Pushpay vs. iChurch

As the fees are incredibly high, I would not recommend smaller organizations with lower budgets. If an organization is looking to separate their electronic giving processing outside of their church management software to allow a consistent user experience regardless of a change from one church management platform to another, Pushpay is a great solution.

Incentivized

• Receive payments for church events
• Receive donations and contributions to the church
• Help manage our CRM (church community database)

• Cannot give to more than one fund in a single transaction.
• Cannot pull data from the church management software. Therefore, if donors give electronically and via cash or check (which is processed directly in Church management software), the donor cannot run one giving statement through Pushpay, which includes all of their gifts. Pushpay does allow check and cash scanning through their platform which can resolve the statement issue, however, they do not have image scanning software, therefore, a visual copy of checks or cash envelopes cannot be exported or retrieved.

Incentivized

The access to support is excellent; however, the turnover with assigned account managers has been high over the years, which makes it challenging to build a lasting rapport. There have been some technical and functionality issues communicated over the years which have been received by the account manager. At the time, with responses such as "yes, we know it's an issue, and we're working on that, but we don't have a timeframe." These problems are never resolved, nor are progress reports or follow up ever addressed, then the account manager changes and the cycle starts again.

Incentivized

We had previously used a program called eGiving to receive online payments and contributions, and we have previously used PowerChurch as our CRM, and Pushpay (including its Church Community Builder program) far excels both of these other programs. Pushpay is more user-friendly, and its financial program and its CRM program work much more effectively with one another.

• Pushpay served as a fine giving platform and allowed for our church to move digitally well.
• However, the inordinate fees and costs of their platform ate away at much too large of our donations. With the other platforms out there, it doesn't make sense for us to lock into contracts with excessively high fees.