Breeze ChMS is a cloud-based church management software that helps churches of all sizes manage their finances, members, events, and more. In the church world, Breeze is recognized for being more user-friendly than other tools and simple to implement quickly and painlessly. 

It offers a variety of features, including:

• Attendance tracking
• Church accounting
• Donations management
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Bank reconciliation
• Payroll management
• Event management
• Membership management
• Volunteer management
• Pledge management
• Worship planning

Breeze ChMS is a good choice for churches looking for a comprehensive church management software solution that’s both easy to use and affordable. When used properly, this helps your church to save time, maximize efficiency, and communicate better.

Pros and Cons of Breeze

Pros of Breeze ChMS

• Easy to use and affordable
• Comprehensive solution for managing all aspects of a church
• Includes features for managing members, events, finances, and more
• Customizable to fit the specific needs of each church
• Provides excellent customer support
• Customize your instance with your church name and logo

Cons of Breeze ChMS

• Some features may be more complex than others
• Might be expensive for smaller churches

What is ACS Technologies?

ACS Technologies is a collection of online ChMS products used by churches and ministries across the country. As a company, ACS is a collection of congregational services like Realm, MinistryPlatform, Parish Data System (PDS), and ACS OnDemand.

Established in 1978, ACS Technologies is one of the older and more established brands in the ChMS software category. Headquartered in Florence, South Carolina, ACS has over 400 employees spread over several regional offices. 

Pros and Cons of ACS Technologies

Pros of ACS ChMS

• Established company with a long history of serving churches
• Administrative features, like accounting, are a strength of ACS
• Customizable to fit the specific requirements of each church
• Excellent customer support

Cons of ACS ChMS

• Can be more expensive than some other church management software options
• Not as user-friendly as some other options
• Some features may be more complex than others
• Might be unclear which specific solution is right for your situation

Who Should Use ACS Technologies?

ACS Technologies is a good choice for churches that need a comprehensive church management software solution. This primarily includes medium-sized or larger churches that have the budget to afford the product and staff large enough to handle the workload.

ACS also works for church organizations, faith-based companies, denominational offices, ministry associations, and governing bodies like conferences and dioceses. The Parish Data System (PDS) was specifically designed for Catholic parishes.

ACS Technologies vs. Breeze: Key Features Comparison

Attendance Tracking

The attendance tracking features of Breeze and ACS Technologies share common functionalities, allowing for efficient monitoring of congregation attendance during church events and services. Both systems provide user-friendly interfaces that facilitate the easy recording of attendance data. 

Breeze is known for its simplicity and intuitive design, making it accessible to users of varying technical proficiency. Users can import event attendance manually, export attendance reports, filter users by attendance, and more within the database. 

ACS allows church leaders to track attendance history for worship, small groups, and other events. This includes creating class rolls, absentee reports, check-in sheets, and enrollment forms. Attendance can be added manually online or through a barcode scanner.

Church Accounting

Recognized for its user-friendly accounting tools, Breeze is designed for users with varying levels of financial expertise. It includes features like donation tracking, fund management, and basic financial reporting. Breeze supports the ability to create a general ledger, view year-end reconciliation, and integrate seamlessly with tools like Quickbooks.

Accounting is a major part of the ACS software suite, including everything from maintaining the general ledger, accounts payable & receivable, employee payroll, purchase orders, and handling fixed assets or product inventory. 

Donations Management

Both Breeze and ACS Technologies are set up for donation management features, including online donations, donation tracking, and donor-giving statements. This simplifies the process for both church leaders and congregational supporters to see online donation reports.

Breeze is tailored for managing mobile and text-giving and enables donors to optionally cover transaction fees each time they donate. Both systems can manually input offline giving and generate year-end statements. 

ACS handles giving and contributions through their integration with MinistryPlatform. For this reason, the giving management is a weakness for ACS. They offer multiple giving options, campaigns, automated statements, and reporting. But these tools aren’t nearly as user-friendly as those offered by Breeze.

Bank Reconciliation

Bank reconciliation is the process of comparing the bank statement with the cash book to ensure that they agree. This is done to ensure there aren’t discrepancies between the records and all transactions have been recorded correctly. Reconciliations are imperative for ChMS systems like Breeze and Faith Teams.

Breeze doesn’t have dedicated features for bank reconciliations but does offer detailed financial planning and reporting. For ACS, bank reconciliations happen within the general ledger feature, which can also help with managing church budgets and forecasting. 

Member Communication

An advantage of collecting your church members’ contact information in the same hub is the ability to communicate and send mass messages to entire groups. This is possible with both tools, however, it’s a strength of Breeze, while the options in ACS are more limited.

Breeze offers more communication options, especially since they include a mobile app and text communications. These notifications can be customized, scheduled ahead of time, and monitored with in-depth analytics. ACS relies on its built-in integration with the email marketing tool, Constant Contact, for most member communication.

Payroll Management

If you’re looking for administrative support from your ACS, you likely need help with payroll management for your church staff. Payroll is a robust feature with ACS and their church accounting software. They allow you to create pay types, create time sheets, track employee vacation and sick time, automatically post payroll, and electronically file employee paperwork.

Unfortunately, Breeze does not offer payroll management as part of their system. This ChMS is more focused on church members than staff. This is why ACS offers a stronger accounting platform, which is more robust than Breeze’s offerings.

Event Management

Handling and scheduling church events is a common practice using ChMS tools, and both Breeze and ACS accommodate that need. These events can be everything from holidays, to worship services or committee meetings. Both programs allow churches to create individual events and generate publicly sharable interactive calendars for use by the congregation.

Managing volunteers and generating attendance reports also come standard with both tools. Breeze takes event management a step further by also integrating event check-in and worship service planning into the mix. ACS adds the ability to manage a facility schedule for events happening around your church campus.

Membership Management

Membership management helps you to organize people and contact records—this is what all ChMS tools are built around. This includes easily adding or editing people's records, communicating with users, and allowing members to view their profiles. Ultimately, this serves as a database—a single place for your church leadership to manage any information about your people.

Both ACS and Breeze make it easy for churches to group people in family or volunteer groups since those are common contexts. Breeze adds the ability to include a business designation on a person’s record. Otherwise, both tools manage people similarly.

Volunteer Management

Volunteer management is similar to membership management since these are based on people's records. The key is organizing people into various volunteer groups, tracking who signs up when, and allowing them to register as a volunteer for events within the calendar.

In both systems, volunteers can be assigned specific roles and invited to events by a system admin. In Breeze, volunteers can block out dates when they’re unavailable to serve. ACS organizes volunteers through its worship planning feature.

Pledge Management

Increasing online donations to your church requires planning. Knowing how much your congregation might give permits you to set annual goals for your expected income. This usually means asking your congregation to pledge to contribute a specific amount for a year or an upcoming season.

Breeze is set up for churches to create giving campaigns, request pledge amounts from users, and update these amounts as church families make donations. This makes it more manageable to monitor how much has been pledged across your entire community. Individual users can make and monitor their pledges within the ACS stewardship tool.

Worship Planning

Handling the various elements of a weekly Sunday worship service is a valuable tool for any church leader. This involves setting the worship order, worship songs, and personnel needed at services. 

Breeze improves worship planning by creating editable drag-and-drop templates that can be used for different styles of worship. Relevant files can be attached from external storage sources like Dropbox or Google Drive. ACS offers the ability to stream worship or events online, as well as plan the details of these services through your ChMS.

Technical Details and Deployment

Before you can adopt a new ChMS tool, it’s best to understand the technical details and the steps required to launch it within your church environment. Data privacy is a valuable feature because personal data will be stored within this tool, and Breeze and ACS ensure this information is secure. There’s no real way of determining which solution is more secure or more reliable than the other

Training is a crucial step for your team to adapt to this new network. Both Breeze and ACS offer onboarding so your instance is optimized for your church, however, ACS has a steeper learning curve than Breeze. Given its focus on ease of use, Breeze is also easier to implement and offers better data migration tools if you’re switching from another ChMS.

Technical Support

Any ChMS tool is going to have issues or cause confusion regardless of how user-friendly it is. Therefore, customer support is valuable to using the system effectively. To this end, Breeze and ACS have various ways to communicate with their customer team.

Both have created online knowledge bases with FAQ articles and software updates. ACS has several free online resources including walkthrough videos, screenshots, toolkits, and ministry guides. Based on online user review sites, Breeze is viewed as offering better support than ACS. Because of its complexity, ACS requires more training than Breeze to implement.

Users can call both help desks during working hours, and Breeze allows users to schedule a future support call and has an overall faster response time. Both tools also have interactive chat features on their website to address common questions. Technical support teams help with the installation and implementation of the software for your church. 

ACS Technologies vs Breeze: Pricing Comparison

Price is a major decision when choosing which ChMS is right for your church. Both Breeze offers a flat, one-tier monthly price of $72 per month for all of their features. Breeze offers a 14-day free trial for all customers.

This cost includes unlimited people records, customer support, and online donation processing. This can be combined with the Tithe.ly All Access membership for $119 per month.

Pricing for ACS Technologies is more complex because it depends on which tool you select, and the size of your community. Overall, the pricing model begins at $279.95 per month, which is priced higher than comparable solutions.

Final Verdict: Which One is Right For You?

There’s never one right answer for which ChMS is right for your church. That’s a decision you must consider for yourself based on which details are a higher priority. Ultimately, your church needs to find the right value for your money.

ACS Technologies is a more powerful tool that has stronger options for accounting and budget management. ACS is likely a better option for large churches, multi-site congregations, or denominational offices looking for a higher level of customization. Since they’ve been around longer, ACS has a larger user base and is preferred by certain denominations over Breeze.

Breeze is an easier-to-use option that comes with a feature-rich set of tools for a reasonable price. For this reason, it’s the preferred solution for smaller churches and ministries looking for something that’s plug-and-play. Given their focus on development, Breeze is more innovative, is updated more frequently, is more flexible, and offers more integrations than ACS.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are ACS Technologies competitors?

There are many ChMS alternatives a church leader might consider before selecting ACS Technologies. A few similar vendors in this software category include: 

• FaithTeams
• PushPay
• Church Community Builder
• Flockbase

Is Breeze Owned by Tithe.ly?

Breeze is owned by Tithe.ly, a SaaS technology company focused on software development for the church. In addition to Breeze, this includes a church website builder, a church apps platform, an online giving program, and worship planning software. Breeze is integrated with this system, making it easy to add more custom features to help your church more.

Users of Breeze have the option to upgrade to Tithe.ly All Access, which opens these other platforms in addition to the Breeze easy-to-use church management system. This flat monthly price is $119 and is used by thousands of churches around the world.

Which Platform is More Suitable for Larger Congregations?

With its simpler interface, Breeze can easily be used by larger congregations for their administrative ChMS. However, ACS Technologies is slightly better suited to these churches because it’s been in the market longer and has more accounting features than Breeze. It’s also more customizable and more scalable than Breeze and capable of handling multiple church campuses when needed.