Pushpay delivers digital solutions to help churches achieve their missions. Their ChurchStaq, ParishStaq, and Resi Media suites aim to simplify engagement, giving, administration, and video streaming—enabling their 14,500+ customers to increase generosity, drive participation, and build stronger community relationships.
N/A
Realm
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Realm is a church management system from ACS Technologies, designed to create real ministry opportunities by making it easier for your church family to connect with each other throughout the week.
As the fees are incredibly high, I would not recommend smaller organizations with lower budgets. If an organization is looking to separate their electronic giving processing outside of their church management software to allow a consistent user experience regardless of a change from one church management platform to another, Pushpay is a great solution.
Realm is a user-friendly, intuitive web-based database manager, great for church membership and financial information. Transitioning was easy--even our 90-year old attendance volunteer made the switch with ease. The customer service staff at Realm is fantastic. As I mentioned before, my one big complaint is the inability to pull a report with children outputted on the same row in excel as their parents.
Cannot give to more than one fund in a single transaction.
Cannot pull data from the church management software. Therefore, if donors give electronically and via cash or check (which is processed directly in Church management software), the donor cannot run one giving statement through Pushpay, which includes all of their gifts. Pushpay does allow check and cash scanning through their platform which can resolve the statement issue, however, they do not have image scanning software, therefore, a visual copy of checks or cash envelopes cannot be exported or retrieved.
The access to support is excellent; however, the turnover with assigned account managers has been high over the years, which makes it challenging to build a lasting rapport. There have been some technical and functionality issues communicated over the years which have been received by the account manager. At the time, with responses such as "yes, we know it's an issue, and we're working on that, but we don't have a timeframe." These problems are never resolved, nor are progress reports or follow up ever addressed, then the account manager changes and the cycle starts again.
Our transition to Realm was fantastic. We had a rep do two days of training with staff. She also provided us with a step-by-step plan for our rollout to the congregation. In addition to the fabulous customer service team, the "help" section of the Realm website is useful--it includes written answers and also video tutorials/webinars. The search function in the help section is built effectively.
We had previously used a program called eGiving to receive online payments and contributions, and we have previously used PowerChurch as our CRM, and Pushpay (including its Church Community Builder program) far excels both of these other programs. Pushpay is more user-friendly, and its financial program and its CRM program work much more effectively with one another.
From my experience Realm is fatter than SQLite. Realm has less Query and is easy to understand. even new developers also can use it In his/her project. It has a good document so a new developer can read and understand and apply it to the project. SQLite is old and not so easy to understand. we need to add a third-party library to easily use SQLite.
Pushpay served as a fine giving platform and allowed for our church to move digitally well.
However, the inordinate fees and costs of their platform ate away at much too large of our donations. With the other platforms out there, it doesn't make sense for us to lock into contracts with excessively high fees.
