Online giving platforms compared in 2026: Tithe.ly, Pushpay, Subsplash, Givelify, and Planning Center

Why this matters

If your church still runs the giving platform it picked four or five years ago, the person who set it up may have moved on, and the church may be a different size. Every year or two, it is worth an hour to ask whether the platform still fits.

Five platforms, the free options, and an honest read on each. No affiliate links: every vendor link below goes straight to the vendor's own site. One disclosure up front: Church Digital partners with Zeffy, a free giving platform covered in the free options section below. We work with whatever you choose, and we connect the giving experience into your website either way.

At a glance

These are the published US rates as of October 22, 2026, each checked that day on the vendor's own pricing page, linked in the table. "Not published" means that page does not list it. Rates move, so confirm with the vendor before you decide.

Quick verdict by church size

These are starting points, not rules.

• Under 100 attendance: Tithe.ly or Givelify. The setup is fast, the cost stays low, and you do not need the analytics tools the bigger platforms bundle in.
• 100 to 300: Tithe.ly is still the default. Planning Center Giving makes sense if you are already running Planning Center for services or check-in.
• 300 to 800: Pushpay or Subsplash Giving start to make sense, especially if you want a real donor-management layer.
• 800 and up: Pushpay or Subsplash, usually for the donor-management and reporting tools. Pushpay and Subsplash One are quote-only, so get written quotes and set them beside per-gift rates at your giving volume.

Online giving fees: how each platform actually charges

There are four pricing patterns to watch for:

• Pure transaction fee: Nothing monthly, just a percentage plus a flat fee per gift. Tithe.ly Giving, Givelify and Subsplash Giving work this way.
• Subscription plus transaction fee: A monthly fee plus a per-gift cut. Planning Center Giving works this way above 10 donations a month, and Pushpay sells subscriptions paid monthly or annually.
• Bundled: One subscription for a suite (giving, app, website, messaging), as with Subsplash One.
• Free to the church: Each donor is asked for an optional tip instead. Zeffy works this way.

The right model depends on giving volume, so run a year of your church's online giving through each platform's published rates, plus any monthly fee or written quote, before you choose.

Tithe.ly

The small-church default, and for good reason. Tithe.ly is fast to set up, has a clean donor-facing form, and the cost stays predictable. Their published rates as of October 22, 2026 (per get.tithe.ly/pricing) are 2.9% + $0.30 for credit and debit cards, 3.5% + $0.30 for American Express, and 1% + $0.30 for ACH bank transfers. The base Giving plan itself is free, with no setup fee, no monthly fee and no contract; text-to-give on that free plan costs $19/mo.

Who it fits: churches under 300 attendance, churches that want to switch on giving today and stop thinking about it.

Real strengths:

• The donor form embeds cleanly on a church website.
• Recurring giving works without donor friction.
• Mobile donation is genuinely good.

Real limitations:

• Reporting is functional but not deep. If you want donor cohorts or retention trends, you are exporting CSVs.
• The integration with church management software is fine, but you usually end up doing a weekly sync rather than a real-time hand-off.
• At higher volumes, compare a written quote from a subscription platform against Tithe.ly's per-gift cost.

Pushpay

Pushpay is what churches grow into when Tithe.ly starts to feel small. It is a fuller platform: giving, donor management, communication tools, and (through their parent company's broader suite) integration with church management products.

Who it fits: churches in the 500 to 5,000 attendance range, churches that want analytics and donor-management muscle bundled with giving.

Real strengths:

• Donor recognition and retention reporting that small platforms do not match.
• Strong text-to-give and app-based giving.
• Good integration story with Church Community Builder and similar tools.

Real tradeoffs:

• Pricing is not published. As of October 22, 2026, pushpay.com/pricing lists no plan prices and sends you to a demo for "answers and pricing options." The same page says there are no setup fees, that contracts run 1, 2 or 3 years, and that cancelling early means paying the rest of the contract. Get the quote and the term in writing before you commit.
• The platform is overpowered for a 150-person church; it is built for larger ones.

Subsplash Giving

Subsplash Giving is the answer when you are already inside the Subsplash ecosystem, using their app, their messaging tools, and possibly their website builder.

Who it fits: churches that already run a Subsplash app, churches that want one vendor for web, app, giving, and communication, churches that value a single dashboard over the strongest tool for each job.

Bundled-vs-standalone math: if you are paying Subsplash for an app and a website, adding giving inside the same plan can be simpler than adding a separate giving vendor. Whether it costs less is a quote question, because Subsplash One is quote-only. As of October 22, 2026, subsplash.com/pricing lists Subsplash Giving at $0 a month and shows two card rates: "exclusive rates" of 2.3% + $0.30 per card gift and 1% for ACH, and, in the feature list, 2.99% + $0.30 for standard cards. Subsplash's transaction fees help article explains the split: 2.3% + $0.30 applies to ministries with an Exclusive Partnership agreement, and 2.99% + $0.30 to giving-only and non-exclusive accounts. The pricing page also says rates can drop as low as 1.9% for cards and 0.5% for ACH through a program it calls GrowCurve; the help article says GrowCurve rebates go to Exclusive Partners and are applied each quarter, and it does not list the rebate amounts. Ask Subsplash in writing which rate your church would pay and what the Exclusive Partnership agreement requires.

Watch-outs:

• The lock-in is real. Moving off Subsplash means rebuilding the app, the giving setup, and often the website.

Givelify

Givelify is the donor-app player. They built their platform around the experience of the person giving (find the church, tap, give), and the donor app is the center of the product.

Who it fits: churches whose people respond well to a branded donor app, churches under 500 attendance where simplicity matters more than reporting depth.

Real cost framing: The published rate as of October 22, 2026 (per givelify.com/pricing) is 2.9% + $0.30 per donation, and 3.5% + $0.30 on American Express. The page says there are no sign-up fees, monthly fees or maintenance costs. The pricing page does not list a separate rate for bank (ACH) gifts, so if members give from a bank account, ask Givelify what that costs before you compare.

Real limitations:

• The reporting and admin side is less developed than Tithe.ly's.
• Integration with church management software is thinner than Tithe.ly or Pushpay.

Planning Center Giving

If your church is already running Planning Center for services, check-in, registrations, or groups, Planning Center Giving is worth a hard look. The data flows into the same household and person records you already maintain, which removes a whole category of weekly sync work.

Who it fits: churches already inside Planning Center for two or more modules, churches that value clean data over the flashiest donor app.

Pricing detail: Planning Center Giving's published US rates as of October 22, 2026 (per planningcenter.com/giving) are 2.15% + $0.30 for credit and debit cards and 0% + $0.30 for ACH. The subscription itself is tiered by monthly donation volume: free up to 10 donations, $15/mo for 75, $32/mo for 200, $69/mo for 500, $115/mo for 1,000, $179/mo for 1,500, and $239/mo for unlimited. No contracts, no setup fees, no cancellation charges, and a 30-day free trial. Whether the lower card rate covers the subscription depends on your numbers: on $10,000 a month in card gifts, 2.15% instead of 2.9% saves $75 a month, which you then set against the tier your donation count puts you in.

Watch-outs:

• If you are not already using Planning Center for anything else, the value drops. If you are choosing a church management system at the same time, our ChMS shortlist for churches under 200 compares the common options.
• The donor-facing form is functional but not as polished as Tithe.ly's or Givelify's.

Free options for church online giving

"Free" means two different things in church giving.

No monthly fee, but a fee on every gift. Tithe.ly Giving, Givelify and Subsplash Giving list $0 a month, and Planning Center Giving is free up to 10 donations a month. The church still pays the per-gift rates in the table above, so these are free to start, not free to run.

No fees to the church at all. As of October 22, 2026, zeffy.com/pricing says it charges no platform fees and covers transaction and credit card fees, and its homepage lists credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and ACH transfers. Zeffy pays its own costs by asking each donor for an optional tip to Zeffy at checkout, and its site says donors are never forced to tip.

Two things to weigh before you switch. First, your members will see that tip request on a gift to their church, so make a small gift yourself and read the checkout screen the way a member would. Second, Zeffy is built for nonprofits of every kind, not only churches, so check that it handles what you rely on today, such as separate giving funds and year-end statements, before you move recurring givers.

Our disclosure: Church Digital partners with Zeffy. When a church we work with wants online giving with no platform fees, Zeffy is the option we point to. That partnership is part of why Zeffy has its own section here, so weigh our view with it in mind. The Zeffy links above go to Zeffy's own site, not through a partner link. If your church already uses a platform that works, keep it; we connect whichever one you choose.

Switching considerations

Two things are easy to underestimate when you switch.

First, donor friction. Recurring givers have to update their saved account on the new platform, and some will not. Email the recurring-giving list directly, two weeks before launch and one week after, with a one-tap link to set up the new recurring gift.

Second, your team's time. Rebuilding the campaigns, funds, and reporting categories you had configured in the old platform takes longer than it looks. Block a half day of one staff person's time.

Before you switch, write down three specific things your current platform cannot do that cost you real money or time. If you cannot name three, the upside is smaller than it feels.

How giving integrates with your website

This is the part we care about most, because it is where gifts quietly go missing. In our 2026 State of Small Church Websites study, an audit of 2,000 church websites, 64.2% of small church websites (n=1,734) had a working online giving path as of the July 2026 crawl, about two in three. If the give button on your site does not work, this symptom-by-symptom guide finds the break before you change platforms.

Your giving link belongs in three places on the website:

• The main navigation, with a label that says "Give", not "Online giving" or "Tithe."
• The footer, every page, every time.
• The homepage, on a section that does not require the visitor to hunt.

Beyond that, the give page itself should not be a single button that hands the visitor to a third-party tab and leaves. It should answer the obvious questions: what gifts are tax-deductible, are there options other than online (text-to-give, mail-in check, in-person box), and where do questions go if the donor needs help.

A few specifics on the embed itself:

• Use the platform's embedded form, not a redirect, when you can, so visitors stay on your site.
• Test the mobile flow yourself, on your own phone, every quarter. If no one on staff uses the form, a broken flow can go unnoticed for months.

Where this connects in our work

• Online giving for churches, our plain-language overview of what online giving is and what it costs.
• Pushpay vs Subsplash giving: which fits your church, if those two are your shortlist.

Frequently asked questions

How much does online giving cost a church?

As of October 22, 2026, Tithe.ly Giving and Givelify list 2.9% + $0.30 per card gift, and Planning Center Giving lists 2.15% + $0.30. Bank (ACH) gifts cost less where a rate is published: 1% + $0.30 on Tithe.ly, 1% on Subsplash Giving, and $0.30 flat on Planning Center. Pushpay quotes each church instead of publishing prices, and Zeffy charges the church nothing.

Is there a free online giving platform for churches?

Yes. Zeffy charges the church no platform or processing fees and asks donors for an optional tip instead. Tithe.ly Giving, Givelify and Subsplash Giving have no monthly fee but take a fee on each gift. Church Digital partners with Zeffy, so weigh our view with that in mind.

Do church giving platforms require a contract?

Not all of them. As of October 22, 2026, Tithe.ly says its Giving plan has no contract, and Planning Center Giving lists no contracts, setup fees or cancellation charges. Pushpay is the exception in this post: its pricing page says contracts run 1, 2 or 3 years, and cancelling early means paying the rest of the contract.

Next step

If you want a second pair of eyes on how your current giving setup connects to your website (the link in the nav, the give page itself, the mobile flow), we look at this on every free review we record. Send us your URL at /review. You get a four-minute video back with notes. No sales call required.