Tithe.ly Review: Increase Giving & Grow Your Church

Tithe.ly Cost

Tithe.ly Giving and Tithe.ly Events are free to use. Additional costs include:

  • Text giving: $19/month
  • Credit cards: 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction
  • AMEX: 3.5% + 30 cents per transaction
  • ACH/Bank: 1% + 30 cents per transaction

Tithe.ly's Church Management System is $50 per month with a set up fee of $149.

Finally, Tithe.ly's Church App is $59 per month with a set up fee of $149.

Cancellation: You can cancel your Tithe.ly subscription at any time.

To get a free trial of Tithe.ly, visit them here.

Table of Contents

Full Review: Tithe.ly Increase Giving & Grow Your Church

Tithe.ly was founded in 2013 by Barn and Dean Sweetman, and is based in Los Angeles. The company's flagship product, Tithe.ly Giving, is built to help churches increase giving and deepen engagement. In 2018, the company acquired Elvanto, a church management system (ChMS), which it now offers as a separate product under its own brand name. Tithe.ly has 11,000 customers in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Tithe.ly can be used by churches, ministries, pastors, and 501c3 organizations.

Tithe.ly now offers four distinct products: Giving, Events, Church Management System and Church App. As stated above, Giving is Tithe.ly's flagship product. Typically, churches receive 90% of their gifts on Sunday; customers of Tithe.ly leverage improved mobile and recurring giving to reduce that Sunday figure to 66%. The company's Events, Church App, and ChMS are also strong products that are full of important features and easy to use. In particular, the bespoke Church App can be built to include a very rich set of engaging features including a newsfeed, mobile giving, an event calendar, and push notifications.

We recommend Tithe.ly Giving for churches looking to offer flexibility in how they accept donations. It is robust and much cheaper than alternatives like Aware3, PushPay, and SecureGive. The company's other three products are also well-built, and worth a look for churches interested in event management, a mobile application, or a simple, yet powerful ChMS to boost engagement.

Products

Below, we'll discuss some of the key features for each of Tithe.ly's products, and how they benefit your church. Keep in mind that the Giving, Event, Church Management and Mobile App are all sold by Tithe.ly as distinct products. We have also included images to give you a sense of the look and feel of the software tools.

Tithe.ly Giving

Giving is the domain in which Tithe.ly excels relative to alternatives. Their product is free to use with the exception of credit card transaction fees and text-to-give, which is $19 per month. Getting started takes about 15 minutes – you enter your contact information, your church information and your bank account information for depositing funds.

Tithe.ly's PCI-compliant tool allows your members to pay with credit card, debit card, cash, check, and SMS. Individuals can give through your website, a mobile app, kiosks or any other device. The system tracks online and offline giving in one consolidated view. There are also no fees for chargebacks, refunds, PCI security, deposits, or rejections.

To pay using the app, members download the app to their iPhone or Android, create their account, find your church, enter credit or debit card info and pay. The full process takes less than 5 minutes. Members can flip a switch to cover your credit card processing fees or setup automated recurring giving. It is also simple for each person to see a transaction record of all their gifts. Here's a screenshot of the mobile app we downloaded to test:

Tithe.ly Giving App

Tithe.ly Giving has integrations with most of the popular church management systems, which is key for tracking your gifts and streamlining your accounting. Here's the current list of integrations:

  • ROCK RMS
  • Shelby v5
  • Arena
  • Elvanto
  • Church Community Builder (CCB)
  • FaithTeams
  • Breeze
  • FellowshipOne (F1)

Tithe.ly Events

Tithe.ly Events is a separate product offered by the company that is also free to use. This tool makes it easy to set up an event, customize the event's details, and add ticket types and prices. This tool works for all types of classes, camps, workshops and more. The system also has the ability to offer early bird discounts, coupons, and QR code ticketing. The QR codes are significantly more efficient than managing a paper or digital attendee list.

To create an event, you simply click one button in Tithe.ly. From there, you enter the event's name, the corresponding church, an event description, contact details, dates, and location. The next step is ticketing settings: price, number, and when they're available for purchase. Finally, you can customize the information you require from attendees: email, phone number, or any other information you desire. Once you are done, you will be given an event link you can send to your attendees.

Here's a look at the page where you enter ticketing information for an event:

Tithe.ly Ticketing Page

Tithe.ly Church Management System

The Tithe.ly Church Management System (ChMS) is technology developed by Elvanto, which Tithe.ly acquired in 2018. While powerful, the system does not have some of the features included in enterprise-level systems such as accounting & payroll. This ChMS comes with the functionality below – if these are the features you need, we recommend contacting Tithe.ly for a demo.

  • Profiles for each of your members including family connections
  • Public and private notes for individuals
  • Forms to collect data from your members, synced directly with their profiles
  • Dynamic segments of members based upon profile information that you can use for email or SMS campaigns
  • Message builder that dynamically pulls in contact information into messages for each contact
  • Workflows to automatically trigger communications for individuals over time
  • Groups functionality with leaders, meeting details, attendance tracking
  • Record volunteer activity
  • Customizable service plans with audio and document attachments, volunteer management, and attendance tracking
  • Event creation with payments
  • Public and private calendars

Here is a look at the main dashboard in the system:

tithe.ly chms

Additionally, this is the service planning tool in their ChMS:

tithe.ly service planning

Tithe.ly Church App

Tithe.ly offers a bespoke mobile application to churches for a one-time setup fee of $149 and $59 per month. The company offers a robust set of features that can help you to improve engagement with your community in many ways. Once your app is built, you can manage it through a dashboard in Tithe.ly. The dashboard includes tabs for each feature within the application and is refreshingly easy to navigate. Here's an example of how you would add and control your app newsfeed integrations using the dashboard:

Tithe.ly App Newsfeeds

Here are some of the top features offered in the app:

  • Media player for sermons, podcasts and videos
  • Photo tab to share your photos
  • Newsfeed that can integrate with your social media and blog
  • Push notifications for weekly scripture readings, encourage giving, event reminders, and more
  • Bible reader and prayer wall
  • Mobile giving
  • Event calendar and bulletin (note: the app does sync with the Events product)
  • Custom branding

Is Tithe.ly right for you?

Tithe.ly now offers four distinct products: Giving, Events, Church Management System and Church App. We recommend Tithe.ly Giving for churches looking to offer flexibility in how they accept donations. It is robust and much cheaper than alternatives like Aware3, PushPay, and SecureGive. The company's other three products are also well-built, and worth a look for churches interested in event management, a mobile application, or a simple, yet powerful ChMS to boost engagement. In particular their ChMS is a good option for smaller churches that are looking for a single solution that is easy to set up, user-friendly, and relatively inexpensive. To sign up or get a demo of any Tithe.ly product, visit them here.

Bruce Hogan

Bruce Hogan is Co-founder & CEO of SoftwarePundit. He leads the team's research and publishes content about software products and trends. Bruce has experience investing at multi-billion dollar private equity firms, leading teams at venture-backed technology companies, and launching new businesses. You can connect with Bruce on LinkedIn.

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