Church Communication Apps: What 7 Tools Cost in 2026

Most churches don’t need a church communication app. They need reach. The announcement went out. It was in the bulletin, on the Facebook page, in Thursday’s email and said from the platform on Sunday, and by Wednesday a third of the congregation still hadn’t heard about it.

A church communication app is the usual answer, and often the right one. But these products are priced very differently from each other, three of the seven below won’t publish a price at all, and the feature that decides whether announcements actually land is rarely the one being demoed.

We read every vendor’s own pricing page on 5 September 2026. Here’s what each one costs, and what to fix before you buy any of them.

Why announcements don’t reach people

There are four channels most churches rely on, and each one leaks in a specific way.

• The bulletin reaches the people who were in the room, which is the group least in need of being told.
• The Facebook page reaches whoever an algorithm decides to show it to. Nobody at the church controls that number and nobody can see it.
• Email reaches the inbox and stops there. A healthy open rate means most of the list didn’t open it.
• Word of mouth reaches the connected, which is a polite way of saying it skips the newcomers, the recently bereaved and the people who have quietly stopped coming.

The pattern is the same in every case: the announcement reaches the already-engaged and misses the people you most wanted to reach. Buying an app doesn’t automatically fix that. It fixes it only if the app can tell you, honestly, what proportion of your congregation received a given message.

That’s the question to ask in every demo, and it’s worth asking it in those words: what percentage of an opted-in congregation receives a given announcement, and how do you know?

Seven church communication app options at a glance

Tool	Entry price	Priced by	Platform fee	Free trial	Publishes pricing
ChurchTrac	$29/mo	Number of names, 75 to unlimited	Not broken out, described as a discounted Stripe nonprofit rate	30 days, no card	Yes, in full
Text In Church	$37/mo	Texts per month, contacts unlimited	Not applicable, no giving feature	30 days, card required	Yes, in full
Planning Center	Free, then $15/mo	Per product, by usage	Not broken out, 2.15% + $0.30 all-in on card	30 days	Yes, in full
Breeze ChMS	$72/mo	One flat plan, any size	Not published	30 days, no card	Yes
Tithe.ly	Free giving, then $19/mo	Per module or All Access	Not broken out, 2.9% + $0.30 all-in on card	30 days	Yes
Subsplash	Free giving	Quote, by church size and usage	Not broken out, 1.9% to 2.3% + $0.30 all-in on card	Not published	Giving only
Pushpay	Not published	Quote, 1 to 3 year terms	Not published	Not published	No
Kannect	$29/mo, or $276/yr	People, 500 to 15,000	2%, or 0% on registered nonprofit donations	7 days, card required	Yes, in full

Each one in detail

ChurchTrac

Priced purely by how many names are in your database: $29 a month for 75, $39 for 125, $59 for 250, $79 for 500, $99 for 1,000 and $119 for unlimited. Annual billing is 10% off, so the same tiers are $261.60, $351.60, $531.60, $711.60, $891.60 and $1,071.60 a year. Enhanced messaging is $7 a month for 250 credits with the same rate for each additional 250. The trial is 30 days with no card.

Optional services are published too: a website and app build from $477, and accounting setup from $399. Giving uses what the site calls a discounted Stripe nonprofit rate, but the exact percentage isn’t published, so ask.

Best for. Small churches that want the cheapest honest price and are comfortable with a database-shaped product.

Text In Church

The only product here built specifically around the reach problem. Basic is $37 a month, or $31 a month billed annually at $369, and includes 500 texts a month and one local number. Pro is $67 a month, or $56 annually at $668, with 1,500 texts and two numbers. Premium is $97 a month, or $81 annually at $967, with 2,500 texts and three numbers. Contacts and users are unlimited on every plan and overage is $0.03 a message. The trial is 30 days and does require a card, though it isn’t charged during the trial. Concierge setup is optional from $249.

Best for. Churches whose specific problem is that email isn’t landing. Text is the highest-reach channel available and this product is designed around it.

Where it stops. It’s a messaging tool, not a church management system. There’s no giving, no events, no directory.

Planning Center

Sold per product rather than as one platform, with the same price ladder on each: free, $15, $32, $69, $115, $179 and $239 a month. What moves you up the ladder differs by product. On Giving it’s donations a month, from 10 on the free tier to unlimited at $239. On Groups it’s members, from 15 to unlimited. On Check-Ins it’s daily check-ins, from 10 to unlimited. On Registrations it’s attendees per event, from 5 to 5,000. People is free and unlimited.

Processing in the US is 2.15% plus $0.30 on cards and 0% plus $0.30 on ACH, which is among the best published rates in this category. Texting is a $5 a month add-on for a toll-free number plus $0.02 a message. There’s a free tier on every product, 30 days free, no setup fee, no monthly minimum and no cancellation fee. Annual pricing isn’t published.

Worth knowing. Buying four products at the $69 tier is $276 a month, so the à la carte model rewards churches that genuinely only need two or three modules and punishes churches that need everything.

Breeze ChMS

One plan at $72 a month for a church of any size, with the giving module included at no extra cost. A bundle with worship tools, apps and sites is $119 a month and requires contacting them. Texting includes 250 free messages a month, then $10 per 500. The trial is 30 days with no credit card. No annual price is published and the giving processing rate isn’t published on the pricing page.

Best for. Churches that want one price with no tier arithmetic. At 300 names Breeze is more expensive than ChurchTrac; at 3,000 it’s cheaper.

Tithe.ly

Giving is free. Church Management is $72 a month or $864 a year. A custom church app is $89 a month or $1,068 a year. A custom website is $19 a month or $228 a year. All Access is $119 a month or $1,428 a year, which the site lists against a $228 a month unbundled equivalent. Enterprise is a consultation for churches above 2,000 attendees.

US processing is 2.9% plus $0.30 on cards, 3.5% plus $0.30 on Amex and 1% plus $0.30 on ACH. There’s a 30 day trial on paid plans and an optional one time Premium Onboarding at $599.

Subsplash

Subsplash Giving is $0 a month. Subsplash One and Enterprise publish no price and are quoted based on church size and usage. Processing is 2.3% plus $0.30 on cards and 1% on ACH, with a published GrowCurve discount that can take that as low as 1.9% plus $0.30 on cards and 0.5% on ACH.

Worth knowing. The processing rates are published clearly, which is genuinely useful, but everything above the free giving product requires a sales conversation before you can compare it to anything.

Pushpay

No prices are published anywhere. The tiers are named only: Giving, ChMS, ChurchStaq and ParishStaq, each in Core, Advanced and Complete. The site does state that no setup fees are required, and that check scanning starts at $0.29 a check. Card and ACH processing rates aren’t published. Contracts run in one, two or three year terms.

Worth knowing. A multi-year term is a meaningful commitment for a church budget. Ask what happens at renewal and what the price does in year two.

Giving fees, which are the other price

If your church receives $300,000 a year in giving, the processing rate matters far more than the subscription. Half a percentage point is $1,500 a year, which is more than most of the subscriptions on this page.

Tool	Platform fee	Card processing	Cost on $300,000 by card
Subsplash with GrowCurve	Not broken out	1.9% + $0.30, all-inclusive	About $5,700
Planning Center	Not broken out	2.15% + $0.30, all-inclusive	About $6,450
Subsplash standard	Not broken out	2.3% + $0.30, all-inclusive	About $6,900
Tithe.ly	Not broken out	2.9% + $0.30, all-inclusive	About $8,700
Kannect, registered nonprofit	0%	Stripe standard, 2.9% + $0.30	About $8,700
Breeze	Not published	Not published	Ask
ChurchTrac	Not published	Described as a discounted Stripe nonprofit rate, exact figure not published	Ask
Pushpay	Not published	Not published	Ask

ACH is where the money actually is on a giving base this size, and the spread is much wider than it is on card. Planning Center charges 0% plus $0.30, Subsplash 0.5% on GrowCurve and 1% on its standard rate, Tithe.ly 1% plus $0.30, and the Stripe standard ACH rate that applies under Kannect is 0.8% capped at $5.00 per transaction. On $300,000 that is a difference of several thousand dollars, so if you can move your recurring givers to bank transfer, the card column above matters considerably less than it looks.

The ACH column is the one most churches under-use. Planning Center’s 0% plus $0.30 on ACH means a $500 recurring gift costs the church thirty cents instead of about eleven dollars. Moving your regular givers from card to bank transfer is often worth more than switching platforms.

Five things to fix before you buy a church communication app

1. Get consent to text. Text is the highest-reach channel there’s and it’s useless without opt-ins. Start collecting them on the connection card this Sunday, whatever software you end up with.
2. Stop announcing everything. A congregation that receives eleven announcements a week stops reading any of them. Pick the two that matter.
3. Write for the person who wasn’t there. Most announcements assume context that only regular attenders have.
4. Decide who owns it. Church communication usually fails because it belongs to everyone, which means it belongs to nobody. One person, one calendar.
5. Count who you actually have. Not average attendance. A list of names with a way to reach each one. Most churches discover the list is smaller and staler than they assumed, and that’s the real starting point.

There’s more on the underlying pattern in why community engagement fails, and on what to do with new arrivals in member onboarding in the first 30 days.

Where Kannect fits

Kannect is our product, so check the pricing page yourself. It’s a community engagement platform rather than a church management system, and the difference is exactly the reach problem this article opened with.

Memberships, properly. One membership type with multiple pricing tiers on every plan, or multiple membership types each with their own tiers on the higher plans. Custom application forms, manual or automatic approval, and a welcome flow that drops a new member straight into the conversation. Discounts and renewals are built in, so nobody’s tracking who gets the early-bird rate in a spreadsheet.

And the rest of the organization. A member directory with unlimited listings on every plan, and multiple directories side by side on the higher plans for sponsors, alumni, partners or your team. Groups and programs for chapters, committees and cohorts, each with its own conversation and analytics. A people database with statuses for member, alumni, donor, staff, parent and student, which members keep current themselves from the app. Events, broadcast email, a community website and a member app.

Plan	Monthly	Billed yearly	People	Admins	Emails/mo	Platform fee
Starter	$29	$276	500	3	5,000	2%
Launch	$69	$660	2,000	5	20,000	2%
Growth	$149	$1,428	5,000	10	50,000	1.5%
Scale	$299	$2,868	15,000	25	150,000	1%

The part that matters most day to day is reach. Every opted-in member receives every announcement. No algorithm decides who sees it, and there’s no per-contact overage bill for sending it. Payments run on Stripe. You connect your bank once, and money from events, memberships, programs and donations lands in your own account, usually within three business days. Kannect never holds your money. Registered nonprofits pay 0% Kannect fee on donations.

For a church that also runs membership in some form, whether that’s a formal roll, a giving programme, small groups or a school attached to the ministry, the membership side is the same product: types, tiers, applications, renewals and discounts, with groups and programs for ministries, committees and cohorts. And registered nonprofits pay 0% Kannect fee on donations.

Most organizations start with one job, usually events, payments or the directory, and bring the rest across as they need it. Setup is self-serve at no cost. If you’d rather we build the account for you, that’s an optional one time service starting at $150.

We write separately for churches and for nonprofits, and there’s a wider comparison in the best community engagement platforms.

Frequently asked questions

Where these church communication app prices came from

Every church communication app price and giving rate above came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 5 September 2026.

• Planning Center pricing
• Tithe.ly pricing
• Subsplash pricing
• Breeze ChMS pricing
• ChurchTrac pricing
• Pushpay pricing
• Text In Church pricing

Related reading

• 12 best community engagement platforms, with verified pricing
• What membership management software costs for nonprofits
• Why members join and then go quiet
• How to recruit and engage volunteers
• What community engagement actually means
• Church announcements that actually reach people
• How to keep a small group connected between Sundays
• How to reach every member without paying to boost your post
• 10 emails every community should automate
• Free guides and templates