Tithe.ly is a giving platform first. It takes the card swipe, the ACH pull, the text-to-give message, and turns it into a deposit in your church's bank account — then it reports on what it processed. That is a real, useful, and honestly hard piece of software to build well, and a lot of churches rely on it every week.
SundayBridge does not do that job at all. It has no online giving page, no card processor, no text-to-give number. What it does is record the gift after the money has already arrived — the check from the offering plate, the transfer that showed up in the bank, the cash count from Sunday. If you are trying to decide between the two, the honest answer is that you are probably not choosing between them. You are deciding whether you need a payment processor, a record-keeper, or both.
What Tithe.ly is actually built to do
Tithe.ly's core strength is moving money: a giving app, a giving page you can embed on your church website, text-to-give, kiosks, recurring gifts, and the compliance work that comes with all of it — PCI standards, fraud checks, dispute handling. When a church picks Tithe.ly, they are usually picking it because a donor wants to give from their phone on a Tuesday, not because they need a better ledger.
None of that is something a small church wants to build itself, and none of it is something SundayBridge tries to do. If your church's biggest giving problem is that people cannot give when they are not physically in the building, a record-keeping tool will not solve that. You need a processor, and Tithe.ly is one of the well-known ones.
What SundayBridge is actually built to do
SundayBridge records, edits, and deletes contributions once they exist. It tracks giving goals against what actually came in. It shows trends over time so a treasurer can see whether giving is holding steady, dipping in summer, or climbing before year-end. And at the end of the year it generates a giving statement, ready to print, for every household that gave — the document donors actually ask for in January.
All of that assumes the money already moved. SundayBridge is the record of what happened, tied to the same person profile that also shows attendance, serving, groups, and pastoral care. A treasurer opens one household and sees the whole picture, not just the transactions. That is a different kind of usefulness than a payment page — narrower, and for some churches, exactly the piece that was missing.
The overlap is smaller than it looks
On paper, both products have a word that starts with “giving” in their feature list, so it is easy to assume they compete head to head. They do not, really. Tithe.ly's giving reports describe what its own processor collected. SundayBridge's giving reports describe whatever you tell it happened, regardless of how the money arrived. One is a receipt system tied to a payment rail; the other is a ledger that does not care which rail the money came through.
That difference matters most at the edges: cash in the plate, a check mailed to the office, a stock gift, a one-time transfer a donor made directly with the bank. Tithe.ly's numbers are naturally strongest for gifts that went through Tithe.ly. SundayBridge's record is only as good as what someone enters, but it does not discriminate by payment method — a cash gift and a card gift look the same once they are recorded.
Where a church might run both
Some churches keep a giving-processing platform purely for the online gift — the convenience of card and ACH giving — and use it as the front door for money. Then, separately, every gift from every source (that processor's deposits included) gets entered into a system built to be the single, reliable giving record across the whole congregation. That is a reasonable split: let the processor process, let the record-keeper keep the record.
It does mean someone has to enter the processor's deposits into the record-keeping tool, which is manual work, not a sync. For a church still tracking giving in a spreadsheet, that manual entry is not new work — it is the same habit moved to a system that also produces the year-end statement automatically.
If your giving problem is really a collection problem
Be honest with yourself about which problem you have. If donors are asking why they cannot give from their phone, or your counting team is overwhelmed by a growing stack of checks, the fix is a payment processor — Tithe.ly or one of its competitors. SundayBridge will not make that problem go away, because it was never built to touch the money.
If instead your problem is that giving history lives in three spreadsheets, nobody trusts the year-end statement numbers, or your treasurer spends a weekend every January reconstructing who gave what, that is a record-keeping problem, and it is the one SundayBridge was built for. Plenty of churches have both problems at once and need both kinds of tool.
What switching actually costs
There is no CSV import into SundayBridge, from Tithe.ly or anywhere else. Moving historical giving records means entering them by hand, or asking us to load your spreadsheet for you, which we will do at no charge but which still takes real time on someone's part. If your church has ten years of giving history, that is a decision to make deliberately — maybe you bring over the last two years and let older records stay archived where they are.
The same honesty applies going forward. Someone has to type the numbers in — SundayBridge does not pull deposits from a bank feed or a processor's API. For a small church where one person already reconciles giving by hand each week, that is not a new burden. For a church used to a processor doing the reconciliation automatically, it will feel like a step backward, and it is fair to weigh that against what the year-end statementand household-level view are worth to you.
The plain comparison
Tithe.ly takes the gift and processes the payment. SundayBridge records the gift once it exists, ties it to a household, tracks it against a goal, and turns it into a statement in January. Neither one replaces the other, and a church that needs both jobs done well should not expect one product to quietly do both. Pick the processor for the money, and pick the record-keeper for the record — and if $19 a month for the record-keeping half sounds like a fair trade for not reconstructing giving history every January, that is the piece SundayBridge is built to be.