Tithe.ly

What Tithe.ly is

Tithe.ly is a modular church platform — giving, mobile app, website, ChMS, media, and kiosks — sold as separate but interoperable products under one account. A church can start with the free giving module on a Sunday afternoon, then layer on a branded app a month later, then migrate its directory into Breeze a quarter after that, all without changing vendors or re-onboarding their congregation.

In 2026 the company sits squarely in the small-and-mid-church segment, where its main competitor is Planning Center (which is more polished but more opinionated) and, on the enterprise side, Pushpay (which is far more expensive and aimed at multi-site churches with full-time tech staff). Tithe.ly is what most pastors actually pick when they realize they cannot afford Pushpay and do not have time to learn Planning Center’s workflow.

Why small and mid-sized churches prefer Tithe.ly

The single biggest practical difference between Tithe.ly and the rest of the category is the on-ramp. A church board can decide on Tuesday night to add online giving, sign up on Wednesday morning, and have a working giving link in the bulletin by Sunday — for zero dollars in monthly cost. There is no implementation specialist, no kickoff call, no "we will get back to you with pricing."

That free-to-start, pay-as-you-grow shape is what built the platform. A church that joins for giving tends to add the app within a year, then the website, then Breeze. By the time the staff realizes they have built their entire operating stack on one vendor, the lock-in is real — but the lock-in is earned, not coerced. The thoughtful church admin’s instinct is to be wary of all-in-one suites. Tithe.ly is the one most of them end up tolerating anyway.

Giving: the foundational module that built the company

Giving is where Tithe.ly started, and it is still the module the rest of the platform orbits. The donor experience is intentionally boring in the best way — a clean form, a saved payment method, an option for recurring, a one-tap option in the church’s branded app, and a text-to-give shortcode for the people who never download anything. Kiosks for the lobby are a real product, not an afterthought, and integrate with the same donor record so a person who tithes by card on Sunday and by ACH on Wednesday shows up as one human in the database.

For the finance team, the back end handles automatic year-end giving statements, designated funds (general, missions, building), refund handling, and pledge tracking. Processing fees are competitive — roughly in line with Stripe pass-through, with the option for donors to cover the fee at checkout (which a surprising number of them do). This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is the difference between a church netting 97% of a gift versus 100% on every recurring tithe.

Branded church app builder: a custom app without the custom-app price tag

The Church App module is the second pillar. Instead of pushing congregants to a generic "Church Center"-style aggregator app, Tithe.ly builds your church a fully branded iOS and Android app — your logo on the App Store icon, your colors in the splash screen, your name in the push notification. Inside, the templates cover the things 90% of churches actually need: sermon library, live stream, giving, events, groups, prayer wall, and push announcements.

A decade ago, getting a real custom-branded church app meant paying $10,000+ to a specialist agency and waiting six months. Tithe.ly compressed that to a few weeks of setup and a monthly subscription that most churches can fit in their tech budget. The trade-off is template constraint — you are not getting a Subsplash-tier bespoke design — but for a congregation whose current "app" is a Facebook page, the jump is enormous.

Breeze ChMS: the acquisition that completed the platform

For its first decade Tithe.ly had a noticeable gap: no real ChMS. Churches loved the giving and app modules but had to bolt on Planning Center, Church Community Builder, or a homegrown spreadsheet to actually manage their people. That changed in 2022 when Tithe.ly acquired Breeze — long considered the friendliest, least-intimidating ChMS on the market for non-technical church staff.

Breeze inside Tithe.ly is the people database, attendance tracker, check-in system, group manager, and mass-communication hub. Tagging is its killer pattern — instead of rigid groups and roles, every person can be tagged with anything ("new visitor 2026", "VBS volunteer", "potential elder"), and any tag can become a filter, a text blast, or a report. Donor records from the giving module flow into the Breeze profile, so the same person’s tithe history, attendance, group membership, and check-in record live in one view. Integration between the two products is still maturing — they do not yet feel like one unified app in 2026 — but the data plumbing is there and improving release by release.

Pricing

Where Tithe.ly falls behind

No native multi-site management. Tithe.ly can run multiple campuses, but it does not have Pushpay’s or Church Community Builder’s deep, purpose-built multi-site architecture. If your church has more than three locations, the seams start to show.

Limited workflow automation. There is no real "if a new visitor checks in, trigger a five-step follow-up sequence with assignments and reminders" engine. Planning Center’s People workflows still beat Tithe.ly on this, and it is the most common complaint from churches that migrate from Planning Center to Breeze.

Design polish is a half-step behind. Both the admin UI and the branded app templates are functional and clean, but they are not as visually refined as Subsplash on the app side or Planning Center on the admin side. For most churches this is a fair trade for the price. For churches that prize design, it is a real cost.

Reporting is basic. Standard giving reports, attendance trends, and tag exports are all there. Anything resembling BI — cohort analysis, donor lifetime value, predictive churn — is not. Finance directors at larger churches usually export to a spreadsheet.

Breeze and Tithe.ly are still two apps. The acquisition was 2022, and as of 2026 they share login and donor data but still feel like adjacent products rather than one unified platform. The roadmap clearly points at full unification, but it is not there yet.

Tithe.ly vs. Planning Center vs. Subsplash

These three are the products most churches actually compare when they are picking a stack. They are pointed at overlapping audiences but optimize for very different things.

Different strengths. Tithe.ly is the broadest and cheapest — giving, app, website, and ChMS under one roof, with a genuinely free starting tier. Planning Center is the most polished and the most opinionated — its modules (People, Services, Groups, Check-Ins, Giving, Calendar, Publishing) are best-in-class individually and integrate beautifully, but you pay per module and the workflow assumes a competent church admin who learns the system. Subsplash is the app-and-media specialist — the most beautiful branded church apps in the category, the strongest media platform, and the deepest engagement tooling, but at a price point and complexity that pushes it toward larger churches.

The rough decision tree most pastors land on: under 200 attendance and no full-time tech staff, pick Tithe.ly and start with the free tier. 200–1,500 with a competent admin who values discipline and workflow, pick Planning Center. 1,500+ with a media team and a five-figure tech budget, look hard at Subsplash (or Pushpay for the giving and engagement side). And there is a healthy middle group that runs Planning Center for operations and Tithe.ly for giving — using each for what it does best.

Alternatives to Tithe.ly