Choosing tools
Disciplytics vs. Church Metrics: manual tracking vs. automatic analytics
Church Metrics is a genuinely useful free tool from Life.Church: you type in attendance, giving counts, salvations and baptisms, and it charts them. Disciplytics does not ask you to type anything — it reads the records already in Planning Center and turns them into trends, cohorts, forecasts and a pastoral care list. The real question is whether you want to enter data or interpret it.
Two different jobs
Church Metrics
A free tool from Life.Church for tracking attendance, salvations, giving and more. You enter the numbers (by hand or from its app) and it charts them and compiles reports for any period.
Disciplytics
Disciplytics connects read-only to Planning Center, syncs nightly, and builds rolling averages, guest return cohorts, year-over-year giving, fund health and forecasts automatically — no manual entry.
Side by side
The Church Metrics column describes the tool's public positioning as we understand it. Feature sets change — check the Church Metrics site for its current offering before deciding.
| What you want to know | Church Metrics | Disciplytics |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Pay-what-you-want subscription, free trial, no card required |
| How data gets in | Manual entry of weekly numbers | Automatic nightly sync from Planning Center |
| Attendance charts | Charts of the numbers you enter | Rolling 4- and 8-week averages by campus from check-in records |
| Guest return rate within 30 and 60 days | Not a tracked metric | Tracked as a cohort from people and check-in records |
| Giving trends, fund health and forecasts | Giving counts you enter, charted over time | YoY by fund and campus, concentration, donor lifecycle, fiscal-year forecasts |
| Serving, groups and kids check-in trends | Only if you track them as custom categories | Read from Planning Center alongside attendance and giving |
| Ranked list of drifting households for follow-up | Not included | Care list: names and contacts, no dollar amounts |
When you do not need Disciplytics
- •You are not on Planning Center and just want somewhere to log weekly numbers — Church Metrics does that for free.
- •You only need a simple chart of the totals you already track in a spreadsheet.
- •Your team wants donor-level giving lists by name. Disciplytics deliberately does not show those.
When Disciplytics earns its keep
No more Monday data entry
If someone on your team types the same numbers into a tracker every week, automatic sync from Planning Center removes that job entirely.
From totals to trends
A weekly total tells you what happened. Rolling averages, cohorts and forecasts tell you what is changing and what to do next.
Try it against your own data
Every plan includes a free trial with no card required, and there is a demo mode with sample data if you want to look around before connecting Planning Center.
Common questions
Is Church Metrics free?
Yes — Church Metrics is a free tool from Life.Church. Disciplytics is a paid product with pay-what-you-want pricing and a free trial, aimed at churches on Planning Center that want deeper analysis without manual entry.
Do I have to enter data into Disciplytics?
No. Disciplytics syncs your Planning Center attendance, giving, people and serving records nightly. There is nothing to type in each week.
Can I use both?
You could, but most churches on Planning Center find the manual tracking redundant once analytics are automatic.
Does Disciplytics show individual giving amounts?
Never. Giving is reported as aggregates only, and the pastoral care list shows names and contact details with no dollar amounts.