Admittee vs Planning Center: the church calendar, and the events it sells.
Planning Center runs a church — giving, check-ins, groups, worship planning — and its Calendar product books rooms and resources inside that. Admittee is not a church management system and will not replace one. It is what happens when the events on that calendar start selling tickets, taking registrations, and renting the gym to somebody outside the congregation.
Where Planning Center shines
- A full church management system: giving, check-ins, groups, volunteers, worship planning
- Calendar books facilities and resources, approves requests, and flags conflicts
- Church Center — one app and site where the congregation signs up, gives, and joins groups
- Priced per product: rooms for Calendar, team members for Services, attendees for Registrations
- Processing at 2.15% + $0.30 on cards, 0% + $0.30 on ACH
Where Admittee shines
- Ticketed events with a gate: wallet passes, scanning, card readers, reserved seating
- Rentals to outside organizations with agreements, COI, invoicing and deposits
- Athletics: game proposals signed by both schools, and the schedules behind them
- $0 platform fee and no charge per room or per user; a fee only when you collect a payment
- No giving, no check-ins, no worship planning — and no plans for them
Where Planning Center is the better answer
If the building is a church first. Everything Planning Center Calendar does sits next to the rest of the ministry — the group that meets in that room, the volunteers rostered to it, the giving that funds it. Booking a room out of the same system that runs Sunday is worth more than booking it out of ours.
If the money is mostly donations. Planning Center processes at 2.15% + $0.30 on cards and 0% + $0.30 on ACH. Admittee is 5% + $0.75 on an online donation. For a church whose income is giving rather than admissions, that difference is the whole conversation, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
If nothing is ticketed and nothing is rented out. A calendar that only has to stop two internal groups double-booking the fellowship hall is a problem Planning Center already solved, and you are already paying for it.
Where the two stop overlapping
The overlap is the calendar and the rooms. Past that they are answering different questions.
Planning Center prices Calendar by room — one room free, then a subscription that grows with the catalogue. Admittee charges nothing per room, per facility or per user; the fee arrives only when a payment does. A school with thirty bookable spaces and no ticket sales will find Planning Center's model reasonable and ours pointless. Reverse those facts and the answer reverses with them.
Planning Center Registrations is priced by the attendee count of your largest event, and its payments run through Church Center. Admittee's registrations carry waitlists, forms, payment plans and grade gating, and its gate carries wallet passes and a scanner. Those are different products with similar names.
The one neither of us does for the other. Planning Center has no ticketing gate and no athletics contracts. Admittee has no giving statements, no child check-in, and no service planning. A school attached to a church routinely needs both, which is the arrangement we see most often.
Capability by capability
| Job | Admittee | Planning Center |
|---|---|---|
| Internal facility and room calendar | Included | Included |
| Room and resource catalogue with approvals | Included | Included |
| Double-booking conflict detection | Included | Included |
| Event request forms | Included | Included |
| Priced per room | Not offeredno per-room fee | Includedits pricing model |
| Rentals to outside organizations | Includedagreements, COI, invoicing | Partial or add-onbook a room; no rental agreement or COI |
| Ticketed events and a scanned gate | Included | Not offered |
| Reserved seating charts | Included | Not offered |
| Athletics game proposals and contracts | Included | Not offered |
| Concessions and merchandise | Included | Not offered |
| Registrations with payment plans and waitlists | Included | Partial or add-onsignups, priced by attendees |
| Giving, check-ins, groups, worship planning | Not offered | Includedthe rest of the system |
Based on public documentation as of September 2026. Tell us if something is out of date.
How schools land here
Usually a school attached to a church, where Planning Center already runs the ministry side and the school side has outgrown it — the gym is being rented to a club, the play is selling reserved seats, and athletics is signing contracts with other schools.
One that did it. Foundation Academy retired five systems into Admittee, and Planning Center was one of them — it was carrying the church side of a stack that also included TicketLeap, GoFan, Tandem Calendar and Google Calendar. Their CIO's account is about the five not agreeing with each other rather than about any one of them. Read the case study.
Double booking is virtually eliminated. Multiple organizations and all their departments are booking through one point of truth.
Questions
Can we run both?
Yes, and plenty do. The line that works is the one the building already draws: ministry stays in Planning Center, and anything that sells a ticket, takes a registration fee or rents to an outside group moves to Admittee. Publish either calendar as an iCal feed and the other can subscribe, so neither side retypes the other's dates.
Is Admittee cheaper?
Not on processing. Planning Center is 2.15% + $0.30 on cards; an online donation in Admittee is 5% + $0.75. Admittee costs nothing per room, per facility or per user, so the answer depends on whether your building's income arrives as giving or as admissions. If it is giving, Planning Center is cheaper and we would say so.
Does Admittee do giving statements or child check-in?
No, and it is not on the roadmap. Those are church management problems and Planning Center is good at them.
We are a school, not a church. Does Planning Center come up anyway?
Often, when the school shares a campus or a parent organization with a church. That is exactly the arrangement where the calendars need to see each other, and where one of the two is usually being asked to do a job it was not built for.