Breeze vs Planning Center vs Passport: An Honest 2026 Comparison

A straightforward guide for church leaders choosing between three very different approaches to church management.

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If you are evaluating church management software in 2026, there is a good chance three names keep coming up: Breeze, Planning Center, and Passport. Each one is built for a different kind of church, solves a different core problem, and prices itself on a different model.

This comparison will not declare a single winner. Instead, it breaks down what each platform actually does well, where each one falls short, and which type of church each one serves best. We will be transparent: Passport is our product. We will be fair: we genuinely admire parts of both Breeze and Planning Center, and we will say so plainly.

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The Quick Overview

Before the details, here is the landscape:

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Breeze: The Simple All-in-One

What Breeze Does Well

Breeze built its reputation on one idea: church management should not be complicated. For churches that have been running on spreadsheets, Google Forms, and the pastor's memory, Breeze is often the first ChMS that actually sticks. (If you already use it, here is how Passport works alongside Breeze.)

People management is clean and intuitive. Member profiles, family linking, tags, and custom fields are all well-organized. A church secretary can learn the system in an afternoon — not an exaggeration.

Giving is integrated without requiring a separate module or subscription. Online giving, recurring gifts, giving statements — it all works out of the box. Transaction fees are competitive at 2.9% + $0.30.

Flat pricing means no surprises. Every feature is included at $72/month regardless of church size, users, or records. For budgeting-conscious churches, that predictability matters.

Volunteer tracking and attendance are functional and straightforward. Not the deepest toolset available, but more than adequate for churches under 500 members who need to know who showed up and who is serving where.

Where Breeze Falls Short

Visitor retention is essentially nonexistent. Breeze can flag first-time visitors at check-in. After that, follow-up is entirely manual. There is no structured newcomer journey, no automated follow-up sequence, no engagement scoring, and no system that ensures a visitor heard from someone before Tuesday.

For a church whose biggest challenge is keeping the people who walk through the door, Breeze tracks them well but does nothing to convert them.

The mobile experience for members is limited. Breeze's own app is admin-focused. A congregant-facing app requires upgrading to the Tithely All-Access bundle at $119/month — a 65% price increase for mobile member engagement.

Reporting is basic. Growth trends, retention rates, and engagement patterns require manual analysis. There is no built-in way to answer "how many visitors from the past 90 days joined a group?" without exporting data and working in a spreadsheet.

The Tithely transition creates uncertainty. Breeze is being absorbed into Tithely's product family. The Breeze blog already redirects to Tithely. For churches evaluating a tool they will use for years, the shifting brand and product roadmap is a legitimate consideration.

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Planning Center: The Enterprise Modular Platform

What Planning Center Does Well

Planning Center is the most feature-rich ChMS on the market. Period. If your question is "can it do X?" the answer is almost always yes — as long as you are willing to add the right module.

Services is best-in-class. For worship directors managing bands, tech teams, and service flows across multiple services and locations, Planning Center Services is the standard other tools measure against. Song libraries, setlists, team scheduling, service planning — it is comprehensive and well-designed.

Church Center is a polished consumer app. Members use it for giving, group discovery, event registration, check-in, and communication. It is well-rated in app stores and provides a modern experience that reflects well on the church.

The People database ties every module together. Unlike platforms that silo data, Planning Center shares a single contact record across Check-Ins, Giving, Groups, Registrations, and Services. Data does not fragment.

Workflow automation in the People module allows multi-step processes triggered by tags, form submissions, or status changes. For churches with a dedicated administrator, these workflows can handle onboarding sequences, follow-up tasks, and communication chains.

Where Planning Center Falls Short

Cost stacks quickly. The free tier covers basic People and limited versions of each module. But a church running Check-Ins, Giving, Services, Groups, and Registrations at real-world volume typically pays $200–$500+/month. For large churches with large budgets, that is reasonable. For a 200-person church with a part-time admin, it is a serious line item. (Here is how Passport works alongside Planning Center instead of replacing it.)

Visitor follow-up requires significant manual setup. Workflows can trigger follow-up tasks when someone is tagged as a first-time visitor. But building those workflows requires administrative expertise, maintaining them requires ongoing attention, and the execution depends on staff consistently completing the tasks. There is no structured newcomer journey out of the box. No milestone tracking. No engagement scoring. Visitor retention is possible through manual configuration — but it is not a product focus. (Learn why a dedicated follow-up system matters)

The learning curve is real. Planning Center is a collection of interconnected products, each with its own settings, permissions, and logic. Reviews consistently mention the complexity as a friction point, particularly for smaller teams without a technical administrator.

For smaller churches, it is often more tool than necessary. A 150-person church that needs people records, attendance, and visitor follow-up does not need ten modules. The breadth that makes Planning Center powerful for large churches can make it overwhelming for small ones.

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Passport: The Visitor Retention Specialist

What Passport Does Well

Passport was built to solve one specific problem: guests decide quickly whether to come back, and almost no software was designed around the week after a first visit. In a 2023 Lifeway Research survey of church switchers, 71% decided to attend regularly within three visits, and 79% said the way the church welcomed visitors shaped that decision. Passport is guest follow-up software built for those first visits.

Structured newcomer journeys are the core product. When a visitor checks in or submits a digital visitor card, Passport creates a follow-up workflow with defined touchpoints — same-day text, 48-hour call, week-two group invitation. Staff are prompted. Milestones are tracked. Nobody falls through the cracks between Sunday morning and Tuesday afternoon.

Engagement scoring identifies who is connecting and who is drifting. Instead of relying on a pastor's gut sense that "the Johnsons haven't been here in a while," Passport surfaces quantified engagement data: visit frequency, group participation, serve involvement, milestone completion.

The three-pillar framework (Connect, Grow, Serve) organizes the member journey into concrete, trackable dimensions. Connect measures group involvement. Grow tracks discipleship participation. Serve monitors ministry engagement. A church can see — at a glance — where their congregation is strong and where people are falling through gaps.

Gift card incentives for newcomer milestones are unique in the ChMS market. A first-time visitor who completes three touchpoints receives a small welcome gift. It sounds simple. The data suggests it meaningfully increases return rates.

Breeze and Planning Center integration means churches already on either system can add Passport Companion without replacing their existing ChMS. Breeze: Import your people, tags, events and attendance history from Breeze. While the connection is set to keep Breeze updated, each new guest Passport captures is added to Breeze, matched to anyone already there so nobody is entered twice. If you take attendance in Breeze, Passport reads it from the Breeze events you match to your services, so it knows when a guest comes back. Planning Center: Passport connects to Planning Center through its API. Import your people, households, groups, events, check-ins and services from Planning Center. If you check people in with Planning Center Check-Ins, Passport reads the check-ins for the events you match to your services, so it knows when a guest comes back. First-time guests checked in there start their follow-up in Passport. Your ChMS handles the back office. Passport handles the front door.

Flat, affordable pricing runs $9.95–$99/mo: GoReach ($9.95) for outreach, Companion ($49) for guest follow-up alongside Breeze or Planning Center, Plus ($69) for the full ChMS, and Pro ($99) for AI attendance and up to 5 campuses. Each tier includes everything below it, with no per-module math.

Where Passport Falls Short

Worship planning is lighter than Planning Center Services. Plus includes service planning, but if your primary pain point is coordinating a large worship team across multiple services, Planning Center Services is the deeper tool.

Giving and the rest of the ChMS need Plus. Companion covers guest follow-up only, so a Companion church keeps giving, check-in and member records in Breeze or Planning Center. Online giving, check-in and service planning come with Plus at $69/month.

Multi-site support tops out at 5 campuses. More than one campus needs Pro, and a church with more than 5 locations will outgrow it.

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Head-to-Head Comparison

Pricing

Visitor Retention

Operations

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Which One Should You Choose?

Choose Breeze if:

• You need one tool that does everything reasonably well without complexity
• Your church is under 500 members and needs people management, giving, and attendance in one flat-rate package
• Simplicity is your highest priority — you want something your volunteer admin can learn in an afternoon
• Visitor retention is important but you are willing to handle follow-up manually
• You are comfortable with the Tithely ecosystem and its direction

Choose Planning Center if:

• You have dedicated staff for worship, admin, and volunteer coordination
• Worship service planning is a primary operational challenge
• Your church is 200+ members and growing, with budget to support $150–$300+/month in software
• You need the deepest feature set available and have the administrative capacity to configure it
• You are willing to build visitor follow-up workflows manually within the People module

Choose Passport if:

• Your most urgent problem is visitor retention — people come once and you never see them again
• You are already on Breeze or Planning Center and want to add a retention layer without replacing your ChMS (that is Companion)
• You are a small to mid-size church (30–500 members) that needs the visitor-to-member pipeline automated
• You want structured newcomer journeys that do not depend on staff memory or manual task management
• Your budget is limited and you need high-impact tools under $50/month
• You value a dedicated member-facing app that visitors can use from day one

The Combination Play

A significant number of churches use more than one tool. The most common pairing we see:

Breeze + Passport. Breeze handles people records, giving, and basic operations. Passport Companion handles visitor retention, newcomer journeys, and engagement tracking. Import your people, tags, events and attendance history from Breeze. While the connection is set to keep Breeze updated, each new guest Passport captures is added to Breeze, matched to anyone already there so nobody is entered twice. If you take attendance in Breeze, Passport reads it from the Breeze events you match to your services, so it knows when a guest comes back.

Planning Center + Passport. Planning Center handles worship planning, check-ins, and giving at scale. Passport Companion handles the visitor-to-member conversion that Planning Center's workflows were not designed for. Passport connects to Planning Center through its API. Import your people, households, groups, events, check-ins and services from Planning Center. If you check people in with Planning Center Check-Ins, Passport reads the check-ins for the events you match to your services, so it knows when a guest comes back. First-time guests checked in there start their follow-up in Passport.

You do not have to choose one tool for everything. Sometimes the best church management setup is two tools that each do their job exceptionally well.

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The Bottom Line

Breeze is the simplest path to organized church management. Planning Center is the most comprehensive. Passport is the only one built around the problem most churches actually struggle with: keeping the people who walk through the door.

The right choice depends on your church's size, staff capacity, budget, and — most importantly — which problem keeps you up at night.

If that problem is visitor retention, we built Passport for exactly that.

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Ready to see which one fits?

Start a free Passport trial — No charges today, setup in under 30 minutes.

Compare in detail: Passport vs Planning Center | Passport vs Breeze | Passport vs ChurchTrac

Explore the full feature set or see transparent pricing.

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Disclosure: This article was written by the Passport team. We have represented Breeze and Planning Center as accurately and fairly as possible using publicly available information as of April 2026. We recommend evaluating any software directly before making a decision.