Compare · Planning Center
Roost vs Planning Center
Planning Center is genuinely good, especially its Services planning, and if you love assembling best-of-breed products it shines. Roost makes a different bet: one warm home where everything already works together, for one price.
The core difference
A suite of products, or a single home
Planning Center is a family of separate apps you turn on and pay for one by one. They connect, but each is its own world with its own reports and its own bill. Roost is one platform, so a person's giving, groups, serving, attendance, and care all live on the same record from day one.
- Everything included in one plan, not priced product by product
- One source of truth, so there is no syncing between apps to manage
- Workflows, engagement scoring, and reporting that reach across modules
- A warm, role-based experience designed to feel like one place
Credit where it is due
Planning Center Services set the bar for worship planning. Roost brings that capability in-house, sitting right next to the people and teams it depends on.
Side by side
What you will notice moving from Planning Center
Honest trade-offs, not a takedown. Both are strong tools; this is about which shape fits your church.
| With Planning Center | With Roost |
|---|---|
| A separate product for People, Services, Giving, Check-Ins, Groups, and Registrations | One platform where every module already shares the same records |
| A subscription per product that adds up as you add more | One predictable plan with everything included |
| Data kept in sync between apps | One person record, used everywhere, with nothing to sync |
| Reporting that lives inside each product | Reporting across every module, plus plain-language queries |
| Automation centered in the People product | Visual pipelines and automation that span the whole platform |
| No single engagement score or discipleship pathway | Engagement scoring and next-step pathways built in |
| Excellent worship planning in a separate Services app | Worship and service planning in the same home as everyone's data |
| Church Center app for members | A first-class, optionally white-labeled member app |
| No native intelligence layer | Smart follow-ups, at-risk alerts, and drafts written in your voice |
One bill, not many
Add ministries and grow without watching a stack of separate subscriptions climb. One plan covers the whole platform.
Automation everywhere
Follow-up, care, and discipleship pipelines run across people, giving, groups, and events, not just inside one product.
Answers across the whole picture
Ask one plain-language question and get an answer that spans attendance, giving, serving, and groups together.
Bring your data with you
We import from Planning Center with mapping and a preview, and a concierge for larger churches.
Switching is built in
A move that respects your history
You have years of people, giving, and service history in Planning Center. Roost is built to carry it over cleanly, so you start settled, not from scratch.
- Importers for Planning Center, with field mapping and a full preview
- People, households, giving history, groups, and custom fields come across
- A sandbox to practice in, and onboarding help on every plan
- Open API and export you control, so you are never locked in
Comparing CCB too? See the CCB comparison or view all three side by side.
See the difference
One home for your whole church
Start free and feel what it is like to have everything in one place, or book a tour and we will compare it directly with your Planning Center setup.