Compare every option · updated 26 August 2026
However you're doing it now, compare it
Most churches aren't choosing between two products. They're choosing between a spreadsheet, the dashboards they already have, and a tool or two. Pick what you're weighing up and see it side by side.
Build your comparison
Pick up to 3. Parable stays in for reference.
| Spreadsheets | Planning Center alone | Vitals | Nurture (Pushpay) | MortarStone | Data for Good | Holy Insights | Parable | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where the data comes from | Typed in by hand each week | Already there — it's your ChMS | Planning Center + manual + online | 17+ integrations incl. Planning Center | Planning Center giving + other ChMS | Volunteers tap-count on a phone | Planning Center + 5 integrations + CSV | Planning Center — every product, nightly |
| Answers about individuals | ✕Only what someone typed | ✓People lists span products | ✓People and family Labs | ✓Unified profile per person | ✓Donors only | ✕No person records at all | Care and lifecycle views in beta | ✓Whole person, every product |
| Ask something new | Rebuild the sheet | ✓AI lists + MCP via your AI tool | ✕Dashboards, Labs and AI insights | Fixed signals and workflows | AI assistant + 60+ reports | ✓Plain English — over weekend totals | ✓Ask MAX in plain English | ✓Type the question |
| Giving beside attendance | Manual join, if anyone has time | ✓Cross-product lists and dashboards | ✓Giving, attendance, groups, serving | ✓ | ✕Giving only | ✕ | ✓Attendance, giving, groups, serving | ✓ |
| Spots who's drifting | ✕ | Build or ask for the list | ✓Care inbox + slipping-family alerts | ✓At-risk flags + suggested actions | Lapsed givers only | ✕ | Metric alerts; care lists in beta | ✓By name |
| Forecasting | If someone knows Excel | Recurring gifts + service plans | ✕ | Not advertised | ✓Budget and pledge forecasting | ✕ | ✓Giving and budget scenarios | ✓ |
| Raw data / SQL access | ✕ | ✕API only | ✕ | Not advertised | ✕ | ✕CSV export | Not advertised | ✓Scale plan and up |
| Entry price | Staff hours | Included | $50/mo per campus | Not published — demo required | Free tier; paid pricing unclear | Not published | From $25/mo | From $79/mo |
| Honest downside | Breaks the week its owner leaves | Free, and genuinely enough for a lot of churches | The broadest $50 church dashboard here | The strongest tool here for routing follow-up | Free giving reports are hard to argue with | Best-in-class if manual counting is the job | $25 buys a full metrics dashboard | Overkill under about 200 people |
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Making sense of the table
Four kinds of tool, and what each is for
Six options in one table is a lot to hold in your head, and it helps to notice they are not six versions of the same idea. They are four different kinds of product, and the differences run along two lines.
The first is what the tool knows about: a total, or a person. The second is what you are allowed to ask it: a report somebody designed in advance, or whatever occurs to you on the day. Nearly every frustration a church has with reporting comes from having bought the wrong corner of that square for the job it actually had.
Totals · Reports somebody designed
Dashboards and fixed reports
Charts the numbers your church already produces and presents them cleanly enough to put in front of a board. These are the cheapest and easiest tools to adopt, which is a real advantage — a dashboard nobody has to think about is a low-risk purchase. The limit is in the name: it answers the questions it was built to answer, and a new one means a new report.
Who's here: Vitals, MortarStone, and Planning Center's own metrics — the last of which is already included in what you pay.
Individual people · Reports somebody designed
Action systems
Builds a record for each person, watches for changes in how they engage, and hands your team a worklist: who is drifting, who to contact, and whether the contact actually happened. The strongest published outcome evidence in this category sits here — Pushpay sources Nurture’s return, volunteer and giving results to 79,478 Elevation Church members. What it does not advertise is an open question; the public workflow starts from predefined engagement signals.
Who's here: Nurture, now owned by Pushpay.
Totals · Ask anything
AI over ministry metrics
Lets you ask in plain English about ministry totals and trends. Data for Good starts with numbers volunteers count by hand; Holy Insights syncs Planning Center and other systems into thirty-plus ready-made KPIs. Both are strongest when the answer is a metric, a trend or a board narrative. Person-level care exists only as a beta on Holy Insights and not at all in a hand-counted total.
Who's here: Data for Good and Holy Insights.
Individual people · Ask anything
Reporting layers
Reads your church management system directly and answers questions nobody designed a report for — including the follow-up question. Planning Center now does this through its MCP connection to a separate AI tool; Parable keeps a nightly modelled copy and a reporting interface around it. The trade is a hard dependency: no church management system, nothing to read, and a thin one gives thin answers.
Who's here: Parable and Planning Center MCP. We are describing our own corner here, and you should read the rest of this page knowing it.
The useful part of that map is not where we sit on it. It is that three of the four corners are the right purchase for some churches, and the quickest way to waste a budget is to buy a worklist when the problem was that nobody can get a number out — or a dashboard when the problem was that nobody makes the call.
Before you buy anything
Six questions worth asking every vendor
Including us. These are the questions that actually separate the products in the table above, and none of them takes more than a minute to ask on a call.
- Where does the number come from?
- If a volunteer has to produce it, the tool is only ever as current as their Sunday, and it starts from the day you begin counting. If it reads your church management system, it is as current as the last sync and it arrives with your history already in it. This one question separates the category more sharply than price does.
- Can it name people, or only count them?
- "Attendance is down 8%" and "these twenty-three families have stopped coming" are different products, whatever the pricing pages suggest. Ask to see an answer that resolves to a list of actual households. Plenty of good tools cannot do it, and it is much easier to find out in a demo than in month three.
- What happens when you ask something nobody anticipated?
- Bring a question that is not in the demo script. You will get one of three answers: you can type it, we can build it for you, or you cannot. All three are legitimate — but if it is the second, ask what a custom report costs and how long it takes, because that is the real price of the tool.
- Does it cross products, or live inside one?
- Most questions worth asking span giving and attendance and serving at once. A tool that reads one of the three will answer its own question beautifully and leave you to join the rest by hand. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether your questions stay inside one product — for a lot of churches they genuinely do.
- What does it do after it finds something?
- Some tools tell you; some assign the follow-up to a named person and chase it until it happens. Neither is better in the abstract. Buy for the failure you actually have: if your staff already know who is drifting and nobody makes the call, better reporting will not fix that, and you should be looking at an action system instead.
- Can you see the price without booking a call?
- Not a moral question, but a practical one. Roughly half this category publishes pricing and half gates it behind a demo, which means shortlisting on cost alone can take a week of meetings. If a price is not published, ask early what it scales on — profiles, campuses, donation volume and trailing giving are all used, and they produce very different bills at the same church.
01
Nobody counts anything
Parable reads Planning Center directly. No clipboards, no volunteer entering numbers on Monday, no spreadsheet that only one person understands.
02
Every answer names people
“Attendance is down 8%” is where other tools stop. Parable tells you which twenty-three families it is, so someone can call them.
03
The next question is free
Dashboards answer the questions somebody anticipated. Type a new one and Parable answers it against tonight's data.
50+
churches using Parable
750,000+
people cared for
24M
data points synced weekly
Churches using Parable
“We’re all excited about the vision around this product and the results we’re already getting.”
Go deeper on one
Still working out what to compare on? The reports Planning Center can't run covers why the gap exists at all, how to find out who stopped coming and how to find lapsed givers both walk the job through in Planning Center first — no tool required.
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