Planning Center Reviews - Page 5

Schedule services and communicate with volunteers through one central location Great mobile app that is not an afterthought. Many of our volunteers only use the mobile app Song planning made easy - just add a song to a service and add people to a service and they have everything they need to rehearse and show up prepared The more ministries use it, the more powerful it becomes - managing schedule conflicts across teams gets easier when all of your teams use it. You can tell the people who write this software are also on church teams. They "get" it.

It is so robust and flexible, with so many options, getting started can be a little overwhelming. For even a mid-sized church like us, it is an investment. It costs about the same as our church management system, so it is not insignificant. However, I would say we get much more value out of the software than our church management system, so it is worth it.

Child Check-in is very intuitive and flexible, with the ability to check-in via computers, tablets, smartphones and customizable labels. You can have manned check-in stations, additional self-check-in kiosks, or roll-sheet style stations. Services is an amazing way to keep your volunteers organized, so you don't overschedule or overutilize some volunteers while leaving others without much to do. ...

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People has very limited ability to send e-mails without integrating with MailChimp, and that integration was not very intuitive. That said, MailChimp's safeguards to help ensure you're never marked as a spammer make it a really good idea to use it, anyway, for mass e-mails.

Although our church uses Planning Center for a variety of things, I use it in our worship ministry, and it allows us to all "stay on the same page". Our church meets in the auditorium of a school, and as such, we only have the building on Sunday mornings. Because of this, our worship team cannot rehearse during the week. With Planning Center, I am able to "post" the music for several Sundays in advance...

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The mobile app is not as responsive as I would like, but it works.

Planning Center is easy to learn, and utilize. We have used another church management system and it was extremely difficult to navigate and to teach others to use. Planning Center People make people management and follow-up simple and streamline. We do not have to send people to workshops to figure out how to use it.

The one con is that there are different apps to download for each major function (services, people etc.). It would be nice to have one central app.

I liked the user interface the most. It was more intuitive than others. We used the giving function and liked it better than other solutions. We like the worship band aspect as well.

It didn't do scheduling very well. It was limited in robustness - though I know they are getting better.

Planning Center has been used and implemented at most churches I've been involved with. I like how you can schedule people for specific jobs, and add all your song notes, uploaded pdfs or recordings. It makes communicating and organizing with different volunteers and leaders easy. I also like how everything is located in a central place. I think Planning Center is best when there are more people involved. If you have a smaller group for your worship team, it becomes unnecessary.

Planning Center gets weird when you have the same email address associated with multiple churches. I've had issues logging into one because of an association with a different church. I've had to contact church administrators and ask them to remove me from their system in order to get it to work with the correct account.

We appreciate this review, Andrew! Another option with multiple email addresses to Link your Accounts together, which can be done without contacting churches directly. More info on that here: https://bit.ly/2XlpNH9 Take a look, and reach back out if you run into questions!

Planning Center has revolutionized the way we communicate with our volunteers and teams. From the most tech-savvy teenager to our oldest retired worship team member, this form of communication simply works for everyone. I love the way you can communicate via different ways. When we first began to transition to Planning Center, we were a traditional church stuck in the 1980's in many ways, especially...

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While Planning Center is the industry standard, in my opinion, I would love if they incorporated a capacity to either integrate with an e-mail marketing/communications company (i.e., Constant Contact or Mail Chimp) or offer that service themselves so I don't have to keep email lists in 2 different (sometimes 3) places.

I love the easiness of this program. The interface takes a bit of time getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, you excel pretty quickly. What I love about it is the simplicity of it. Whether I'm on my phone or on a computer, it still feels the same. They did a great job with implementing on both sides of the spectrum to make a intuitive program to help with services on the go.

The interface change they did in August isn't something that I truly liked. They changed up a few things. It's not too difficult right now, but I really got used to how the old interface worked before they changed it.

I've used Planning center for about a year now though I've known of it for years. I don't know how other churches get by without it! It has so many different uses from checking in children, to organizing rooms and supplies for events, to keeping track of attendance for groups, and of course scheduling volunteers for services. It's very versatile and brings order to the chaos of being a volunteer based work space.

It does have some software bugs with their mobile apps. Often, I've scheduled people on the computer, but when I go to the app it will have other people "pending" under the wrong date and when I try to remove them, I get the "oops, something went wrong" message over and over again. It would also be nice if Planning Center Groups had their own separate phone application to make things more versatile for group leaders, that would be amazing!

I've been a part of music teams that used this software dating back to it's initial release. It's evolved over the years to include a whole lot more features and still remains the definitive worship team management and planning software. This one tool made it INCREDIBLY easy to keep everyone on the same page and for me personally as someone who played on multiple teams simultaneously gave me the ultimate rehearsal tool that gathered all my commitments into one place with all the resources I needed to be prepared for the performance.

At times this software has not allowed the admins to see users and simply attach them into the team. Instead, it would send a separate invite and then you had to manually merge the account yourself. I believe that is resolved now but I am not sure. As a user, this was the largest pain point while playing with multiple teams.

Hi! Thanks for your kind words and honest review! If you are still having any trouble at all adding profiles to Services or teams, specifically, contact our support team through the helpdesk in the app or via email, support@planning.center. We'd be happy to look into any issues you encounter. Have a wonderful day!

I used this software as a volunteer coordinator and it was very simple to learn. The software can auto generate new or rotating service weeks to make long term scheduling easier. It also clearly shows who has accepted, declined, or has not responded to their service request.

There are no cons that pertain to the particular part of the software that I use.

Hi Kayla! We're delighted to hear that you've been enjoying your use of Services. Our aim is always to make sure your experience is as good as it can be. Should you encounter any areas of friction or if you have any feature requests you'd like to see us add to the platform, please us know using support@planning.center. Have a great day!

The Planning Center team must be inside my brain. Everything that I have ever needed within my various roles over the years in the church, planning center was able to address. From service planning, to giving, event registration, facility use schedules to and best church database software. It is everything that you need.

Time to time there are various glitches. Which is pretty common, but they are quick to address.

It's very simple and intuitive to use, and makes planning and scheduling worship teams and services very simple and organized. In addition, the company is constantly working on improving their products and adding new services that add more and more value.

It's become very deep over the years and some of the more advanced features (that I watched them add) can be overwhelming to new users.

Thanks so much for your honest feedback of the applications and we are glad it is a powerful tool for you and your Organization. If you have any suggestions on how to make the process of the new features less overwhelming we would love to hear them so we can continue to make the software the best that it can be. You can open a ticket with our support at support@planning.center this way we can record your Feature Request and pass on to the Team.

This software has completely changed our music ministry at our church! Our choir members have moved from having to hold sheet music every Sunday to being able to practice at home on their own time and really dedicate effort to memorizing everything. Putting the music in the hands of our people at home is fantastic!!

The scheduling feature of Planning Center has helped with our A/V ministry, but it has also been a bit of a hindrance. It takes away the personal touch that we had before. Instead of sitting down with everyone and being able to plan out schedules and communicate together, now you just get an email when you are needed to serve. Not much of a personal touch. It's a great tool, but it comes with a small drawback for our kind of ministry.

Planning Center keeps everyone involved with any aspect of service planning connected and informed.

I'd like to see the Planning Center team extend their offerings to include Microsoft Windows users. I use an HP tablet, and would love to use Planning Center's Music Stand app in the Windows 10 environment.

Thanks for your review, Andre! We're always keeping track of those customers looking for a Windows version of Music Stand, so I've let our devs know this is something you'd like to see as well. We're grateful to be able to serve you and your congregation!

It's great to be able to load songs, scriptures and announcements into one source and have so many people benefit from it.

Like anything to do with computers, it's Garbage In / Garbage Out. You only get what you put into it. So, it takes some time to input the information each time. But, the results are good, after the effort.

Hey Joe, thanks for the review! If you're willing, we'd love to see if we can make inputting information into Plans easier for you. Shoot us an email at support@planningcenteronline.com and we'll take a look!

Planning center helps keep our church organized. We can collaborate on plans, see everything in advance, and schedule volunteers. The large number of features such as tags or blockout dates make it easy to make sure we schedule people based on availability. We have also started using ProPresenter, so the link between these two programs is very helpful in creating slides. Everything is stored in Planning Center, and it easily imports in from our slideshow program. Planning Center giving has made it easy for online donations. Most people don't carry cash or checks around, so having that online donation option is helpful for them. Planning Center was easy to set up and use.

I don't have many problems with Planning Center at all. Sometimes, the learning curve on advanced functions can be steep, and I may forget the exact steps to do something, but their help guides are there to guide me through. I'm still not sure how to automatically send emails as soon as I schedule someone, but that's a minor issue.

So many options! Service planning and structure and scheduling. Small group organization and sign ups. Safe check in for children and students.

Duplication of profiles when someone signs up with a different email or incorrectly types their email (.con instead of .com haha) Not being able to precheck children very early. Would be nice to be able to do it a day or two in advance.

Thank you for your kind words, Elizabeth! If you'd like to, please feel free to send us an email at support@planningcenter.com to share more details about having children precheck prior to the day of the event. We thrive on customer feedback and are glad to pass any details onto the Check-Ins team. Have a great day!

It integrates almost everything our church needs in into one place. We have giving, serving planning, event registration, directory, etc all in one app/website.

Planning center is still somewhat limited in each of its different services. For example, in the giving app/service you can record all of the giving your church gets, which is awesome. But tracking non tax-deductible money is more difficult, and you still have to run another software program like quickbooks pro for expenses and the non tax deductible items. We are hopeful this will change over time as they keep developing.

Thanks so much for sharing your feedback. I went ahead and have passed on your suggestions as a Feature Request to our Giving Team. If you have any other suggestions you can email our support @support@planning.center and we'd be happy to pass on any feedback for you to our Team.

Planning Center is super easy to use, very first time user friendly and easy to train new people on!

Transposing the key on new songs was a little more difficult compared to the rest of Planning Center.

This takes the edge off of the Admin work I have to do weekly. The ease of scheduling people is my favorite.

- The new designs, though beautiful, take up too much screen space - As an administrator, I don't like the automatic "Teams" filter applied when I try to view the People page. - I wish it could handle my CCLI reporting for me.

Hey Josh, thanks for sharing the love for the apps and also some great suggestions. As for the "My Teams" filter, you can select the drop-down, and "unpin" that filter. By doing this you will no longer see that defaulted filter the next time you launch the People tab in Services. In regards to CCLI we can pass on as a Feature Request for you. In the meantime, we have some great reports/resources to help you with reporting. If you have any questions on how these features work, feel free to email us at support@planning.center

I like that when there is an update to the church service, the choir then knows the order of the service, the songs that we will sing and the capability to learn songs with the audio of each part. I like that I can set my alto part in the song to repeat the recording so that I can listen to it over and over again to learn my part. I like that I can see who has accepted to attend and who hasn't. Some people however, don't accept or decline the request making it harder for the choir director to know how many and who will be in attendance.

I don't like that previous services cannot be accessed once the date has passed. I would like to see an archive section to review previous songs. I wish that sermons could be captured by clicking on the title so that I could revisit past sermons. Some of the recordings aren't quality so it makes it hard to understand the lyrics to learn them correctly. I would also like to see the document viewer be better to view the song lyrics.

I like the variety of features with this software. You can use Planning Center alone or in conjunction with the various other programs they have. Planning Center is great to use as a central data base and is a full church-management software. It is affordable, easy to use, and they have excellent customer service.

The only issue we have had is that it is easier to use all of the components to this software when it is in "live" mode, which only occurs when an event is happening. However, you can change those parameters and set-up an test event to bypass this.