Choosing tools
Disciplytics vs. Planning Center and Tithe.ly built-in reporting
This comparison is different from the others: Planning Center is not a competitor to replace — it is where your data lives, and Disciplytics is built on top of it. The same is true in spirit for Tithe.ly. A church management system records people, check-ins, groups and gifts, and reports them accurately. What it does not try to do is the analytical layer on top: rolling trends, cohorts, year-over-year comparisons and forecasts.
Two different jobs
Built-in ChMS reporting
Planning Center and Tithe.ly are church management systems: people records, check-ins, groups, giving, events and communication. Their reporting answers “what happened in this date range” with accurate totals and exports.
Disciplytics
Disciplytics keeps your ChMS exactly where it is and adds the layer above it: rolling averages, guest return cohorts, giving year over year, fund health, budget forecasts and a pastoral care list — synced nightly from Planning Center.
Side by side
The middle column describes the general pattern of reporting inside a church management system: accurate records, date-range reports and CSV export. Feature sets change — check Planning Center's or Tithe.ly's own documentation before deciding.
| What you want to know | Built-in ChMS reporting | Disciplytics |
|---|---|---|
| People records, check-ins, groups, giving | This is what a ChMS is built for — the source of truth | Reads the same records; does not replace them |
| Date-range totals and exports | Built in | Not the point — Disciplytics starts where exports end |
| Rolling 4- and 8-week attendance averages by campus | Usually an export plus a spreadsheet | Built-in chart, updated nightly |
| Guest return rate within 30 and 60 days | First-time flag on the day; following guests forward is manual | Tracked as a cohort metric |
| Giving year over year by fund, campus and membership | Date-range totals and exports | Toggleable YoY and trend charts with filters |
| Budget forecasting with uncertainty intervals | Not a reporting feature | Fiscal-year forecasts with conformal prediction intervals |
| Fund concentration, donor lifecycle and fund LTV | Not a reporting feature | Fund health dashboard |
| Individual giving amounts in reports | Visible to users with permission | Never shown — aggregates only, by design |
| Ranked follow-up list of drifting households | Not included | Care list: names and contacts, no dollar amounts |
When you do not need Disciplytics
- •You only need this Sunday's headcount or a giving total for a date range — your ChMS reports already do that.
- •You are not on Planning Center. Disciplytics reads Planning Center data only (Tithe.ly churches: not a fit yet).
- •Your team wants donor-level lists by name. Disciplytics deliberately does not show those.
When Disciplytics earns its keep
Keep your ChMS, add the analytics
Switching church management systems is a large, disruptive project. Disciplytics does not ask you to — it reads what you already record and interprets it.
Recurring leadership reporting
If someone rebuilds the same spreadsheet before every board or elder meeting, that work is the thing worth automating.
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
Do I have to replace Planning Center?
No — and you should not. Planning Center remains your system of record. Disciplytics connects through the official OAuth flow, read-only and revocable, and never writes back.
We use Tithe.ly. Can we use Disciplytics?
Not yet — Disciplytics syncs Planning Center data only. The comparison above still describes the general gap between ChMS reporting and an analytics layer.
Isn't Planning Center reporting enough?
For date-range totals, yes. The gap appears when you want rolling trends, cohorts, year-over-year comparisons, forecasts or a ranked care list — the work churches usually do in spreadsheets.
How fresh is the data?
Syncs run nightly, with a manual sync button and per-source record counts so you can reconcile against Planning Center yourself.