Planning Center runs your church's operations — people, services, check-ins, giving. AskMyChurch answers congregants' questions on your website. No overlap, no integration needed — churches keep both.
Churches sometimes ask us "how do you compare to Planning Center?" and the honest answer is: we mostly don't. Planning Center is the operating system a church staff runs on. AskMyChurch is the assistant a church's website answers with. There is no meaningful overlap, so instead of a fight, this page is a map of where each one sits — and why the combination is common sense.
As of this writing, planningcenter.com lists ten products a church can mix and match: People, Groups, Calendar, Registrations, Check-ins, Services, Music Stand, Church Center, Publishing, and Giving. Pricing is per product, most with a free tier — for example, Services free for five team members, Check-ins free for ten daily check-ins, Giving free for ten donations a month — so a small church can start at $0 and pay only where its usage grows. US card processing is listed at 2.15% + $0.30, ACH at 0% + $0.30. It is mature and priced transparently.
All of it is aimed at running the church: scheduling volunteers and worship teams, managing the member database, event registrations, kids check-in, donations. Church Center is its member-facing app and web experience for people already connected to your church.
A stranger on your website at 9pm — the parent googling churches after a move, the college student wondering what you believe, the member who forgot what time the Christmas Eve service starts — is not inside your Planning Center. Their question lands on your public website, and websites don't answer questions; they hold pages. That gap is the whole reason AskMyChurch exists: it answers from your church's own website and sermons, cites its source in the answer, screens every message through a hard-coded crisis gate before any AI runs, answers in English or Spanish automatically, and hands off to a real person when the content runs out or the person asks.
| AskMyChurch | Planning Center | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it faces | Visitors and members on your public website | Staff, volunteers, and connected members |
| Core job | Answers questions from your own site and sermons | Runs operations: people, services, events, check-ins, giving |
| Pricing | $99 / $249 / $500 mo by weekend attendance | Per product, free tiers, scales with usage |
| Congregant AI assistant | Yes — grounded, cited, crisis-gated, bilingual | Not on the published pricing page |
| Giving, check-ins, volunteer scheduling | No | Yes — core products |
| Integration between the two | Not needed — the assistant links to the Planning Center pages your website already links to | — |
(Planning Center facts verified 2026-07-11 from planningcenter.com. Their per-product free-tier details change as products evolve — confirm current numbers on their pricing page.)
A church running Planning Center already has its internal machinery: sign-ups flow into Registrations, kids get checked in, donations process. AskMyChurch sits in front of all of it, on the website, catching the questions that machinery was never built to answer. When someone asks the assistant "how do I sign my kid up for camp?", the useful answer is usually a sentence from your site plus the link to the registration page your team already built — which is exactly what a grounded assistant gives them.
No migration, no data sync, no IT project. Keep Planning Center. Add the front door.
No. Planning Center is church management software — a staff-facing system for people, services, registrations, check-ins, and giving. AskMyChurch is a congregant-facing assistant on your website. They do different jobs and don't compete.
No, and it doesn't need to. AskMyChurch answers from your church's website and sermons. If your site links to your Planning Center signup or giving pages, the assistant can point people to those links like any other content on your site.
As of this writing, the pricing page at planningcenter.com lists its products and plans without mentioning a congregant-facing AI chatbot.
Because Planning Center organizes your church for the people already inside it, while most visitor questions start on your public website — often after hours. AskMyChurch answers those from your own content and routes people to a human when they need one.
Updated 2026-07-11 · AskMyChurch by Vision Genesis · Knoxville, TN
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