The best Pushpay alternatives in 2026

The donor app is the part most churches buy and the part Pushpay genuinely earns. One-tap recurring setup, Apple Pay and Google Pay flows, text-to-give, donor-side recurring management, and a branded shell on iOS and Android all add up to a giving experience that converts at the top of the category². At megachurch scale, a one or two percent conversion lift on first-time gifts compounds into real money over a year, and that math is the reason most 5,000+ person churches end up here.

The account management is also real. You get a dedicated CSM who knows your campus structure, your giving seasonality, and your big-event flows, and at large-church scale that relationship is genuinely useful (not theater). High-touch implementation, deep donor cohort reporting (new-giver retention, lapsed-giver alerts, multi-year pledge tracking), and the CCB pairing for ChMS round out the bundle. None of the alternatives match Pushpay on the dedicated-human dimension, and for churches with the volume to justify it, that's the headline feature.

The last thing Pushpay does well is the boring stuff: multi-site campus permissioning is battle-tested, the giving rail is reliable through Easter and Christmas spikes, and integrations into the broader Pushpay platform (CCB, the branded app, the donor portal) are tight in a way that bundle products usually aren't. At the tier of church Pushpay is built for, none of that is glamorous, and all of it is the reason customers stay.

The price tag is the most common complaint, and it's the structural one. Quote-only pricing means a 600-person church and a 6,000-person church both walk into the sales call with no benchmark, and the result is a non-trivial number of mid-size churches signed into multi-year contracts at $600-1,200/month who'd be just as well served by Tithe.ly at $0/month plus per-transaction fees¹. The auto-renewal language has caught more than one church admin off guard, and reversing course at month 12 takes proactive calendaring most teams don't do.

The CCB half of the bundle is the next pressure point. CCB has been around since 1999 and the data model is mature, but the UI is visibly older than Planning Center, Realm, or even Breeze, and roadmap velocity has been steady rather than aggressive². Most CCB customers we talk to are content rather than excited, and increasingly we hear from churches paying for CCB inside the Pushpay bundle while their staff actually does the work in a separate Planning Center subscription on the side, which is the worst of both worlds on cost.

The last gap is accounting. There's no general-ledger accounting in the Pushpay stack, so multi-site churches with real finance teams pair it with Realm Accounting, Aplos, or QuickBooks anyway, and the integration is a CSV export the bookkeeper runs monthly. For a vendor that markets itself as the enterprise all-in-one, the absence of a real GL is conspicuous, and it's the single biggest reason finance-led churches end up moving to Realm.

We installed each tool, imported a 1,200-person sample membership list with a multi-site flag, and ran the same end-to-end workflows: a Sunday morning child check-in across two campuses, a recurring online gift with Apple Pay, a 12-person volunteer rotation across worship and tech teams for three weeks, end-of-month contribution statements at scale, donor cohort reporting on new-giver retention, and a multi-year giving-versus-attendance pull. We noted setup time, the steps that broke, support response when things didn't work, and the actual all-in cost at our test church size.

We pair hands-on testing with AI-assisted writing: the judgments, ranks, and pricing math are human, the prose is cleaned up from raw notes. Switching cost matters most for Pushpay specifically because the contract structure makes timing a real consideration, so we mapped the realistic migration off it: donor history exports cleanly, recurring gifts require donors to re-authorize on the new processor (plan 60-90 days of proactive communication), CCB data exports through standard channels, and the custom branded app does not transfer (you rebuild on the new vendor). The auto-renewal calendaring is the single most important piece of the move.

Pushpay won't quote you a price without a sales call, but the math we've gathered from churches looking for the exit lands around $400-600/month for the giving product alone at single-campus mid-size scale, and $800-2,000+/month for the full Giving plus CCB plus branded-app bundle at multi-site scale¹. Per-transaction processing is typically 2.5-3.0% on cards plus $0.30, negotiable at high volume. Contracts are annual minimum and multi-year is common, with auto-renewal¹.

At the same 1,200-person church, Planning Center running 5 modules (People, Services, Giving, Check-Ins, Groups) lands around $250-400/month plus 2.15% + $0.30³, with no contract, no sales call, and the ability to drop a module any month. Subsplash is also quote-only and meaningfully expensive, typically $400-900/month for Subsplash One at this scale⁴, but the bundle is wider on media and the branded app is the centerpiece. Realm Connect plus Accounting lands around $300-450/month combined, by quote, and consolidates the books into the same product⁵. Tithe.ly All-Access is $159/month flat plus 2.9% + $0.30 on cards⁶, the cheapest credible bundle and the largest single drop from Pushpay pricing. Breeze is $72/month flat⁷, only relevant for churches that were genuinely oversold and should have stayed smaller.

The quieter cost is what Pushpay doesn't include: no GL accounting (add $99-300/month for Aplos or Realm Accounting depending on size⁸), and the branded app billed separately even within the Pushpay bundle. Folding those in, a full multi-site Pushpay stack with accounting alongside lands meaningfully north of $1,000/month all-in, and that's the bill the procurement review starts asking questions about.

If you're a 1,500+ weekend attendance church (especially multi-site) processing seven figures of giving annually, and your CSM is doing real work (campus rollouts, giving-season strategy, donor cohort analysis your staff actually uses), stay. The donor app's conversion advantage is real at your volume, the CCB pairing genuinely reduces vendor count, and the high-touch service earns its premium. The math we've laid out against Planning Center or Tithe.ly doesn't actually beat Pushpay at your scale once you weight conversion lift and the staff time the CSM saves.

The other 'stay' case is the church mid-way through a multi-year contract with no procurement pain. Migration off Pushpay is doable but real (60-90 days, with donor communication as the most fragile piece), and if the bill is comfortable in the budget, ripping it out mid-term to save 20% on a competitor rarely pencils once you weight staff time. The right move there is to calendar the auto-renewal date, re-quote at renewal with two alternatives in hand for leverage, and decide then. The wrong move is to switch reactively after a single bad CSM month.

For most churches that genuinely outgrew (or were oversold) Pushpay, Planning Center is the right move. You'll trade the dedicated CSM and the highest-converting donor app for public pricing, modular billing, and the ability to walk away monthly³. Services is the category-leading volunteer-scheduling tool, the API depth lets you build cross-module dashboards Pushpay can't match, and the all-in cost typically lands 40-60% below Pushpay at the same church size. The donor experience downgrade is real but tractable: Church Center is good, just not as polished as Pushpay's branded app.

The runner-up depends on what was actually driving the Pushpay decision. If the branded app and media-first digital strategy were the headline, Subsplash is the head-to-head pick: same enterprise contract energy, but built around media instead of giving⁴. If accounting was the gap (and it usually is for finance-led churches), Realm consolidates Pushpay-plus-QuickBooks into one product, with real fund accounting and denominational workflows⁵. If the goal is just to cut the bill and you're under 1,500 people, Tithe.ly's All-Access bundle at $159/month is the cleanest path, with the rough edges of an acquired-product stack as the trade-off⁶. Breeze only makes sense as a deliberate downsize to a back-office tool paired with separate giving.

The push-back: don't switch off Pushpay reactively. If you signed an enterprise contract, plan the move around the renewal calendar, not the next bad month. Donor migration is the most fragile piece of any move off Pushpay (recurring gifts require re-authorization, and a chunk of donors will drop off in the transition), so a 60-90 day proactive communication plan and a quiet-season migration window matter more than picking the perfect alternative.