A Pushpay alternative for churches that want a lighter connected system
Pushpay combines giving, engagement, apps, church management, reporting, and a large integration ecosystem. Sanctuary is aimed at churches that want a more direct start: free people management with connected scheduling, service planning, giving, check-in, and Shepherd.
Competitor information reviewed from first-party sources on .
How to think about Sanctuary and Pushpay
Pushpay presents itself as an engagement and generosity platform as well as church management software. For a large organization, its mobile-app strategy, integration catalog, reporting, and enterprise experience may be the point—not overhead. Replacing that platform should never be reduced to comparing a handful of feature checkboxes.
Sanctuary is a more natural candidate when a small or mid-sized church primarily needs its staff operating from current people, schedules, plans, gifts, and check-in records. The tradeoff is deliberate: Sanctuary does not claim to replace Pushpay’s full engagement and integration ecosystem.
When Pushpay may be the better choice
- Your church needs a congregation-facing mobile app as a central part of its engagement strategy.
- A broad integration catalog is essential because your church intends to keep several existing systems.
- You are a large or complex organization looking for an established giving and engagement vendor with enterprise experience.
- Your buying process benefits from guided analysis, demos, and a vendor-led rollout rather than self-directed adoption.
When Sanctuary may fit your church better
- You want to begin with free people and household management instead of committing first to a broad engagement suite.
- Your primary problems are staff operations: records, forms, events, volunteer schedules, service plans, giving, and check-in.
- You want the church’s own Stripe account to receive giving charges directly and want actual processing fees recorded.
- You value an incremental product model suitable for a small or mid-sized church with limited implementation time.
Questions to answer with your team
- Is a custom mobile app a ministry requirement, or is it being treated as a default feature during the buying process?
- Which integrations are mission-critical, and could a connected core system remove some of them?
- What level of onboarding, implementation support, reporting, and organizational scale do you need?
- Can each vendor demonstrate your real giving, scheduling, check-in, and statement workflows using representative data?
A safer way to evaluate the move
- Document every integration and identify the system of record on both sides of each connection.
- Confirm how recurring gifts, saved payment methods, donor history, and statements can be transitioned.
- Run real multi-campus, permissions, reporting, and reconciliation scenarios during evaluation.
- Phase the rollout so staff operations and donor experience are not changed on the same weekend.