Pushpay

What Pushpay is

Pushpay is an enterprise church technology platform built around three integrated products: a digital giving system (the original Pushpay), a church management system (Church Community Builder, acquired in 2018), and a custom-branded mobile app for the congregation. The company is publicly known for serving a striking share of the largest US churches — outreach decks have historically cited a majority of Outreach 100 megachurches as customers.

The platform is sold on custom annual contracts, implemented by a dedicated onboarding team, and administered from a unified admin console once live. It is not a self-serve, download-and-go product. It is a system you buy, plan a rollout for, and train staff on — closer in shape to Salesforce or Workday than to a consumer app. For the churches it fits, that depth is the whole point. For the churches it does not fit, that depth is the whole problem.

Why large churches choose Pushpay

The single biggest practical difference between Pushpay and almost everything else in the church-tech market is scale assumption. Most church-app and giving platforms are built first for the church with 80 people on a Sunday, then stretched upward. Pushpay was built the other way — for the church with 8,000 across four campuses, then stretched downward into smaller bundles. That orientation shows up everywhere: in how permissions are modeled, in how reporting rolls up across campuses, in how the system handles tens of thousands of recurring gifts without manual reconciliation.

The second reason large churches stay is the human side of the contract. Pushpay assigns a customer success manager, runs structured onboarding, and treats churn as an executive-level metric. For a church executive pastor whose Sunday-morning failure mode is a broken giving link, that relationship is worth real money. It is the model that respects the operational weight of a large church — and the model smaller competitors structurally cannot match at low price points.

Enterprise-grade giving and recurring donations

The original Pushpay product is digital giving, and a decade-plus of focus shows. Donors can give in roughly three taps from a saved payment method, set up recurring gifts with flexible cadences (weekly, biweekly, monthly, on a specific paycheck day), give to multiple funds in a single transaction, and pledge against a campaign with a progress thermometer the church can display in service. Kiosk hardware in the lobby, text-to-give shortcodes, embedded giving on the church website, and mobile-wallet support (Apple Pay and Google Pay) all share one donor record on the back end.

For finance staff, the system is built around reconciliation rather than just collection. Batch settlement, fund accounting export to QuickBooks and other ledgers, donor statements, and pledge tracking are all first-class — not afterthoughts. A church running a seven-figure annual budget can close a Sunday in a normal amount of time, which is the thing the cheaper platforms quietly cannot do at scale. Add in tax-receipt automation, recurring-gift retry logic for failed cards, and donor self-service for updating payment methods, and the operational case for paying enterprise money starts to make itself.

Multi-campus ChMS via the Church Community Builder acquisition

When Pushpay acquired Church Community Builder in 2018, it absorbed one of the most respected church management systems in the market — and the combined product is now the main reason multi-campus churches sign. CCB handles the operational machinery of a large church: people records, household relationships, small-group rosters, volunteer scheduling, child check-in with secure tags, attendance, communication, and the long tail of processes ("workflows") that turn a first-time guest into a member into a serving volunteer. Pastors and staff get queues — who needs a follow-up call, who is overdue for a leader check-in, who has not been to a group in six weeks.

The multi-campus design is what genuinely separates CCB from lighter alternatives. Each campus can have its own pastoral team, its own permissions, its own groups and processes, while senior leadership rolls up consolidated reporting across the whole network. Add a new campus and you are not standing up a new system — you are adding a node to an existing one. For churches in the 2,000–20,000 attendance range, that one design choice is often worth the entire price of admission.

Custom-branded mobile apps for the congregation

The third leg of the Pushpay stack is the church-app product — a fully custom-branded mobile app published under your church’s own name in the App Store and Google Play. Members download "First Baptist" or "Crossroads Church," not a generic Pushpay shell, and inside they get a unified experience: latest sermon (audio and video), live-stream when service is on, push notifications from staff, event calendar, group directory, giving in the same flow as the website, and content tied back to whatever CCB has for them.

This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is transformative for how a church communicates midweek. A senior pastor can push a 200-character note out to the congregation’s home screen, drive registration to a Wednesday-night event, or surface a sermon series’ study guide without asking anyone to dig through email. The custom-branded shell also drives a different kind of stickiness — congregants treat the church’s app as theirs, not as a third-party product the church happens to use. For pastors who have spent years fighting for attention against everything else on a phone, that distinction matters.

Pricing

Where Pushpay falls behind

No real entry tier for small churches. Pushpay’s pricing floor is a wall, not a ramp. There is no $19/month plan, no free tier, no nonprofit discount that gets a 75-person congregation in the door. For the median US church (under 100 weekly attendance), Pushpay is structurally the wrong product — Tithely, Givelify, or ChMeetings will serve you better at a fraction of the cost.

Opaque pricing. Every competitor at the small-and-mid-church tier publishes a price. Pushpay does not. That is defensible for a true enterprise product, but it slows down evaluation and leaves a bad taste with church leaders who expect transparency from a Christian vendor.

CCB’s learning curve is real. The depth that makes CCB powerful for multi-campus churches also makes it intimidating for a part-time staff member. Smaller, friendlier ChMS products (Planning Center People, Breeze, ChMeetings) win on time-to-productivity even when they lose on raw feature count.

Ship cadence is enterprise-paced. Pushpay does not move at the pace of a venture-backed startup. New features land in considered, quarterly-ish waves. If you want a vendor that ships something new every few weeks, Subsplash or Planning Center will feel faster.

Custom app polish varies by configuration. The branded-app product is good — not jaw-dropping. Subsplash, in particular, has historically pushed harder on the app side as a standalone discipline. For churches whose primary criterion is app quality alone, the race is closer than Pushpay’s pitch decks suggest.

Pushpay vs. Planning Center vs. Subsplash

Different strengths. Pushpay is the enterprise stack — giving, ChMS (via CCB), and a branded app sold together to large multi-campus churches on a custom contract. Planning Center is the modular church-tech standard — a constellation of well-designed products (Services, People, Giving, Groups, Check-Ins, Calendar, Registrations, Publishing) you mix and match, with transparent per-product pricing and a strong indie-developer culture. Subsplash is the church-app specialist — branded apps, web, media, and increasingly giving, with deep investment in the member-facing experience.

Pushpay is better at: enterprise giving, multi-campus ChMS depth, consolidated reporting, dedicated customer success. Planning Center is better at: small-and-mid-church flexibility, weekly service planning and worship-team scheduling (Services is the industry favorite), pricing transparency, ergonomic UX, and letting a church buy only what it needs. Subsplash is better at: the branded-app and media experience specifically, with sermon delivery, podcasting, and content distribution as core competencies rather than add-ons.

For most large multi-campus churches, the honest answer is that Pushpay and Planning Center are not mutually exclusive — many run Planning Center Services for the worship and volunteer side and Pushpay/CCB for giving and pastoral care. Subsplash often slots in where the priority is the app first and the back-office stack second. The question is rarely "which one wins" and more often "which one anchors your stack." If you are a 4,000-attendance multi-site, Pushpay is the strongest single-anchor answer in the market. If you are a 400-attendance single-site, Planning Center is.

Alternatives to Pushpay