Key Takeaway
Breeze was renamed Tithely Church Management on November 11, 2025, and Planning Center's free tier has expanded enough that many small churches can now run their entire operation for $0 a month. Most comparison articles you'll find haven't updated for either change.
The best church management software for small churches in 2026 depends on two things almost every comparison article gets wrong. First, Breeze is now called Tithely Church Management. Tithely acquired Breeze in 2021 and officially merged the two products under the Tithely name on November 11, 2025. The product itself is unchanged (Tithely's FAQ explicitly tells existing customers their data, pricing, and workflows continue uninterrupted), but every listicle that still talks about them as two separate ChMS products is out of date. Second, Planning Center's free tier has gotten dramatically better, which means a church under 100 people running a simple operation can now do church management for $0 a month indefinitely and still have better tools than most churches had five years ago.
There are roughly six products worth looking at in this category, and for most small churches the choice comes down to three.
A small church is not a small business, and most software pretends otherwise
A 75-person congregation has very different needs than a 75-person company. It runs on volunteers, not employees. Its "revenue" is recurring donations from members, not sales. Its admin staff is usually one part-time person plus the pastor's spouse, sometimes just the pastor. Its busiest day of operations is a four-hour window on Sunday where 30 people need to be in the right room doing the right thing.
What that church actually needs from software is narrow: a membership database that doesn't lose people when they move; a way to accept online donations without processing 2.9%+$0.30 into oblivion; volunteer scheduling that doesn't require group texts; event signups for the fall potluck; and maybe children's check-in if they have ten or more kids on a given Sunday. That's it. Most "all-in-one" church platforms ship with twenty features, and small churches use four. For the general shape of what a membership database should even do, see The Best CRM Software in 2026 Depends on Exactly One Thing; most ChMS platforms are essentially a vertical-specific CRM bolted to a giving processor.
The 50,000-plus churches on Tithely (per Tithely's August 2025 product-launch announcement) and the 13,000 on ChurchTrac (per ChurchTrac's homepage) are mostly small churches. The market is dominated by the tools built for them. The enterprise platforms (TouchPoint, CCB, Fellowship One) exist for the 2,000-member megachurch with a full IT staff and aren't the right answer at 75 members.
Tithely Church Management is what Breeze became, and it's still maturing
Tithely Church Management is the product formerly known as Breeze. When Tithely bought Breeze in August 2021, both brands kept running separately for four years. Tithely officially rebranded Breeze as "Tithely Church Management" on November 11, 2025, unifying the two under one name. Tithely's own FAQ emphasizes that existing Breeze customers keep their data, pricing, and workflows with no action required. The product includes the core Breeze feature set (membership, attendance, events, communications, volunteer scheduling) plus Tithely's free giving platform, text messaging, and an admin mobile app. Tithely's other products (custom church websites, branded church apps, worship planning, text-to-give) are sold separately or bundled in the All Access plan.
Pricing is a flat $72 per month for the "Giving + Church Management" plan, with unlimited admin users and no per-person tiers. That flat rate is the product's core appeal for small churches. A 75-person church and a 750-person church pay the same. No seat limits, no module upcharges for basic features. Tithely also sells an "All Access" bundle at $119 per month that adds a custom church app (normally $89/mo as a standalone), a custom church website ($19/mo), worship team planning ($29/mo), and text-to-give ($19/mo) on top of everything in the $72 ChMS plan. Free giving is included at every tier. All Access is a better deal than buying those pieces separately from anyone else.
The transition has not been frictionless. Capterra reviewers from late 2025 describe earlier versions of the unified product as not tying the Breeze and Tithely sides together cleanly, with some duplication between the two interfaces. The same reviewers describe the customer-service side of the transition positively and note that the duplication is becoming rare as the merged product matures. The honest read is that Tithely Church Management is a product still catching up to the vision of a fully unified Breeze-plus-Tithely experience, not a product still broken. If you're considering it, you're buying into a platform on a good trajectory rather than a finished product.
The strongest reason to pick it: if you want the simplicity Breeze was famous for and you don't want to think about church software again for five years, Tithely is the continuation of that philosophy. The weakest reason: if you mainly want digital giving, Tithely is not the cheapest way to get it.
Planning Center is free for most small churches and nobody talks about that
Planning Center is the most surprising option in 2026 because its free tier has expanded to the point where a small church can run its entire operation on it without paying anything. People (the membership database module) is now unlimited users and unlimited people at zero cost. Services (the Sunday-morning planning and volunteer scheduling tool) is free for up to 5 team members. Check-Ins is free for 10 daily check-ins, enough for a small children's ministry. Giving is free for up to 10 monthly donations. Registrations handles up to 5 attendees per event for free. Groups supports 15 members for free.
For a church under roughly 100 people with a children's ministry of ten kids, that free stack actually works. Paid plans start at $15 per module per month when you outgrow a given limit, so a church that needs more Giving transactions or more Check-Ins scales up one module at a time. Total for a small growing church using People (free), Services ($15), Check-Ins ($15), and Giving ($15) is $45 per month, which is still half what Tithely costs.
The catch is that Planning Center is built around Sunday services. If your operational center of gravity is Sunday-morning execution (service planning, worship team, volunteer rotations, kids check-in), Planning Center is arguably best-in-class; the service-planning layer functions like a specialized version of the tools covered in The Best Project Management Software in 2026 Is the One Your Team Will Actually Use, but tuned to a four-hour weekly production cycle. If your center of gravity is membership care and first-time-guest follow-up outside the service, Planning Center's modular setup feels scattered. Each module has its own interface. The mobile experience lives across multiple apps. For a church with one part-time admin who wants a single login to do everything, this is a legitimate friction that Breeze (sorry, Tithely) handles better.
The Planning Center ecosystem also includes the Church Center app, which is a free member-facing app where people update profiles, give, register, and check in. That app is probably the single most underrated tool in this category, and it's included even on the free plan.
ChurchTrac is the cheapest legitimate option, and it's not a toy
ChurchTrac prices by congregation size: $9 a month for up to 75 people, $18 for up to 125, $36 for up to 250, and so on up the ladder. For a 75-person church, that's $108 a year. Paying annually shaves another 10 percent. The base subscription includes membership, attendance, event signups, online giving (Stripe at 2.9% + $0.30, with a nonprofit discount available), worship planning, check-in, a church website and app, and volunteer scheduling. Fund accounting is a paid add-on at $15 a month; enhanced messaging (two-way SMS, text giving, voice broadcasts) is another $7 a month. ChurchTrac's homepage claims over 13,000 churches use it, and Capterra shows it at 4.8 stars across roughly 850 reviews.
The honest limitation is that ChurchTrac doesn't have the polish of Tithely or Planning Center. The interface is functional, not pretty. The mobile app is fine, not best-in-class. The integration ecosystem is narrower than Planning Center's, and custom reporting is basic. None of that matters for a small church that mainly wants to replace spreadsheets, which is the actual use case for most churches looking at this category. But a worship pastor who wants deep ProPresenter or MultiTracks workflows will outgrow it quickly.
ChurchTrac's strongest case is the 50-to-150-person church that's currently running on spreadsheets, a shared Google Calendar, and one staff member's brain, and needs to consolidate without spending much money. At $9 to $18 a month, the decision is almost reversible. If it doesn't work, you've lost a pizza night's worth of money, not a software budget.
Rock RMS is free and open source, and your church probably can't use it
Rock RMS is the option nobody writing listicles covers with any depth. It's open-source software developed by the Spark Development Network, a nonprofit affiliated with NewSpring Church. Life.Church uses it. NewSpring uses it. It's truly free to download, and the feature set matches or exceeds every paid option in this list: membership, workflows, groups, events, communications, check-in, giving, and a full content management system for the church website, all in one platform.
The reason it's the free option nobody takes: self-hosting Rock requires real technical skill. It runs on Windows Server with SQL Server, needs someone who can manage patches and backups, and has a learning curve that can take months to climb. Third-party hosting providers in the Rock community can take on the infrastructure problem for roughly $50 to $200 a month, and that changes the calculus for any church that has one tech-comfortable volunteer or staff member.
For most small churches, the answer is still no. If the pastor and the church administrator together have fewer than twenty combined hours a week to manage software, Rock is not realistic. For the rare small church that has a retired IT professional in the congregation who wants to serve, Rock is the dream: effectively unlimited capability for the cost of hosting and one volunteer's Saturday afternoons. That scenario exists in about one in fifty small churches.
Two things small churches spend too much mental energy on
Online giving fees get obsessive attention and shouldn't, with one real exception. Most major church platforms (Tithely, ChurchTrac, most of Rock's partners) charge roughly 2.9% plus $0.30 per credit card transaction, the standard Stripe/payment-processor rate. Planning Center Giving is the exception at 2.15% plus $0.30, which is a meaningful discount at volume: a church receiving $200,000 a year in digital gifts would pay about $4,300 on Planning Center versus $5,800 on most alternatives. That $1,500-a-year gap is the only giving-fee difference worth caring about. Everything else in the category sits within a few basis points of each other, and switching platforms to save twenty basis points saves $400 a year. Not nothing, but far less than the time cost of migrating your giving data and retraining your congregation on a new app.
Mobile apps are oversold. Every platform markets a "custom church app." For a 75-person church, nobody downloads the app. People use the website, the email newsletter, and the text message. Church Center (Planning Center's free member-facing app) and the Tithely Giving app are the only two that have enough critical mass that your members might already have them from another church they've attended. Unless you're 300-plus people and actually have a branded-app reason, skip it.
The question most small churches should ask first
The real question before picking software is whether you need software at all yet. A church under 40 people with volunteer leadership, no dedicated admin, no children's ministry, and giving handled through a single Stripe link can run on a shared spreadsheet plus a Mailchimp account for the newsletter for many years. The moment you add a second paid staff member, a children's ministry that needs check-in, or regular events that need signup tracking, that calculus changes. Until then, a $72-a-month subscription is paying for features that no one is using.
The second question is whether you primarily need giving software or primarily need management software. These are different products sold under the same umbrella. If 80 percent of what you want is "let people give online easily," Tithely Giving or Stripe alone ($0 monthly fee, 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction) might be the right answer, and you can add management software later when you actually need it.
Quick recommendation by church size
Church under 40 people, no dedicated admin, no children's check-in needed: Stripe or Tithely Giving plus a Google Sheet. You're not ready for a ChMS yet, and paying for one delays your growth.
Church of 40 to 100 people with a children's ministry and one part-time admin: Planning Center on the free tier. People (free) plus Services (free up to 5 team members) plus Check-Ins ($15/mo if you need it) runs the whole operation for $0 to $15 a month.
Church of 50 to 150 people coming off spreadsheets who wants a single tool and minimum complexity: ChurchTrac at $9 to $18 a month. It will not impress you on Day 1, and it will quietly run your church on Day 365.
Church of 100 to 400 people that wants Breeze's simplicity and doesn't want to think about software for five years: Tithely Church Management at $72 a month. You're paying for the flat rate and the bet that the Tithely/Breeze merger will keep maturing. Know what you're buying.
Church with a tech-capable volunteer or staff member who wants unlimited capability for $50 to $200 a month in hosting: Rock RMS hosted. This is the most powerful option in the category, and it rewards the time investment.
Church over 400 people with a worship team running multiple services and a paid staff that lives in software: Planning Center paid modules. Each paid module starts at $15 a month at small scale and scales up based on how many team members, check-ins, donations, or rooms you're handling. At a mid-sized church (roughly 300 to 500 people), expect $80 to $160 a month for the full stack (People free plus Services, Check-Ins, Giving, and Calendar at their appropriate tiers). At that price, it does more than anything else in the category.
The biggest mistake small churches make in this category is buying for the church they hope to become instead of the church they actually are. Pick the tool that matches your current staff, your current giving volume, and your current Sunday attendance. When you outgrow it, every platform in this list can export your data. Switching is annoying but survivable. Overpaying for five years while you figure out how to use features you don't need is the unrecoverable mistake.
