Original research
What software do churches actually use? We checked 25,593 websites.
We crawled the public homepages of 25,593 US churches and classified the church management, giving, and payment vendors each one links to. 62.2% show no software marker at all, and giving or payment platforms outnumber true church management systems by roughly 2.7 to 1.
By Jamison Cote · Published · Data collected August 7 to 8, 2026 · Jump to methodology
62.2%
No software marker found
15,908 sites
13.0%
Giving / payment platform only
3,323 sites
11.3%
Planning Center (free tier)
2,884 sites
4.8%
Paid management system
1,234 sites
8.8%
Inconclusive / unreachable
2,244 sites
What we found
A dedicated, paid church management system, the kind of tool that tracks people, households, attendance, and serving schedules, was detectable on just 4.8% of the homepages we crawled (1,234 of 25,593 sites). Planning Center's free People product showed up on more sites on its own (2,884, 11.3%) than every paid management system we detected, combined, roughly 2.3 times as many.
Giving and payment platforms, tools like Tithe.ly, Subsplash, and Pushpay that process online contributions but are not church management systems, were more common still: 3,323 sites (13.0%), about 2.7 times the count of paid management systems. Put another way, a church website in this sample was considerably more likely to show a “donate” button than to show any evidence of a system for tracking its own people.
Counting every category together, a management system, Planning Center, or a giving platform, 29.1% of the sites we crawled (7,441 of 25,593) showed at least one software marker of any kind. 62.2% (15,908 sites) showed none, and 8.8% (2,244 sites) were unreachable or gave no conclusive signal either way. See the methodology below for exactly what that “none” figure does and doesn't tell you.
Among the paid management systems, ACS Realm appeared roughly 1.5 times as often as Breeze in this sample (732 versus 491), and MinistryPlatform was rare, 11 sites total.
The full breakdown
Indented rows are a breakdown of the category above them, and are already included in that category's count, not additional sites on top of it.
| Category | Websites | Share of sample |
|---|---|---|
| Church management system (any) | 1,234 | 4.8% |
| Breeze | 491 | 1.9% |
| ACS Realm | 732 | 2.9% |
| MinistryPlatform | 11 | <0.1% |
| Planning Center (free tier product) | 2,884 | 11.3% |
| Giving / payment platform only | 3,323 | 13.0% |
| Tithe.ly | 1,455 | 5.7% |
| Subsplash | 1,182 | 4.6% |
| Pushpay | 389 | 1.5% |
| Givelify | 174 | 0.7% |
| EasyTithe | 123 | 0.5% |
| No software marker found | 15,908 | 62.2% |
| Inconclusive / unreachable | 2,244 | 8.8% |
| Total | 25,593 | 100.0% |
Percentages are each count divided by all 25,593 sites crawled, rounded to one decimal place.
This data is free to cite. If you reference these numbers, a link back to sundaybridge.com/research/church-software-usage is appreciated, so readers can check the methodology below for themselves.
How we did this
We fetched each church's public homepage and looked for vendor markers in the page's markup: script tags, link tags, iframes, and requests to known vendor domains, for example a Breeze embed, a Planning Center giving widget, or a Tithe.ly iframe. A site was classified into whichever category matched, and counted once. The crawl ran on August 7 to 8, 2026.
This detects only what a church links from its homepage. A church can use software without linking it there, a back-office system with no public-facing element, a giving link buried on a page we did not fetch, a QR code on a bulletin instead of a homepage button. So the 15,908 figure, “no software marker found,” is an upper bound on the number of churches with no system at all, not a precise count. The real number of churches running some kind of system, but not showing it on their homepage, is unknown and almost certainly brings that figure down somewhat.
Giving and payment platforms are not church management systems. Tithe.ly, Subsplash, Pushpay, Givelify, and EasyTithe process or record online contributions. They are not tools for tracking people, households, attendance, or serving teams, and we did not treat them as competitors to one in this data. They are counted separately for exactly that reason: a “give online” button on a homepage tells you a church accepts electronic giving, not that it runs a system for its records.
Planning Center is broken out on its own. Its People product has a free tier, which makes finding it on a homepage a different kind of finding than finding a paid system like Breeze or ACS Realm, so we did not fold it into the “church management system” total above.
The sample is not a random sample of all US churches. It is US churches that have a website and a discoverable contact address, drawn from open church directories. Churches without a website are structurally absent from this data, and that absence is not neutral, a church with no website at all is, if anything, less likely to be running paid management software than the average site we could reach. Treat every figure here as describing churches with websites, not churches in general.
2,244 sites (8.8%) were unreachable at crawl time or returned no conclusive signal either way. They are counted as “inconclusive,” not folded into either the “has software” or “no software” figures above.