NearFaith Research · September 2026
State of Church Tech 2026
Which giving platforms, church management systems, website builders and streaming tools US churches show on their websites, read from 10,294 church websites.
- churches crawled
- 12,451
- fetched (88%)
- 10,957
- distinct church websites
- 10,294
- vendor fingerprints
- 197
- sampled detections confirmed by hand
- 634 / 636
Every share is a floor, not a census: we read each church's homepage and its own giving page, and the sample is the NearFaith directory, not a random draw of US churches. How we measured
What stood out
Each figure is a share of church websites, detected on the homepage and the church's own giving page. The small print under each figure gives the count and the group it is counted against.
Giving
31.7%3,265 of 10,294 sites
of church websites show no recognizable online giving platform. 12.2% have no Give or Donate link at all.
26.5%1,438 of 5,431 weekly YouTube posters
of churches that post video every week still show no giving platform. These are active churches with an online audience.
7.6%533 of 7,029 sites with online giving
of churches that take online gifts do it only through general-purpose tools like PayPal, Venmo, Cash App or Square.
35.1%444 of 1,264 Wix sites
of Wix church sites show no giving platform, against 28.2% on WordPress and 11.4% on Subsplash Sites. The website builder predicts whether a church takes gifts online.
30.6%79 of 258 Lutheran sites
of Lutheran church sites show Vanco, against 4.2% of all sites. Planning Center Giving, the most-detected platform overall, appears on 1 of 1,003 Catholic parish sites.
Church management
63.8%1,583 of 2,482 sites with both
of churches where both a giving tool and a church management system were detected run both from one parent company.
26.8%536 of 2,004 Planning Center sites
of churches running Planning Center for people and groups take gifts through a different vendor.
39.8%2,011 of 5,054 non-denominational sites
of non-denominational church sites show church management software, against 11.0% of Catholic parish sites, where parish software rarely surfaces on the public website.
Media and the website
83.5%4,642 of 5,559 active on YouTube
of churches that posted to YouTube in the last 90 days show no dedicated streaming or church-media vendor. For most, YouTube is the broadcast platform.
64.0%691 of 1,080 stale-footer sites
of church websites with a copyright year of 2024 or earlier still livestream or post video. The ministry is active; the website lags.
Growth signals
7.6%779 of 10,294 sites
of churches carry their own Google Ads tag or Meta Pixel. Of those, 66.8% offer a Plan a Visit page, against 39.3% of churches that don't advertise.
4.1×188 of 431 vs 1,057 of 9,863
Churches whose site serves two or more locations link to a jobs page 4.1 times as often as single-location churches (43.6% vs 10.7%).
Who runs what
Share of all 10,294 church websites where each vendor was detected. A site can run more than one vendor in a category, so bars can add up to more than the category total.
Giving platforms by tradition
Share of each tradition's church websites where the giving platform was detected. Traditions with at least 150 sites are shown. Darker cells mean a larger share; every cell carries its number.
| Tradition | Planning Center | Pushpay | Subsplash | PayPal | Tithely | Vanco | Givelify | No giving platform | Church mgmt. detected |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Non-denominational5,054 sites | 24.6% | 12.8% | 10.3% | 6.5% | 5.4% | 1.3% | 1.7% | 28.6% | 39.8% |
| Baptist1,697 sites | 10.9% | 7.5% | 6.8% | 6.4% | 7.8% | 3.2% | 5.4% | 36.5% | 23.2% |
| Catholic1,003 sites | 0.1% | 5.8% | 0.3% | 5.2% | 0.5% | 10.1% | 0.0% | 29.9% | 11.0% |
| Methodist / Wesleyan520 sites | 9.4% | 4.2% | 5.0% | 9.2% | 7.3% | 13.9% | 2.5% | 32.3% | 18.1% |
| Pentecostal / Charismatic454 sites | 14.1% | 9.7% | 11.7% | 7.5% | 7.9% | 2.4% | 3.5% | 30.2% | 26.0% |
| Evangelical (other)398 sites | 21.6% | 6.5% | 19.4% | 6.3% | 6.8% | 2.8% | 0.3% | 30.2% | 31.4% |
| Church of Christ / Christian Church293 sites | 4.8% | 5.5% | 4.8% | 6.8% | 9.2% | 2.7% | 2.1% | 52.6% | 13.3% |
| Presbyterian / Reformed278 sites | 18.4% | 4.3% | 4.3% | 4.7% | 6.1% | 5.0% | 0.0% | 41.4% | 28.1% |
| Lutheran258 sites | 7.0% | 4.3% | 3.1% | 5.0% | 2.7% | 30.6% | 0.0% | 40.7% | 12.4% |
| Other151 sites | 9.3% | 4.0% | 5.3% | 11.9% | 10.6% | 1.3% | 6.6% | 41.1% | 13.3% |
Scroll the table sideways to see every platform.
How we measured
Every share is a floor
We read each church's homepage and its own giving page. Tools that load later by script, or that sit only on inner pages, are missed. A detection counts only at high confidence, and church management is counted only from its own evidence (groups, events, check-in), never from a giving link.
Checked by hand
For every vendor with 5 or more detections we opened real pages and confirmed the church actually uses it. 634 of 636 sampled detections held up. Samples per vendor were small (3 to 13), so treat the long tail with care.
Not a random sample
12,451 churches with a website is about 3.5% of the 356,739 US congregations in the 2020 Religion Census. The directory grew city by city: the top 15 states hold 71% of sites, led by Arizona, Georgia and Texas, and non-denominational churches are 49% of sites. Churches without a website are absent.
Websites, not churches
A multi-campus church or a shared diocesan site counts once. Free hosts such as Wix or Google Sites are split per church. 431 of the 10,294 sites serve two or more locations.
Blocked is not broken
1,250 churches (10%) turned away automated readers with bot protection or robots.txt. We respect that and left them out of every share. Only 75 sites (0.6%) were actually gone or parked.
YouTube activity
Posting cadence comes from channels linked on a church's own site, which lean toward active channels. We use it only to define comparison groups, never as a national posting rate.
The data behind the report
This page shows aggregates only, and no church is named. Teams that sell to churches can subscribe to the full dataset, refreshed every month by NearFaith's automatic recrawl.
Ask about data access- Church-level records: city, state, tradition, website, and every detected vendor by category
- Signals your team can filter on: no online giving, PayPal-only giving, stale website, active livestream, runs ads, plan-a-visit page
- Monthly refresh, so you see stacks change instead of a one-time snapshot
- CSV export or API into your CRM
- Regional reports on request
Crawled September 2026 by NearFaithBot, which follows robots.txt and requests one page at a time per site. Figures from NearFaith's church directory.
Vendor names are trademarks of their owners. No vendor sponsored or reviewed this report.