We’re excited to welcome Planning Center as a Contributing member of the Rails Foundation - the first new member in 2026!

Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Carlsbad, CA (with a fully remote team), Planning Center builds church management software used by more than 90,000 churches around the world. Their platform helps churches organize the practical details of ministry - service planning, volunteer scheduling, donations, event registrations, check-ins, small groups, and more.

On Rails since day one

If it runs at Planning Center, it runs on Rails, and has for nearly two decades. That includes:

• Customer-facing web applications used daily by tens of thousands of churches
• API backends for their mobile apps and public developer API
• Church Center, their congregation-facing web experience
• Internal tools, account management, and billing systems

The platform consists of multiple Rails applications, where each core product (Services, People, Groups, Giving, Registrations, Calendar, Check-Ins, Publishing, and more) runs as its own Rails app. In a world of majestic monoliths and sprawling microservices, Planning Center took another path: macroservices. (Internally, they call it the “Stonehenge architecture.” Nobody quite remembers why it was made that way, but it works, and people keep coming back to see it.)

Bootstrapped and profitable since day one, Planning Center has now grown to a team of 225 people, more than 100 of whom are engineers. The company has no outside investors, no debt, and no plans to sell. In fact, they recently committed to transitioning to a non-profit structure, reinforcing their long-term commitment to serving churches rather than building equity.

Joining the Rails Foundation

Founder Jeff Berg has long been a member of the community, and was even in attendance at the first RailsConf back in 2006.

Rails is 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, Planning Center

Planning Center’s history of building, scaling, and sustaining a profitable, independent company on Rails is yet another testament to what the framework makes possible. We’re excited to have them on board, and we appreciate their support of our shared mission.

Welcome to the Foundation, Planning Center!

Planning Center joins Core members Cookpad, Doximity, Fleetio, GitHub, Intercom, Judge.me, Procore, Shopify, 1Password and 37signals, and Contributing members AppSignal, Cedarcode, Chime, Clio, Fullscript, Gusto, Higher Pixels, makandra, Planet Argon, Renuo, Saeloun, SerpApi, and TableCheck.

Learn more about the Rails Foundation and its mission here. If your company would like to join the list, please reach out to foundation@rubyonrails.org.