Planning Center Giving vs Tap.Giving: 5-Year Math (2026)

The Short Answer (Read This First)

Planning Center Giving and Tap.Giving sit at different layers of the giving stack. Planning Center Giving is a giving platform: it hosts your Church Center donation page, runs the card, manages recurring gifts and funds, posts to donor records, and ties giving to the people, groups, and registrations you already have inside Planning Center. Tap.Giving sells NFC tap plates: 4-inch printed discs with a tiny chip that opens a phone to whatever giving page you already have. We are hardware, not a payment processor.

Over five years, a 200-seat church on Planning Center Giving with Tap.Giving plates spends $800 once on hardware on top of whatever Planning Center charges for processing and its subscription tier. The plates add tap to give, tap to donate, and contactless giving in service without adding another monthly bill. The honest question is rarely "which one do I buy?" It is "Planning Center is already my back end, how do I add an in-service NFC giving moment without changing anything?"

Planning Center Giving Pricing in 2026

Planning Center sells products inside a single product family: People, Services, Giving, Groups, Calendar, Check-Ins, Registrations, Publishing, and Music Stand. Giving is one of those modules. Subscription pricing scales with the number of people in your database, starting at zero for the smallest churches and stepping up in tiers as the roster grows. Payment processing is built in, with card gifts at roughly 2.9% + $0.30 and ACH at about 1% capped at $5 per transaction. Treat the figures below as directional and confirm current rates inside your Planning Center billing area.

Source: Planning Center public pricing pages as of 2026. Confirm current rates before purchase. For a step-by-step on encoding plates to a Church Center giving URL, see our Planning Center tap-to-give setup guide.

The pattern to notice on any people-tiered platform is that the subscription climbs with your roster, not with your giving. A 200-seat church with 350 people in the database pays a different monthly fee than the same church with 800 people on file. Adding NFC tap plates does not change any of that. The plates simply open the same Church Center page, and Planning Center charges the same processing rate whether the giver arrived by tap, scan, typed URL, or a button on the Church Center app.

Tap.Giving Pricing in 2026

Our pricing has one shape: a per-plate price, one time, with free shipping. There is no monthly fee, no setup fee, and no transaction fee from us. Quantity drives the rate.

Promo code WELCOME10 takes 10% off the first order. The plates ship with adhesive backing, pre-drilled screw holes, and a QR code printed on the front for any phone that cannot read NFC. Full pricing detail is on our pricing page, and the quick math is on our cost calculator.

5-Year Total Cost: A 200-Seat Church

Here is the dollar math for a 200-seat church running 200 plates and about $150,000 a year in digital giving through Planning Center, with a 75/25 split between card and ACH gifts. Subscription is pulled from the publicly listed mid-tier pricing as a midpoint estimate, and a standard 2.9% + $0.30 card processing rate plus ~1% ACH (capped at $5) is applied. Numbers are rounded and conservative.

The plates add about $800 to a five-year window, or roughly $160 a year, in exchange for moving in-service giving from cash and check to mobile gifts. Churches using NFC tap plates have reported donation lift of 300% or more in service, with 81% of attendees willing to give in service when a tap option is available versus 24% who actually give without one. Tap to give is about 42 times more engaging than printed QR codes. If even a small share of seated givers shifts from cash to a mobile gift through Church Center, $800 of hardware pays for itself well inside year one.

Nothing about adding plates raises Planning Center's bill. The subscription, the processing rate, and the recurring schedules stay the same. The plates just open the same Church Center page faster, and for the 53% of NFC givers who are first-time givers, that friction drop is the whole game. This is the cheapest layer of church giving technology you can add without renegotiating a subscription. For a deeper take on why hardware-led giving beats more subscription tools, see our hidden costs of church giving platforms breakdown.

Feature Comparison

Because Planning Center Giving and Tap.Giving sit at different layers of the stack, this is more "what each one does" than "winner take all." Mark the row that matters most to your church.

For a side-by-side against more giving platforms, see our 2026 guide to the best online giving platforms for churches or our tap-to-give platform comparison. For sibling write-ups in this same shape, see our Anedot vs Tap.Giving breakdown and our Donorbox vs Tap.Giving comparison.

Why Most Churches Run Both Together

The cleanest mental model is to treat Planning Center as the bank teller and ledger and Tap.Giving as the front door. Planning Center handles the boring, regulated work: PCI compliance, recurring schedules, bank deposits, fund accounting, donor records, statements, and ties into the same People database that drives Services and Groups. Tap.Giving handles the in-service moment when a guest in row five wants to give and does not feel like fishing a wallet out of a jacket. NFC tap plates open the Church Center giving page in roughly 8 seconds, no app required and no QR code to fumble with.

The same logic applies whether the back end is Planning Center, Tithely, Pushpay, Subsplash, Donorbox, Givelify, or Anedot. Tap tags for churches in general work the same way: they encode a URL and hand it to a phone. Where church-purpose plates differ from generic NFC tags for churches is the branding, the form factor, the mounting hardware, and the bulk economics for a 200-seat or 500-seat room. For more on that, see our complete guide to church NFC tags and our piece on contactless church collection plates.

A church plant on Planning Center often pairs 100 plates ($450, lower with WELCOME10) with their existing Church Center page, and that is the entire giving stack: Church Center for online and recurring, NFC tap plates for in-service. Larger churches scale the same setup with 200, 400, or 600 plates. The plates are deliberately platform-agnostic so the church can switch processors later without rebuying hardware. For a walk-through of how the giver actually experiences it, our plain-English explainer on how tap to give works covers the eight-second flow end to end. For a denomination-specific angle, see our notes on digital giving for churches in Methodist congregations.

When to Pick Planning Center Anyway

Honest carve-out: situations where Planning Center Giving is the clear choice on the back end.

• You already use Planning Center for People, Services, Groups, Registrations, or Check-Ins and want giving inside the same product family.
• You want Church Center as the single mobile front door for sermons, groups, events, and giving.
• You need recurring giving, donor statements, and fund accounting tied to the same People record that drives your service plans.
• You want a tiered subscription that scales with the roster rather than a fee per donor or per campaign.

Even in those cases, NFC tap plates still make sense the moment the offering window opens on a Sunday. Hardware that costs $800 once and never asks for a renewal is a low-stakes addition to any back end. For a fuller picture of how tap and give plays out across denominations and church sizes, see our NFC giving explained guide and the how it works walkthrough.

FAQ: Planning Center and Tap.Giving Questions