- Starting price
- $9.99/month per church
- Free tier
- No
- Platforms
- Web · Mobile browser · Ministry OS app referenced in terms
- Developer
- Jethro Software LLC
- Launched
- 2026
- Updated
- Aug 16, 2026
The verdict
Ministry Planner has an unusually coherent idea for a young church product: Sunday is one connected object, not a teaching spreadsheet plus a worship document plus volunteer texts plus an operations board. Plant pricing makes a real pilot affordable, and unlimited users remove the penalty for inviting volunteers. Begin with teaching, service plans, and a small scheduling team; verify Planning Center round trips and exports; then expand. Do not import confidential pastoral care, counseling, child, health, or financial records until permissions, retention, subprocessors, incident response, and contract terms are documented in substantially more detail.
Try Ministry Planner ↗Opens ministryplanner.church
Ministry Planner is a 2026 church-operations platform from Jethro Software LLC. Its central “cascade” starts with one row in a teaching calendar—date, series, passage, teacher, campus, and special element—and carries that context into the worship plan, timed run sheet, volunteer schedule, and staff dashboard. Around Sunday planning sit projects, tasks, ministry chat, documents, meeting notes, groups, visitor follow-up, people records, supply drives, spreadsheet analytics, and team workspaces.
The product deliberately positions itself above rather than instead of a church management system. Its website calls a ChMS the source-of-truth database and Ministry Planner the place staff do the week’s work. Planning Center integration is the best-explained example: the service says it can read songs, arrangements, tempos, and people and push completed service plans back. Breeze, Church Community Builder, and CSV or spreadsheet imports are also marked available, though buyers should test exactly which objects and write directions each supports.
Pricing is unusually accessible and not per seat. Plant is $9.99 per month for three ministry teams and one campus; Grow is $49 for unlimited teams at one location plus daily backups; Multiply is $120 for unlimited teams and campuses, daily backups, a custom domain, and white-labeling. Every plan advertises unlimited team members, the teaching calendar, series library, service planning, volunteer scheduling, team workspaces, dashboard, and Planning Center sync. The footer says cancel anytime, while the terms say subscriptions renew automatically, purchases are nonrefundable, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid term.
We researched the public product, feature, pricing, demo, About, privacy, and terms pages. We did not create a church workspace, connect a production Planning Center account, send volunteer email, import people, verify app-store availability for the “Ministry OS” app named in the terms, or test exports and access control. The product and policies are new. The homepage’s “SOC 2-compliant infrastructure” statement appears to describe underlying services, not an independent SOC 2 report issued to Ministry Planner itself.
✓ The good
- One connected Sunday object - teaching, worship, timing, volunteers, and dashboards inherit the same source information
- Flat church pricing - unlimited team members avoid per-seat resistance to inviting volunteers and part-time staff
- Excellent church-plant entry - $9.99 monthly makes a narrow real-world pilot unusually affordable
- Works beside a ChMS - the product does not demand an immediate database replacement
- Operational breadth - projects, chat, documents, notes, groups, care, and supply drives can reduce scattered general-purpose tools
- Published ownership and export promise - the vendor says churches can export calendars, plans, songs, and rosters
- Explicit role permissions and encryption claims - security is considered in public copy rather than ignored
✗ Watch out
- Very young platform - reliability, support, migrations, integrations, and organizational continuity have little public history
- Privacy notice is too short - five brief sections do not explain retention, subprocessors, cookies, rights, backups, breaches, or international obligations
- Care and people data can be highly sensitive - the terms explicitly say the service is not designed for HIPAA or other regulated use
- No refunds - a cancellation ends access at the close of the current paid term rather than reversing the payment
- Integration depth is unevenly documented - Planning Center behavior is clearer than Breeze or Church Community Builder behavior
- Contribution license is overbroad - generic terms grant expansive perpetual commercial rights to material treated as public contributions
- Vendor security proof is limited - infrastructure claims are not the same as a vendor-specific audit, penetration test, or uptime history
Best for
- Church plants wanting affordable coordinated service and volunteer planning
- One-campus churches whose staff work is scattered across documents, texts, and task boards
- Planning Center churches seeking an additional staff coordination layer
- Multi-site teams willing to pilot a young system before broad migration
Avoid if
- You need a long operating history, formal SLA, or vendor-specific compliance report
- Your planned records include protected health, counseling, or highly confidential safeguarding data
- You require proven bidirectional integrations beyond the specifically demonstrated workflow
- You need giving, accounting, child check-in, or a complete ChMS replacement in the same product
What Ministry Planner is
Ministry Planner is a collaborative operations layer centered on the weekly service. It connects a yearlong teaching calendar to the tasks performed by preachers, worship leaders, production teams, volunteer coordinators, children’s leaders, and administrators. The shared context is designed to eliminate repeated data entry and conflicting versions.
It is not currently presented as a replacement for giving, accounting, check-in, or the complete membership database. The vendor explicitly encourages churches to keep their existing ChMS as the source of truth and connect or import what staff need for planning.
Why church teams notice the “plan once, cascade” model
General project tools treat a Sunday service like any other board. Ministry Planner understands that the passage, series, teacher, songs, timing, volunteer roles, and campus are related data. When the teaching pastor changes one source row, every team sees the same Sunday instead of updating several documents manually.
That model succeeds only if synchronization is trustworthy. Churches should define which system owns people, songs, service plans, attendance, and notes; which direction each field moves; how conflicts are resolved; and what happens after an integration token expires. A “single source” can become a second source quickly when ownership is not explicit.
Teaching calendar, service plan, and run sheet: the strongest workflow
The calendar maps series, passage, speaker, service element, date, and campus. Worship teams build sets on the same row, and song durations feed a minute-by-minute run sheet. A shared dashboard summarizes readiness and open work.
This is a practical improvement over copying sermon information through email. Test exceptions before trusting it: multiple services with different orders, last-minute speaker changes, communion, baptisms, rehearsals, special events, campus-specific songs, and simultaneous time zones.
Volunteer scheduling and team workspaces: inclusion without seat tax
Rosters, positions, open slots, one-tap RSVP, reminders, projects, tasks, chat, documents, and meeting notes keep the work beside the service. Volunteers reportedly can confirm without installing an app, reducing onboarding friction.
Unlimited accounts are useful only with careful roles. Separate staff, ministry leader, volunteer, care, children’s, finance, and network access; review departures promptly; require strong authentication; and test whether notes and documents inherit appropriate team boundaries.
People, groups, care, and analytics: valuable expansion, highest risk
The platform advertises families, tags, service history, follow-up processes, groups, leaders, rosters, notes, and charts built from uploaded spreadsheets. These can give operations leaders a clearer view of engagement and unmet needs.
The brief privacy policy does not match that sensitivity. A church should prohibit diagnoses, counseling detail, abuse reports, background-check material, immigration information, and private prayer disclosures unless contract, permissions, retention, legal basis, and incident handling are fit for that data.
Pricing
Plant
$9.99/month per church
For one location and up to three ministry teams. Includes unlimited users, the teaching calendar, series library, service planning, scheduling, workspaces, dashboard, and Planning Center sync.
Grow
$49/month per church
For one location with unlimited ministry teams. Adds daily data backups while retaining unlimited team members and the core planning modules.
Multiply
$120/month per church
For unlimited locations and teams. Adds daily backups, custom-domain support, and white-labeling for multi-site churches and church-planting networks.
The flat price is Ministry Planner’s clearest advantage. A church can invite the people who actually perform the work without turning every volunteer into a paid seat.
Plant is a sensible pilot, but the three-team cap may arrive quickly once worship, production, children, welcome, prayer, and facilities are separated. Grow is the realistic one-campus comparison price.
Multiply costs $1,440 over twelve monthly payments before tax. Its value depends heavily on campus isolation, network-wide views, white-labeling, and reliable permissions—test those with representative staff roles.
Subscriptions renew automatically and are nonrefundable under the terms. The site says cancel anytime, which means stopping a future renewal, not necessarily reclaiming a current payment.
Where Ministry Planner falls behind
Expand the privacy policy. Name subprocessors, purposes, cookies, retention, backups, deletion, exports, breach notices, regional rights, integration tokens, church responsibilities, and treatment of care and children’s data.
Publish vendor-specific assurance. Provide uptime history, status page, disaster-recovery targets, penetration testing, vulnerability disclosure, authentication controls, audit logs, and a data-processing agreement.
Document every integration. List objects, directions, frequency, conflict resolution, API scopes, rate limits, disconnection behavior, and known unsupported fields for Planning Center, Breeze, and CCB.
Narrow content terms. Internal church documents, service plans, notes, logos, and contributions should receive only the license necessary to operate the service, not generic perpetual commercial exploitation language.
Clarify product surfaces. Explain where the Ministry OS app named in the terms is available and how it relates to browser access, volunteer confirmations, and white-label apps.
Ministry Planner vs. Planning Center vs. Church Community Builder vs. Asana
Planning Center is the mature church-specific suite for people, services, check-ins, groups, registrations, giving, and more. Ministry Planner offers a more unified staff workspace around one Sunday while integrating with Planning Center. Existing PCO churches should test whether the extra layer removes more duplication than it creates.
Church Community Builder is a deeper membership and process database with established people workflows. Ministry Planner is more modern and operations-oriented but much younger. Asana, ClickUp, and Monday are mature project systems with automations and integrations, yet they do not natively understand teaching calendars, set lists, run sheets, or ministry rosters.
Choose Ministry Planner when church-specific connected planning is the unsolved problem, not simply because it lists many modules. Keep the established ChMS as system of record until exports, permissions, support, and integration behavior have survived a complete ministry season.
The bottom line
Ministry Planner’s design is sharper than its age suggests. One teaching row cascading into service plans, worship, run sheets, volunteers, dashboards, projects, chat, groups, and follow-up reflects how church work actually connects. Per-church pricing—$9.99, $49, or $120 with unlimited users—makes it easy to pilot. The operational risk is equally real: this is a 2026 vendor, the privacy notice is only a few paragraphs, broad boilerplate terms sit beside sensitive people features, and infrastructure claims are not independent vendor assurance. Start narrow, connect a test Planning Center environment, export everything, audit roles, and let the system earn more consequential data over time.
Alternatives to Ministry Planner
Planning CenterThe mature modular church-management baseline for services, people, groups, check-ins, registrations, and giving.Church Community BuilderAn established people and process ChMS for churches needing deeper membership records and workflows.
Ministry PassStronger for sermon resources, media, and outreach content; less centered on one connected internal operations workspace.
B1 ChurchA church platform option for organizations comparing people, communication, and engagement features.
MxUA worship and production-team platform with planning and training focus rather than whole-church operations.Frequently asked questions
How much does Ministry Planner cost?
Plant is $9.99 per month for three teams and one location; Grow is $49 for unlimited teams at one location; Multiply is $120 for unlimited teams and campuses. All advertise unlimited users.
Does Ministry Planner replace Planning Center?
No. The vendor presents Ministry Planner as a workspace above the ChMS and describes Planning Center as a continuing source of truth. It reads selected data and can push completed service plans back.
Can I cancel Ministry Planner anytime?
The website says cancel anytime. The terms say subscriptions auto-renew, all purchases are nonrefundable, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid term.
Is Ministry Planner secure?
The vendor claims church isolation, role-based permissions, encryption in transit and at rest, Supabase storage, and SOC 2-compliant infrastructure. Public material does not establish a Ministry Planner SOC 2 report or independent audit.
Who owns church data?
The website says the church owns its data and can export calendars, plans, songs, and rosters. Buyers should test the completeness and format of all needed exports before migration.
Can Ministry Planner store counseling or health data?
Its terms state that the service is not tailored for HIPAA and similar regulated requirements. Avoid protected or highly confidential care records unless appropriate legal and contractual safeguards are established.
Does it charge per volunteer?
No. Every published plan includes unlimited team members. Limits are based on ministry teams, locations, backups, and white-label capabilities instead of seats.
Sources & further reading
More Church Management Software
B1 ChurchA genuinely free, open-source church platform - app, website, giving and check-in on one database - run by an Oklahoma nonprofit. The catch is not the price - it is that the vendor own docs call the native app deprecated.
Involv Chat (church.chat)Involv Chat combines ministry-team messaging, rosters, blocked dates and service scheduling in a focused church workspace—useful when leaders protect volunteer consent and resist turning attendance or gifts data into a spiritual score.
ChurchSoftwareChurchSoftware—formerly StoreHouse—offers an unusually broad church-management core for $0, including giving, check-in, accounting and a shared mobile app, while charging transparently for vendor-heavy extras.
Pastor Notes AppA two-app system that lets leaders publish sermon notes and invite live congregational response while attendees use the free Bible Notes companion—but its pricing math, refund terms and app privacy disclosures need correction before a church commits.
Take RootA low-cost, offline-friendly relationship tracker built specifically for evangelism and discipleship follow-up—more intentional than a spreadsheet, but its old generic privacy policy does not adequately describe the sensitive ministry data the product exists to hold.
Develop.MeDevelop.Me packages course building, cohorts, discussion, assignments, gamification and mobile learning for churches and mission-driven organizations—with unlimited learners on paid plans, but a vague free tier and a 2022 website privacy notice leave procurement questions open.