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Planning Center is a church management software platform serving over 90,000 churches worldwide, building tools that help churches handle the stuff that makes ministry actually run: service planning, volunteer scheduling, donations, event registrations, check-ins, small groups, and more. They’ve been bootstrapped and profitable since day one, nearly 19 years ago, with a team of 225 people (100+ of whom are engineers). No investors, no debt, no plans to sell. Planning Center recently committed to transitioning to a non-profit, because building software for churches shouldn’t be about building equity.
Planning Center is built almost entirely on Ruby on Rails and has been for nearly two decades. The platform consists of multiple Rails applications, where each product (Services, People, Groups, Giving, Registrations, Calendar, Check-Ins, Publishing, and more) runs as its own Rails app. In the world of majestic monoliths and microservices, they’ve carved out a path of macroservices. (They call it the “Stonehenge architecture.” Nobody really remembers why it was made that way, but it works and people keep coming back to see it.)
Rails powers all of their customer-facing web applications that churches use to manage their operations, the API backends for their mobile apps and public developer API, the Church Center web experience (a congregation-facing product), and their internal tools, account management, and billing systems. If it runs at Planning Center, it runs on Rails.
A 225-person bootstrapped company serving 90,000+ churches, running on Rails for nearly 19 years with no outside investment, no major rewrites, and a team of 100 engineers. Rails isn’t just part of Planning Center’s stack. It’s the whole stack.
In 2026, Planning Center became a Contributing member of the Rails Foundation.
Planning Center has been built on Rails for nearly 19 years. I even attended the first RailsConf. It's not just our framework, it's the foundation our entire company grew up on. Every product, every API, every line of code that serves all churches runs on Rails. Joining the Rails Foundation felt less like a strategic decision and more like finally showing up to the family reunion.
Jeff Berg CEO, CTO, & Founder