even on the free plan.
- One plan instead of four ladders. Members, attendance, giving, events, discipleship, pastoral care, media and communications, priced together.
- Billed in Naira. No currency exposure on a recurring cost.
- A branded church website included, rather than as another module to buy.
The free tiers, compared honestly
Both are real free tiers rather than trials, and they are generous in opposite directions.
Planning Center gives you an unlimited member database and then meters the doing: ten donations a month, ten check-ins a day, fifteen group members. You can hold your whole church in it, and you will hit a wall the first Sunday you try to run anything at scale.
Flock gives you 85 active members and one staff seat, and then lets the functions work: attendance, events, a public giving page and forms are not metered on the free plan. You will hit the members wall before you hit a feature wall.
So the honest test is which wall you reach first. A 400-member church that only wants a directory should take Planning Center's free tier. A 60-member church that wants to actually take giving and track attendance this Sunday is better served by ours.
How to decide in ten minutes
Ignore feature lists, including this one, and answer four questions about your own church before you shortlist any Planning Center alternative:
- How do your people actually give? If the answer includes bank transfer or USSD, that narrows it immediately.
- What currency is your income in? Match your subscription to it if you can.
- How many modules do you genuinely need this year, not eventually?
- Does anyone schedule volunteers weekly? If yes, Planning Center Services has no rival, ours included.
Then set the shortlist up with your own data. Add ten real members, take one service's attendance, and send one message. Ten minutes with your own church tells you more than any comparison page, and that applies to this one too.
If the giving rails and the currency are what pushed you to look for a Planning Center alternative in the first place, that is the case for Flock, and starting is free. If it was the rota, it is not, and we would rather you knew that now. Details of what each plan includes are on the pricing page, and we wrote separately about how to choose church management software without anyone selling to you.