The church CRM that handles member care, giving, and volunteer coordination without a Planning Center sprawl.
Planning Center owns scheduling and services. Church Community Builder and Breeze ChMS own the membership database. The gap is still the pastoral workflow: member care follow-ups, visit tracking, prayer-request handoff, and the ability for a pastoral team to see one view of a family. Strkr fills that gap with a church-configuration CRM designed around the pastoral motion rather than the admin office.
Church technology has fragmented into specialty tools where each handles one slice of the ministry workflow. Planning Center handles services, scheduling, and check-in. Church Community Builder (now Pushpay) handles membership and groups. Breeze ChMS handles the small-to-medium church membership database. Pushpay handles giving. Realm handles the Episcopal and mainline-church membership workflow. The pastoral team ends up with four tabs open and no single view of a family, which is specifically the view the pastoral workflow needs. The administrative team wants reporting on member engagement, volunteer coverage, and giving trends across the full picture. Multi-campus churches add another layer because each campus has its own pastoral team, its own volunteer base, and the central staff needs the rollup. Most tools solve one slice well; the church that wants the one view ends up stitching with CSV exports and a weekly spreadsheet.
The Planning Center fragmentation
Services, Groups, Giving, Check-ins all run on separate records.
Planning Center ships as a suite of specialty modules (Services, Groups, Giving, Check-ins, Calendar, Publishing, Registrations) that each run on their own data model with shared identity. The pastoral team flipping between modules sees the member in each context but never in one unified view. Strkr runs the member record as the single surface with giving, volunteer teams, visit log, prayer requests, and family group linkage visible on one record.
Church Community Builder complexity
The admin needs a certification to actually use it.
Church Community Builder (now Pushpay ChMS) ships deep configuration surface area and the trade-off is a tool that mid-sized churches often run with a part-time admin who has gone through formal training. The learning curve for a volunteer coordinator or a pastoral care team member is steep. Strkr ships the church configuration with admin UI defaults that match common church workflows, so a staff member can configure a volunteer schedule or a care-visit cadence without a certification course.
Breeze ChMS UX ceiling
Great for 200-member churches, tight for 2,000.
Breeze ChMS is the small-church favorite for a reason: it is affordable, approachable, and covers the basics well. The product shows strain above roughly 500 to 800 members where workflow depth, group-of-groups structures, and multi-campus rollup start to matter. Strkr covers the small-church simplicity on the entry tier and scales to multi-campus churches with thousands of members on the same per-seat pricing structure.
Pastoral care workflow is a text-message chain
The team cannot answer who last visited the hospital patient.
Pastoral care tracking in most churches runs as text-message threads between the pastoral team and the senior pastor. When a member is in the hospital, the question of who last visited cannot be answered quickly, and multiple pastors sometimes show up on the same day while other members wait days without a visit. Strkr tracks pastoral visits as logged records with the visit date, pastor, visit note, and follow-up flag so the team can see the care distribution.
Giving history disconnected from relationship
The giving platform and the member record never agreed.
Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Givelify, and the ACH-focused platforms (Vanco, EasyTithe) all own the giving transaction. The member record in the church database carries a limited view of giving history, often as a monthly summary that lags the actual activity. The pastoral team cannot see at a glance whether a member who is going through a hard season has reduced giving, which is sometimes a care signal. Strkr integrates with the common giving platforms so the full giving history sits on the member record.
Volunteer coordination burns coordinator hours
Sign-ups, reminders, scheduling run across 4 tools.
Volunteer coordination for a service week typically runs across a sign-up tool (SignUp.com, Doodle), a reminder tool (text broadcast), a scheduling tool (Planning Center Services, Rotunda), and the member database for the actual volunteer skills and preferences. The volunteer coordinator burns 10 to 15 hours a week stitching these together. Strkr runs volunteer coordination as a single flow with the member's skills, availability, and history in one view.
What Strkr for churches does
The pastoral primitives on one surface.
Strkr's church configuration ships the member record, the family group, the giving history, the volunteer workflow, the pastoral care log, and the event registration flow on one surface designed around the pastoral motion. The cards below are the capabilities that ship on every paid tier for church tenants.
Family-level member record
The household as the first-class record.
A family record carries the primary contacts, children, extended household members, and the full relationship graph. Giving aggregates at the family level and at the individual level. Volunteer availability, group participation, and pastoral care history show at both levels. The pastoral team opens the family record and sees the full picture rather than flipping between individual members in the household.
Giving history integration
Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Givelify, Vanco on the record.
Giving history integrates from Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Givelify, Vanco, and EasyTithe via the open REST API with webhooks. The full transaction history appears on the family record and the member record, with the pattern trend and the year-over-year change visible. The pastoral team can see giving trends as a care signal when relevant, with role-based access controls restricting giving visibility to the roles that need it.
Pastoral care log
Visits, calls, prayer requests as structured records.
Pastoral care runs as a workflow with visits, phone calls, prayer requests, and follow-up tasks as structured records on the member or family. The pastoral team log shows the care distribution across the staff and surfaces members who have not received contact in the configured cadence. The hospital-visit question of who last visited and when takes 10 seconds to answer rather than a group-text thread.
Volunteer coordination
Teams, skills, availability on the record.
Volunteer coordination tracks team memberships (worship, kids, hospitality, parking, tech, prayer team), skills, availability windows, and participation history on each volunteer's record. The service-week flow surfaces volunteer needs, matches available volunteers to teams, fires sign-up requests, and tracks the confirm rate. The volunteer coordinator reclaims most of the 10 to 15 hours per week previously spent stitching tools.
Small group management
Groups, group-of-groups, and attendance tracking.
Small groups and group-of-groups structures (life groups organized under coaches organized under campus pastors) map as hierarchical records. Group attendance tracks per meeting, group leaders see their group's participation history, and the central staff sees the group-ministry rollup. The group leader opens a group record and sees the full roster, attendance patterns, and the follow-up queue for members who missed recent meetings.
Event registration
Camps, retreats, classes with payment and waiver flow.
Event registration runs for camps, retreats, classes, baptisms, and member events with the registration form, waiver flow, and payment capture integrated. The event roster carries custom fields per event (dietary restrictions, cabin assignment, emergency contact, medical conditions). The event coordinator opens the event record and sees the full roster with the operational details in one place.
Communication automation
Member-care emails and SMS tied to life events.
Automated communication fires on life events: new-member orientation at 30 days, baptism follow-up at 7 days, hospital-visit follow-up at 48 hours, grief-care touch points at 7, 30, and 90 days. The Strkr AI drafts the message personalized to the family context, the pastoral team reviews, approves, and sends via Strkr Messaging. The automation handles the mechanical cadence while the staff handles the actual pastoral conversation.
Multi-campus rollup
Per-campus pastoral teams with central rollup.
Multi-campus churches configure per-campus pastoral teams, per-campus volunteer coordinators, and per-campus member rolls with a central staff rollup. The lead pastor opens the rollup and sees attendance, giving, member engagement, and pastoral-care distribution per campus side by side. Benchmark variance surfaces so the central staff can direct operations support to the campus that needs it.
Flat per-seat pricing
The church board reads one invoice line.
Strkr pricing is per seat with the full church configuration on every paid tier: member record, family group, giving integration, pastoral care log, volunteer coordination, small group management, event registration, communication automation, multi-campus rollup. No per-member meter. No giving-SKU gate. For a church with 8 staff seats, the per-seat line is predictable 12 months out and defensible to the finance committee.
What church leaders compare on
The evaluation checklist that actually decides church software.
Church-tech comparison articles tend to rank by feature count or by denomination fit. The criteria that actually decide the evaluation sit elsewhere: the pastoral workflow depth, the volunteer coordination time saving, the multi-campus rollup, the giving integration posture, and the total cost over three years. The six criteria below are what church leaders actually care about.
Pastoral workflow depth
Does the system support the pastoral care motion.
Strkr: pastoral care log with visits, calls, prayer requests, and follow-up flags on the family record. Planning Center: focused on services and groups, pastoral care via People notes. Church Community Builder: pastoral care via Involvement module with workflows. Breeze: notes and tasks on the person. For churches running an active pastoral care motion with multiple staff coordinating visits, the workflow depth matters most.
Volunteer coordination
Can the coordinator run the service week without 4 tools.
Strkr: team membership, skills, availability, scheduling, reminders, and participation history in one flow. Planning Center Services: strong on scheduling, limited on skills and availability modeling. Rotunda: volunteer-focused tool, less integrated with the member database. For churches with 100 plus active volunteers, the coordinator time saving from one flow versus four tools is the first operational win.
Multi-campus rollup
Can the central staff see per-campus metrics side by side.
Strkr: per-campus dashboards with central rollup, benchmark variance surfaced. Planning Center: multi-campus via campus field, reporting via standard reports. Church Community Builder: multi-campus configuration, deeper rollup capability. For growing churches past the first campus plant, the rollup view is the operational tool that lets the lead pastor direct the right conversation at the right campus.
Giving integration
Which giving platforms sync natively.
Strkr: Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Givelify, Vanco, EasyTithe via open REST API with webhooks. Planning Center Giving: native, same ecosystem. Church Community Builder: Pushpay-native since the acquisition, other platforms via integration. Breeze: Pushpay and Tithe.ly via integration. For churches that want to stay on their current giving platform rather than switch, the integration depth is the question to ask.
Learning curve for staff
How long before a volunteer coordinator can run it.
Strkr: admin UI with church-workflow defaults, most staff productive in a day. Planning Center: strong UX, approachable. Church Community Builder: deeper surface area with a steeper learning curve, often requiring formal training. Breeze: approachable UX, limited depth. For churches with high staff turnover or volunteer-run administration, the learning curve matters as much as the feature set.
Three-year TCO
What this costs by year three.
Strkr: flat per seat with everything included; three-year cost for a 10-seat church typically under 15K. Planning Center: per-module pricing, scales with modules used; mid-sized church often lands 8K to 20K annually. Church Community Builder: tiered pricing by member count, mid-sized church often lands 12K to 25K annually. Breeze: per-tier flat pricing with a lower ceiling, best for small churches. The three-year math depends on the module mix and the member count, which is why most church evaluations run the comparison on the current state.
What Strkr for churches will not do
The limits.
Any vendor that will not tell you where their product falls short is selling you the demo and leaving the deployment problem for your team to discover. The list below is what Strkr for churches does not do today, with the context on why.
Not a service planning tool
Planning Center Services is better at service orders.
Strkr does not run service orders, song planning, or the production-week workflow for the worship team. Planning Center Services is the specialty tool for this and does it well. For churches running Strkr for the member and pastoral workflow, Planning Center Services typically stays on the stack via the open REST API with webhooks for the service-planning side.
Not a giving platform
Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Givelify, Vanco run the actual transaction.
Strkr does not process giving transactions. Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Givelify, Vanco, EasyTithe, and the dozen other giving platforms handle the actual charge, the ACH processing, and the tax receipt generation. Strkr integrates with each to pull the giving history onto the member record. For churches evaluating a new giving platform, the choice stays with the giving-platform market rather than consolidating onto Strkr.
Not a check-in system
Children's check-in stays with Planning Center or ChurchMetrics.
Children's and kids-ministry check-in with the security tag printing, pickup matching, and allergy tracking remains with Planning Center Check-ins or similar specialty systems. Strkr reads check-in data via API so the family record shows attendance patterns, but we do not run the Sunday morning check-in flow itself. For the Sunday morning operational workflow, the specialty tool is the better fit.
Not a sermon-content management system
Message series, archives, and publishing stay elsewhere.
Strkr does not manage sermon content, series archives, podcast publishing, or video-on-demand libraries. Planning Center Publishing, Subsplash, Pulpit AI, and similar content platforms are the specialty fit. Strkr can reference sermon series as a field on event records (for sermon-tied events like series kickoffs or discussion groups), but the content library remains with the content platform.
Not a bookkeeping tool
QuickBooks, ChurchTrac, Aplos run the GL.
Strkr does not run the general ledger, the accounts payable, or the church bookkeeping. For churches, QuickBooks for Nonprofits, ChurchTrac, and Aplos remain the specialty tools. Strkr can push giving summary data to the bookkeeping system via API, but the actual accounting workflow stays with the specialty tool.
Not a replacement for in-person ministry
The tool supports; the pastors still do the work.
Strkr automates the mechanical cadence (reminder texts, follow-up emails, visit scheduling, volunteer notifications) and surfaces the pastoral workflow in one view. The actual pastoral care, the hospital visits, the grief support, the counseling conversations remain the work of the pastoral team. The tool's job is to make sure nobody falls through the cracks and the staff is coordinated, not to replace the ministry itself.
Head-to-head
Strkr vs Planning Center for the member and pastoral workflow specifically.
Planning Center is the dominant church-tech suite and the comparison most church leaders run against anything new. Church Community Builder and Breeze ChMS are the common comparisons for the membership-focused evaluation. Here is the head-to-head against Planning Center for the member and pastoral side of the stack specifically.
Feature
Strkr
Planning Center (People + Groups + Giving)
Primary purpose
Member and pastoral CRM with one unified record
Suite of specialty modules with shared identity
Family-level record
First-class family record with full household graph
Household grouping on People, limited aggregation
Pastoral care log
Visits, calls, prayer requests, follow-ups as records
Notes and tags on People
Volunteer coordination
Teams, skills, availability, scheduling in one flow
Services module for scheduling, People for roster
Giving on record
Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Givelify, Vanco via API
Giving module, native integration
Small group management
Groups, group-of-groups, attendance in one view
Groups module, mature
Event registration
Camps, retreats, classes with waiver and payment
Registrations module, strong
Multi-campus rollup
Per-campus dashboards with central rollup
Multi-campus via campus field with standard reports
Communication automation
Life-event triggered with AI-drafted messages
Via Workflows and third-party integrations
Pricing
Flat per seat with everything included
Per-module pricing, scales with modules used
How teams use Strkr
How churches run Strkr today.
The common thread across church customers that choose Strkr: they wanted the pastoral workflow, the volunteer coordination, and the giving history on one surface so the pastoral team could stop stitching tools and start coordinating ministry. The playbooks below are motions live on church customer accounts right now.
800-member single-campus church
Pastoral care distribution surfaced a 40-member gap.
An 800-member single-campus church implemented the pastoral care log with the 90-day cadence target per family. After 60 days of logging, the report surfaced 40 families who had not received any pastoral contact in the preceding 180 days. The pastoral team ran a targeted outreach week, closed the gap, and now runs a weekly review of the care-cadence report. The senior pastor cited the visibility of the care distribution as the capability that changed the pastoral team's coordination from a group-text thread to an actual workflow.
2,400-member multi-campus church
Volunteer coordination hours dropped from 14 to 4 per week.
A 2,400-member multi-campus church was running volunteer coordination across SignUp.com, Planning Center Services, Rotunda, and a weekly Google Sheet. The volunteer coordinator was burning roughly 14 hours a week stitching the tools. Strkr's one-flow volunteer coordination dropped the coordinator time to roughly 4 hours a week, and the service-week confirm rate improved from 78 to 92 percent because the reminder cadence was consistent across all teams. The 10 reclaimed hours a week funded the coordinator's expansion into student-ministry volunteer coordination without hiring.
450-member church plant
New-member orientation flow lifted retention from 44 to 68 percent.
A 450-member church plant was watching roughly 56 percent of first-time guests never return. The new-member orientation flow fired on first-visit record creation with the 7, 30, and 90-day touch points drafted by Strkr AI and sent via Strkr Messaging after pastoral review. The 90-day retention rate (defined as attending at least 3 services in the first 90 days) improved from 44 percent to 68 percent over two quarters. The lead pastor attributed the lift to the consistency of the follow-up cadence that no longer depended on the staff remembering.
1,200-member urban church
Giving-trend care signal caught two families going through hard seasons.
A 1,200-member urban church running giving integration with Pushpay set up a care signal to flag families whose giving had dropped 50 percent year-over-year with no communication from the family. In the first six months, the signal flagged 11 families. Nine were explained by rational changes (job transitions, moves, discontinued memberships). Two revealed hard seasons the pastoral team had not known about. In both cases the pastoral team was able to engage with care support. The signal was configured with role-based access controls so only the senior pastor and the pastoral care director saw it.
3,500-member church with 4 campuses
Multi-campus rollup revealed a 23-point engagement variance.
A 3,500-member multi-campus church with 4 campuses ran per-campus dashboards for 90 days before the rollup revealed a 23-point variance in small-group participation rate between the highest and lowest campus. The central staff ran a campus-specific operations review at the lagging campus, identified a gap in small-group leader training, and ran a focused training cycle. Within 180 days the lagging campus closed 15 points of the variance, which represented roughly 180 additional members in active small groups.
A church CRM that lets the pastoral team coordinate ministry instead of stitching tools.
Start a 14-day trial with the church configuration enabled. Family record, giving history integration, pastoral care log, volunteer coordination, small group management, event registration, communication automation, multi-campus rollup. Integrates with Planning Center Services, Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Givelify, Vanco for the specialty surfaces.
Does Strkr replace Planning Center or Church Community Builder?
It depends on which modules you are using. For the member record, family grouping, pastoral care, volunteer coordination, small groups, event registration, and communication automation, Strkr can replace Planning Center People plus Groups plus Workflows or the equivalent Church Community Builder modules. For service planning and song management, Planning Center Services remains the specialty fit and Strkr integrates via the open REST API with webhooks. For the actual giving transaction processing, Pushpay or Tithe.ly or Givelify remain the specialty platforms and Strkr pulls the giving history onto the member record. The common pattern for churches migrating to Strkr is: consolidate the member-and-pastoral workflow onto Strkr, keep Planning Center Services for the service-planning side, keep the current giving platform.
How does the pastoral care log actually work during a hospital season?
When a member goes into the hospital, the pastoral team creates a care record on the family with the situation note. The pastoral care log on the record carries each visit, phone call, and follow-up as a logged entry with the pastor, date, and note. The visit-cadence target configures per care-situation type (hospital, grief, new-baby, counseling, home-bound) so the pastoral team knows when the next contact should happen. The weekly pastoral team meeting opens the open-care-records view and sees the full picture: who is in a care situation, who last visited, who is overdue for a follow-up. The hospital-visit question of who last visited and when takes 10 seconds to answer rather than a group-text thread. For churches with multiple pastors coordinating care, this single capability tends to be the one most pastoral leaders cite as the reason the workflow finally works.
What giving platforms does Strkr integrate with?
Native integration includes Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Givelify, Vanco, and EasyTithe via the open REST API with webhooks. The integration pulls the full giving history including recurring donations, one-time gifts, pledge commitments, and tax-receipt data onto the family record and the member record. Role-based access controls restrict giving visibility to the roles that need it (typically senior pastor, pastoral care director, and the finance team). For churches on giving platforms not yet in the native list, the open REST API with webhooks lets a developer wire the integration in a sprint. For churches changing giving platforms, the migration path preserves the historical giving data on the member record so the long-arc view of giving history survives the switch.
How does the multi-campus configuration work?
Multi-campus churches configure each campus as a record scope with its own pastoral team, volunteer coordinator, member roster, and campus-specific pipelines. The campus field attaches to every member record, event record, volunteer team, and small group so the per-campus views filter correctly. The central staff role sees the full rollup with per-campus metrics (attendance, giving, pastoral care distribution, volunteer confirm rate, small group participation) side by side. Benchmark variance highlights the campus that is performing above or below the group average so the central staff can direct operations support where it is needed. For churches planting campuses on a multi-year cadence, the new-campus configuration ships live in roughly a day and the pastoral team at the new campus starts logging care records from day one.
What does Strkr cost for a mid-sized church?
Strkr pricing is per seat with the full church configuration on every paid tier. A typical 800-to-1,500-member church with 6 to 10 staff seats lands on the standard team-size per-seat line. For multi-campus churches with 20 to 40 total staff seats, the pricing scales with the staff seat count, not with the member base or the giving volume. There is no per-member meter, no giving-SKU gate, no multi-campus upcharge. The three-year TCO for a 10-seat church usually lands under 15K, which is typically meaningfully lower than the three-year math on Planning Center with the comparable module mix or Church Community Builder at the equivalent member count. For specific pricing, the discovery call confirms the seat count and the current tooling to be replaced.
Is Strkr GDPR and CCPA compliant for international congregations and California members?
Yes. Strkr is GDPR + CCPA compliant with the data-handling practices and the deletion-path audit evidence that regulatory requests require. For international congregations with members in the EU or UK, GDPR compliance including the data-processing agreement, the lawful basis documentation, and the member rights fulfillment runs through the Strkr admin console. For churches in California with CCPA-relevant members, the CCPA data-request fulfillment path runs through the same console. Strkr is SOC 2 Type II in progress through 2026-Q4, HIPAA compliant with BAA available for churches operating counseling services that handle protected health information. The compliance posture is a operational asset for churches operating across state and international lines.
No sales call, no migration consultant, no four-month implementation. Enter your card, get 14 days of the full Pro tier, cancel any time before day 14 with zero charge. Spin up a workspace, import your CSV, and have something useful before lunch.
We use cookies.
Essential cookies keep the site working. If you accept, we also enable Google Analytics
so we can see which pages help and which don't. Reject to opt out entirely. Details in our
Privacy Policy.
