Every question we get asked about Parable

For different jobs. Vitals is the better weekend-metrics dashboard at a lower price. Parable is the only one of the two that answers open questions and shows you individual people. If your board wants a clean attendance chart, Vitals will do it. If your staff needs to know who to call this week, it will not.

Some churches do, and nothing breaks — both read Planning Center independently, and the only thing Parable can add to it is custom fields and notes on people, if you turn that on. Most consolidate within a couple of months, because two dashboards showing slightly different attendance numbers causes more arguments than it settles.

No, and you should not. Parable is a layer on top of Planning Center rather than a replacement. You keep Planning Center exactly as it is, and your giving provider too.

There is nothing to migrate. Parable reads your history straight out of Planning Center, so your first sync brings years of attendance and giving with it. Connect Parable, run it alongside Vitals for a month, then cancel whichever one your staff stopped opening.

$50 per month per campus when we checked on 24 July 2026, with unlimited users and unlimited data included and free dashboard setup. Custom metrics are quoted separately at $250 one-time each. They run a 30-day free trial with no credit card, and churches less than two years old get their first year free. Parable starts at $99 a month, or $79 billed yearly, for up to 2,500 profiles with unlimited staff accounts.

Yes. Planning Center is one of their integrations, alongside YouTube, Google Analytics, Facebook and Instagram, with CCB, Breeze and Pushpay listed as coming. So both tools read the same Planning Center data — what differs is how far into it each one goes. Vitals aggregates it into weekend metrics and gauges; Parable keeps it at the person level, which is why our answers can name households and theirs cannot.

No, and this is the thing most worth understanding before you choose. Vitals' AI explains trends you are already looking at — it will point at a speaker, a holiday weekend or the weather as context for a chart in front of you. Parable's takes a question you type and answers it against your data, including questions nobody anticipated when the dashboards were built. One annotates a dashboard; the other builds one on demand.

Ours, at four. Multi-campus support starts on our Growth plan — $149 a month billed yearly, up to 10,000 profiles, unlimited staff accounts, no per-campus charge. Vitals charges $50 per campus, so they are cheaper at one or two, it is roughly a wash at three, and from four the flat plan costs less. Profile count matters as much as campus count, though: if four campuses put you over 10,000 profiles you are comparing against our Scale plan rather than Growth.

Partly. Both build a single record per person and surface who is drifting. Nurture goes further into pastoral workflow — assigning touchpoints and tracking whether they happened. Parable goes further into reporting — open questions, forecasting, cohorts and raw data access. Churches that want a follow-up queue should look hard at Nurture; churches that want to understand what is happening should look at Parable.

No. Pushpay acquired Nurture in April 2026 and has said churches do not need to be Pushpay customers to use it. Worth knowing all the same that it now sits inside a company that also sells giving, a ChMS and livestreaming, and that its roadmap will reflect that.

Parable reads giving through Planning Center Giving. If your giving lives somewhere else and syncs into Planning Center, Parable sees it. If it does not touch Planning Center at all, Parable will not see it — that is a real limitation and Nurture handles it better.

About ten minutes to authorise, then the first sync runs in the background — a few hours for a large church. No onboarding project and no success manager required, though you can book a demo if you would rather be walked through it.

Yes. Pushpay announced the acquisition on 22 April 2026. Nurture was founded in 2024 and its founder stayed on through the deal. Pushpay has been explicit that churches do not need to be Pushpay customers to use Nurture, which pre-empts the obvious objection fairly. It is still worth knowing that the product now sits inside a company that also sells giving, a church management system and livestreaming — roadmaps tend to follow their owner, and independence is one of the few things we can offer that they structurally cannot.

They do not publish it. When we checked on 24 July 2026, access was demo-gated, with a Founder's Club offering discounted early access to the first hundred churches and onboarding described as white-glove with a dedicated success manager. That is not a criticism of the product, but it does mean you cannot compare the two of us on cost without booking a call with them first. Parable is $79 a month billed yearly at the entry tier, and the number is on the page because we think it should be.

Yes, by name, and it is one of the things churches use it for most. The difference is what happens next. Parable is where you find out that fourteen households have not checked in since March and that nine of them still give every month; Nurture is where a named staff member gets assigned four of them and gets reminded until the calls happen. We surface, your team acts.

Technically yes — both read Planning Center and neither depends on anything the other writes. Whether it is worth paying for both depends on which problem you actually have. Churches with follow-up discipline already in place tend to get more from Parable; churches whose problem is that follow-up does not happen should buy Nurture first and worry about reporting later. We would rather say that than pretend the overlap is smaller than it is.

Only if your need is broader than giving. MortarStone is a giving-analytics product with a free tier and more donor-specific reporting than Parable has. Parable is a reporting layer across all of Planning Center, so giving is one of several signals rather than the whole picture. Plenty of churches could reasonably run both.

You would not, if giving reports are all you need — free is a good price and their Basic Track includes their reporting features. The case for Parable starts when the question crosses products: a household still giving but no longer attending, or whether the people who joined a group in January are still serving in April. A giving tool cannot see either.

No. Parable reads Planning Center Giving and never writes to it. You keep your giving provider exactly as it is.

Yes — first-time givers, lapsed givers, recurring and core givers are all questions you can ask, and the answer comes back as a list of actual households. MortarStone ships more giving-specific reports out of the box; Parable lets you ask for whatever you want, including questions that mix giving with attendance or serving. We do not ship a proprietary giving score the way they do.

Their Basic Track was free when we checked on 24 July 2026, and described on their own site as including access to all reporting features — first-time givers, giving retention, core and top givers, recurring givers, benchmark trends, tithing reports and giving scores among them. Growth Track and Impact Track sit above it. We would rather point you at that than talk you out of it: if giving reporting on Planning Center is what you need, free is hard to beat and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

They do not publish it. Growth Track and Impact Track are quoted per church, billed annually, and scaled to your trailing-twelve-month giving, with roughly a 10% premium if you pay monthly instead. That is a reasonable model — a larger church pays more — but it does mean you cannot compare us on price without a conversation with them. Parable's number is on the page: $79 a month billed yearly at the entry tier, priced on profile count rather than on how much your church gives.

Probably not, and we will not push you to. The honest shape is that MortarStone stays your giving reporting and Parable answers the questions that cross out of giving into attendance, groups and serving. Some churches do consolidate onto us once they notice most of their questions were never really about money — but if your board's standing report is a giving report, keep the tool that produces it.

Only if your church uses Planning Center. That is the whole difference. Data for Good is built for organisations whose numbers are not in a system yet — it gives volunteers a phone to tap and an AI analyst to interpret the totals. Parable is built for churches whose numbers are already in Planning Center and just cannot be read across products. If you are on Planning Center, Parable answers the same questions without anyone counting; if you are not, Parable has nothing to read and Data for Good is the better fit.

What the question can be about. Data for Good can tell you attendance was 942 last Sunday, because that is what a volunteer counted. Parable can tell you which twenty-three families who came every week last autumn have not checked in since Easter — because Planning Center recorded each of them individually. Same phrasing, different depth of data underneath.

Yes, and a few churches reasonably would — Data for Good for things nobody records anywhere (parking counts, coffee, guest conversations) and Parable for everything Planning Center already holds. The overlap is small enough that it is not wasteful, though most churches settle on one.

Two things, genuinely. Their leadership report is a finished artifact — trends, anomalies, discussion points, exportable for a board meeting — where Parable expects you to ask. And they work for organisations with no church management system at all, which Parable simply cannot do.

Not that we could find. When we read their site on 24 July 2026, no church management system integration was named anywhere on it — the routes in are volunteers tap-counting on a phone, and CSV import. That is a design choice rather than an oversight, because they are built for organisations whose numbers are not in a system yet. But if your numbers are already in Planning Center, it means you would be re-entering data you have.

Not published as of 24 July 2026 — the call to action on their site is "Get Started" rather than a price. So a like-for-like cost comparison is not possible without contacting them, and we are not going to invent a figure to fill the cell. Parable is $79 a month billed yearly at the entry tier, for up to 2,500 profiles with unlimited staff accounts.

You can build and share dashboards, and export anything you ask for, but Parable will not write the narrative for you — there is no one-click PDF with discussion points and recommended next steps. That is the thing Data for Good does better and it is worth being plain about. What Parable gives a board instead is the ability to answer the follow-up question during the meeting, rather than promising to look it up afterwards.

Yes, and for a few churches that is genuinely the right shape — their phone counter for things Planning Center will never hold, ours for everything it already does. The overlap is small enough not to be wasteful. Most churches on Planning Center find they stop needing the counting layer once check-ins are being used properly, though, so treat it as a stage rather than a destination.

For a lot of churches, yes — and we would rather say so than sell you something you do not need. Planning Center Home includes dashboards and metrics at no extra cost, and if your questions are about one product at a time they answer them well. The gap opens when a question crosses products, because no built-in report joins Giving to Check-Ins to Groups. That is when people start exporting to spreadsheets, and that is the job Parable takes over.

Anything that needs two products to talk to each other. Which of our volunteers have stopped giving. Which families in a small group have stopped attending. Whether people in groups give more than people who are not. Who came every week last autumn and has not been seen since Easter. Each of those is one question in Parable and three exports plus a spreadsheet otherwise.

No. The connection is authorised by one of your Planning Center Organization Administrators, with Giving Administrator access, and is revocable from your Planning Center account at any time. Parable reads across your Planning Center products and writes nothing back unless you opt in to custom fields and notes on people. Nobody changes their workflow, and no data is migrated anywhere.

Yes. Planning Center Home is included with every subscription at no extra cost, and it covers dashboards, metrics for big-picture data, church-wide activity, product-specific reports and shareable dashboards. Use it — it is good, and it is already paid for. Parable is only worth adding once your questions stop fitting inside a single product.

Not that they claim. When we read their pages on 24 July 2026, no AI or ask-a-question features were described anywhere in Home or the product reports. Their reporting works the traditional way: you pick a report or build a list. That is a perfectly good way to work, and it is why the real question on this page is whether you need to ask things nobody built a report for.

Almost certainly not yet. Planning Center gives church planters a year free and eligible churches twelve months of Giving free, and at plant scale you know everyone by name without a tool. Spend the year filling Planning Center with good data instead. Do that and Parable's first sync a year from now will be worth having; buy us now and we will mostly be reading an empty database back to you.

Nothing, unless you switch it on. The connection is read-only by default. There is an opt-in write-back that puts custom fields and notes on people — only on people, nothing else — so that what Parable finds shows up where your team already works. It is authorised by one of your Planning Center Organization Administrators, with Giving Administrator access, and revocable from your Planning Center account whenever you want.

Nothing, until three things happen. It goes stale, because it is only as current as the last export. It cannot answer the follow-up, because the summary threw away the people behind the totals. And it has exactly one owner, so the week they leave or get busy, the reporting stops. Churches usually do not switch because the sheet is bad — they switch because it stopped being maintained.

Yes, and plenty do. Parable exports anywhere, and on the Scale plan you can point Google Sheets, Excel, Power BI or Tableau straight at the underlying data — so the sheet your board likes keeps existing, it just stops needing a human to refill it.

Nothing is lost, and nothing needs migrating. Parable reads your history directly out of Planning Center, so the first sync brings years of attendance and giving with it — usually more than the spreadsheet had, because it reads every record rather than the summary somebody typed.

Often not, and we would rather say so. Under about 200 people a spreadsheet and Planning Center’s own dashboards will usually do the job. The maths changes when the manual work costs more staff hours per month than the subscription, or when the questions start crossing products.

Parable cannot see it. We read Planning Center and nothing else, so hand counts from before you used check-ins, notes typed into a tab, and figures from any other system all stay exactly where they are. If that data matters, the usual fix is getting it into Planning Center — which is worth doing regardless, because that is where the rest of your team already looks.

The connection takes about ten minutes and the first sync runs in the background, a few hours for a large church. After that the report is a question rather than a morning. Most churches keep building the sheet in parallel for a month, because trusting a new number takes a cycle or two, and then quietly stop.

That is the failure this whole comparison is really about. A spreadsheet has exactly one person who knows why cell K42 is hard-coded, and churches usually do not switch because the sheet was bad — they switch the month after that person left. Parable has no author. Anyone on staff with a login can ask the same question and get the same answer, and there is no formula for anyone to inherit.