Start with the concession, because it saves everyone time. Tithe.ly processes online and mobile giving — a donor taps a button, a card gets charged, money moves from their account into yours. SundayBridge does not do any of that. It has no payment processing, no card handling, no way for a giver to type a number into a screen and have a dollar move. If that is the gap your church is trying to close this month, this article will not talk you out of it, and it should not.
But a gift does not stop being a fact the moment it clears. It needs a giver attached to it, a fund, a date, a place in a trend line, and eventually a line on a year-end statement a household can hand their accountant. That second half of the job — the record, not the transaction — is where the comparison actually gets interesting, and where a lot of churches discover the payment processor they already trust was never meant to carry it alone.
Two different jobs wearing similar names
It helps to say out loud what each product is actually for, because “giving software” gets used loosely enough to cover both. Tithe.ly grew up as a payments company: online giving, text-to-give, card processing, kiosks at the connection table. Its center of gravity is the moment money changes hands, and it is good at that moment. Over time it has layered on broader features reaching toward people and events, the way payment-first products often do once the core business is established.
SundayBridge starts from the opposite end. It never sees the card, the bank account, or the transaction fee. What it sees is the fact that a gift happened — recorded, edited if the fund was wrong, deleted if it was a duplicate — and it builds everything else on top of that fact: goals, trends, and a statement a giver can trust at tax time. One is built to move a dollar. The other is built to remember it correctly afterward.
What a giving record actually needs to do
A church of 120 people running six giving funds does not need a payment rail more than once — the money either arrives or it does not. What it needs repeatedly, every week and every January, is a record that answers ordinary questions without a spreadsheet rebuild each time. Did the Hendersons’ gift get logged under the building fund or general giving. Is this month running ahead of or behind the same month last year. Can a giver call in March and get an accurate number for an amended return without someone re-adding a column of figures by hand.
SundayBridge answers those questions because giving is treated as one part of a person’s whole record, not an isolated ledger. A contribution sits on the same profile as that person’s household, their serving history, and their engagement timeline — so a treasurer is not cross-referencing three systems to confirm a name matches a household matches a fund. Trends are charted, not just tabulated, so a decline shows up as a shape on a graph months before it shows up as a shortfall in the checking account. And the statement at year end is generated from the same records already entered all year, ready to print rather than assembled from scratch in the second week of January.
What Tithe.ly does that a record-keeping tool cannot
Say the limitation again, because it deserves repeating rather than softening. There is no online giving here, no mobile app for a donor to tap, no card processing of any kind. A church with no way to take a gift outside the offering plate has a real, urgent problem, and a record-keeping tool does not solve it no matter how clean its statements look. Payment processing means touching banking rails and card-network compliance — a different discipline than keeping a ledger straight, and one SundayBridge deliberately stays out of.
That is not a gap waiting on a future release. It is a line drawn on purpose, the same way a filing cabinet does not also try to be a cash register. Churches weighing the two products side by side sometimes expect a longer feature battle; there mostly is not one, because the two barely compete on the thing either was built to do best.
The part that gets lost in a payments-first suite
Where things get uneven is on the record side of a payments company’s broader product. A directory bolted onto a business built to move money tends to feel like exactly that — an add-on, not the center of the design. A giving record built around the person, rather than the transaction, tends to hold up better over years, because a household’s giving history is one line among many on a profile that also carries their groups, their serving, and a timeline of how they have shown up over time, rather than a row in a payments log with a name attached.
That distinction matters most at year end, when a statement has to reconcile against a person’s full giving history and not just the transactions a processor happened to run. It also matters when a household’s structure changes — a couple that started giving separately now gives jointly, or an adult child moves out and needs their own record. For more on why that person-first structure holds up better than a transaction log, households versus individuals in a church giving record walks through the mechanics.
The honest cost of running both
If your church already uses Tithe.ly and is weighing whether to add a record-keeping layer alongside it, the real cost is not the monthly fee. It is the entry work. Every online gift Tithe.ly processes still has to be typed into the record by hand — there is no import, no automatic sync, no button that moves a processor’s report into a giving history overnight. For a church running fifty gifts a month that is a manageable weekly task. For one running several hundred, it is a real chunk of a volunteer treasurer’s week, and it deserves to be budgeted for honestly before anyone signs up, not discovered three weeks into the arrangement.
The upside of that manual step is durability. A record built around people rather than a specific processor’s transaction feed does not care which payment rail sits underneath it. Churches switch card processors more often than they admit — chasing lower fees, fewer declines, a better mobile app — and when that switch happens, a person-first giving record survives it untouched. Only the plumbing for taking the payment changes; the history of who gave what, and the statement built from it, stays exactly where it was.
A worked example: forty gifts, eighty checks
Take a congregation of 120 people. Forty households give online through a processor already in place; eighty still give by check or cash on Sunday morning. The processor can tell that church, accurately, what the forty online givers gave. It usually cannot put that number on the same page as the other eighty gifts, chart the combined trend across both channels, or generate one statement per household that does not care whether the money arrived by card or by check.
That combined view is the actual job a giving record does. Someone enters the forty online gifts from the processor’s report and the eighty from the offering count, and from that point on, every fund total, every trend line, and every January statement treats all 120 gifts the same way — because to the giver, and to the IRS, a dollar is a dollar regardless of which rail it traveled. For churches still deciding how granular to get about which fund a gift belongs to before that data entry starts, tracking giving in a way that respects the giver is worth reading first.
What neither product does
It is worth naming the limits plainly on both sides, since neither company benefits from a customer discovering a gap live in front of a giver. SundayBridge has no CSV import; a spreadsheet of giving history from a previous system goes in by hand, and the team will help with that for free rather than pretend a button does it instantly. It sends no email or text of any kind — no automated giving reminders, no thank-you receipts. There is one login per church and no staff permission tiers, so anyone with the password sees the full giving history, not a role-limited slice of it. And giving is only one piece of what it tracks; attendance accepts a named roster or headcount and charts its history, while Sunday school remains a read-only view.
None of that is a knock on Tithe.ly, which has its own list of things it deliberately does not try to be. The point of naming both lists is the same reason this whole comparison opened with a concession: knowing exactly where each tool’s line sits, before a Sunday morning finds it for you, is worth more than a features page that pretends there is no line at all.
How to actually decide
Write the problem down in one sentence before comparing anything further. “We have no way to take a gift online” is a payments problem, and Tithe.ly or a comparable processor answers it directly — no giving record on earth fixes a missing donate button. “Our online gifts and our offering- plate gifts live in two different places and January is a nightmare” is a record-keeping problem, and that is the gap a purpose-built giving record is meant to close. A church with both problems at once usually ends up running both tools, each handling the half it was actually built for, and neither pretending to be the other.
If your church is still tracking giving in a shared spreadsheet regardless of how the money arrives, moving your church off spreadsheets is the place to start before either product enters the conversation, so the comparison is between two real tools and not a spreadsheet standing in for one of them.