Planning Center Reviews - Page 6

Planning Centre is an excellent tool for church organisation. It has a wide range of features that supports all the key aspects of church service/meeting planning: team management, music group and media management, rota scheduling, and many others. The permissions controls are helpfully graded to allow various levels of devolved access. Calendar integrations are helpful too. The layout and user interface is clean and clear and the design is consistent across the web version and mobile versions.

There used to be some limitations but technical developments over the past couple of years have really improved functionality and robustness. There isn't anything significant that can be faulted on this software from my use and requirements of it.

What I liked most about this software is its ability to manage religious groups.

What I liked least is that it is not easily usable by new religious organizations.

Hi there! Thank you for your review. You mentioned having a bit of trouble getting started as a new org. Our Support Team is a great resource for help in tis area. Hit the '?' icon in the upper-right of the screen when you are looking at your page. Send us a message and our team will jump in to help. Thank you!

We use Planning Center for absolutely everything in our church. Whether acting as our church member database, service itineraries and scheduler, check-in systems for children’s ministry, or registering for events, Planning Center provides an extremely reliable platform that is user-friendly for all of our staff and volunteers! They have wonderful customer service and are constantly adding new features to their platform.

I don’t know if any cons with using the software. Planning Center does a great job of staying ahead of the game and fixing bugs before they become major problems.

Hey Benjamin - Thanks for the review! So glad to hear Planning Center has been useful in your ministry. Please reach out if you have any questions!

I am able to keep my staff and pastors in the loop and in the know at all times. Makes my job so much easier!

I wish there was better reporting capabilities. I would also like to have training able, as I had to learn how to use PC mostly on my own.

Hey Jennifer! Thanks so much for the feedback. We lobe that it has helped streamline your communication and made your job easier. As for training, we do have our Planning Center university that gives an in-depth training on each of our products. This is available here: https://planning.center/university As for improved reporting capabilities, we'd love to hear about some of the suggestions you have. Would you be up for sharing with us by emailing us at support@planning.center We are always looking for ways to improve our products so that they continue to support the church and their processes for reaching their community.

I love how easy Planning Center is to use. Everything is very intuitive from Services to Check-Ins to Giving. It is a robust platform but requires very little training to start using.

Each of the applications costs has a monthly subscription charge so it can get a little pricey, but well worth it.

There are several apps Planning Center offers that are excellent. For instance, the services app is second-to-none and the registration app is great as well. You can keep things easy or really get down into the weeds with each and your users will have a fairly easy time adapting to its use.

The price tiers leave a little to be desired. It can get pricey the bigger your church is (a number size doesn't fit all in terms of financial resources available). Suing Planning Center as a database has taken quite a bit of adjustment, but has worked, overall.

This software covers all the bases for church management. It comes with an app, it covers children's ministry, worship, registrations, check-ins, groups, facility management and giving.

I wish it included more features about guest followup such as texting.

Hey Terri, thanks so much for the feedback, we are so glad that the software has been a blessing to you and your team. Texting is definitely a feature that we do hope to support in the future. In the meantime, we have some great third party texting companies that integrate with us. You can check out that list here: https://pcopeople.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002285534-Third-Party-Integrations If you have any suggestions on how we can continue to improve our apps we'd love to hear from you. You can reach us at support@planning.center Have a blessed one.

I love everything about PCO. For real. I use mostly every feature and have yet to find another product cheaper and better. Do it!

I really don’t have one. Maybe...at times it’s a bit too good. Sometimes it’s so intuitive that it’s easy to overthink features.

There are many great aspects of Planning Center. We don't use every piece, but the Check-Ins are HUGE. This is THE way to allow kids to be checked in during our Sunday services. Having a barcode scanner makes the process much quicker and easier. The update allowed past registration issues to be fixed (users were listed twice - once as an "employee" and second as "customer"). The second biggest piece we use is the Services portal. Allowing every member of the worship/media team to see the flow of service is great! Everyone can be on the same page while allowing service to flow smoothly - almost without the congregation even knowing there's an order to things...

Have to jump through hoops to get any type of technical support. The answers aren't always online in the FAQ or Help pages. On top of that, not "anyone" can create a ticket, it must come from the contact person. That's normally fine, but what if they're on vacation, or just happen to be the person who pays the bill? On a Sunday morning when kids are going crazy and parents are looking at you like you did something wrong - it doesn't help.

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

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.

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!

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

I have been using PCO for years at various churches and on events outside of church. It makes it really easy to schedule volunteers and to collaborate on the event schedule. If the service is well scripted, running PCO Live for timers to keep everyone on schedule is amazing. There are also plenty of additional Planning Center tools to help churches with managing all aspects of their church all from one platform.

The pricing can be a bit daunting, especially for smaller churches. There are some features that could be a bit more discoverable or easier to use. As a technical person I like the evergreen approach that Planning Center takes to be constantly iterating and improving the UI/UX of their software, but some changes can be quite jarring, especially for infrequent users.

Thank you for your kind words! We would love to hear more feedback with regards to which features could be more discoverable/easier to use. If you would, please send us an email at support@planningcenter.com to continue this conversation. Thank you!

Planning Center is very easy to learn! I've been using it for years and a first time volunteer can get set up within minutes through the Services app. Scheduling people to serve is a breeze, and their free People app makes for a great church management software. I've tried others but I won't be switching anytime soon.

I honestly have no complaints about this software personally.

It allows different departments to schedule teams and then give everyone a chance to adjust their calendars in advance

I don't do much admin with it - as the leader, I am on everyone's team just so I can see the schedules and who's committed to what.

Databse use, services and team scheduling and planning, resource usage, kids checkin

The giving platform is really lacking in reporting features, time to give via ACH, year end statements and payment bank deposit tracking

Thanks for you kind words and honest feedback! If you'd like to walk through any of the issues you are running into or submit a feature request, would you be up for contacting our support team, here: support@planning.center. Or through the helpdesk of the app. We take feature requests very seriously and we'd love to hear what you'd like to see change!

I love that it's user-friendly and that there are so many training resources. If you can't figure it out on your own you can just jump over to a training video or click on the help questions and usually get the info you need. The customer service is also amazing! We've had to reach out a few times with issues we didn't know how to fix and they jumped right on it.

I'd say my biggest hurdle is making sure my leaders know how to use it. Because I started as an Admin I never saw what it's like from a "volunteer" standpoint so sometimes I don't know how to answer volunteer's questions or know how to direct them. I've had others log on for me so I could see their account and then walk them through their questions from their.

The best part of Planning Center is being able to pick and choose which parts of the software you actually need. You don't have to worry about paying exorbitant prices for tons of features you don't need. The pricing is based on what your church needs. And it's so easy to add or remove apps. This may have started as a service scheduling software, but it has become established as a resource, scheduling, and giving database for our church.

The only con I could see with this software is learning. I've been using this software for many years, but for those who are first trying it out could need some extra time getting started and used to it. They provide great training videos but if they built an onboarding process for newbies, it could make the product that much greater for the larger church management software market.

Very user friendly. Volunteers are able to intuitively use it without a need for training. Works together to give more detail about each user. It's mobile friendly and has various apps across platforms. Very affordable.

They do lack some more complex reporting features. We've also had issues with the registration module not being very simple for the end user. We've also had issues with registration lacking some basic functionality you would expect it to have.

Hi Steve, Thanks for your review. Could you please follow up with us and let us know which reporting features are missing for you? We'd also like to hear about which Registrations features were more difficult for people who were signing up. Registrations has just had some significant updates made to it, so it's possible those issues were addressed in the update. You can email support@planning.center with that information. Reagan Helms Support Team Lead

This software it's really useful to understand, and at the same time it have great tools and functionalities that are really useful, this software it's amazing and for the churchs it's really good.

I don't like the graphic interface for some esthetic incongruences and i don't like it, but it's a great software.

Thank you, Bruno! You mentioned not liking our graphics or Publishing features. Our Support Team is a great resource for help in that area. Hit the '?' icon in the upper-right of the screen when you are looking at your List. Send us a message and our team will jump in to help! Thank you!

Huge features that are independently well designed: volunteer management, donation management, events, customer relationship management, workflows for attendees, and especially kids checkins.

I have very few cons. Planning Center has grown to include a lot of features that have solved cons that I've had in the past. The church center app (attendee facing and giving app) could use some work and is in its infancy. I fully expect improvements based on Planning Center's track record.

PCO is a very full-featured church operating system (except no integrated accounting). It makes so much of the work of church management easier and better integrated. Online registrations, meeting materials, giving, and so much more. Their support staff is also amazing. They respond to questions and problems very quickly, and have resolved some technical issues very promptly.

Wish that you could set security at a more micro basis. Users have either full permission to the selected modules, or no permission. It would be nice to select functions within modules for permission, for example in Giving, it would be nice to give the counting team the ability to enter a batch, but not finalize it, or not release a finalized batch for further editing.

Thank you for your review Doug! In regards to permissions, specifically in Giving, we plan to introduce additional levels of access down the road. We don't have an exact ETA, but this is on our roadmap of future updates! You can stay in the loop on new Giving features from our announcements page here: https://bit.ly/2x3Rsyv

We just signed up for planning center a few months ago and it seems like it has everything we need. I love how you can customize what apps/ service you need and not have to purchase things you don't need. Seems fairly easy to use and can integrate paypal.

It has been a little difficult to set it up and transfer all our information from our previous database. But other than that it seems good.

Planning Center makes it so easy to plan schedule and disseminate information to all of my teams. I love being able to set notifications to go to different team leaders and keep track of everything from one place. Integrations with MailChimp and Song Select are invaluable.

Spotify has removed support for integrations and I'd like to see the option to set a default browser in the mobile app.

Hey Wallace, thanks so much for the love and feedback. If you have any suggestions on how we can continue to improve the software for you and your Team, you can reach us at support@planning.center Hope you and your team have a blessed one.