Organisation & background
MinistryPlatform was created by Think Ministry, Inc., founded in 2006 in Cumming, Georgia. It merged into ACS Technologies in 2021; ACS Technologies was itself acquired by payments company Vanco, a Great Hill Partners portfolio company, in a transaction that closed in late 2025.
Functionality
MinistryPlatform is a highly configurable church management system for large churches, multi-campus organisations and Catholic dioceses. Its five main records, as the vendor calls them, are contacts, households, groups, events and donations, and a parish structure lets one instance serve many parishes. Administrators with SQL skills can add custom tables and fields without affecting upgrades, and filtered pages give each campus its own view. A workflow engine runs multi-step approvals and creates tasks. Giving covers programmes, pledge campaigns and recurring gifts, a Check-In Suite prints labels, and a mobile app, website widgets and a REST API extend it.
Localised features
Natively accommodates a Congregations/Parishes structure serving both congregational/evangelical and Catholic/diocesan polity patterns from the same schema.
Implementation model
You can set it up yourself, or use a third-party partner. This assumes a trained internal SPoC team (User, Money and IT points of contact), or an implementation partner. It’s not suited to a lone volunteer administrator.
Hosting
You can choose: self-hosted, or specialist third-party hosting. MinistryPlatform runs on a SQL Server database that churches typically host either themselves or through a named specialist hosting partner, Higher Ground Technologies, rather than a single vendor-run SaaS offering.
Links
Last full research
August 2026