OnlineGiving is a church giving platform with a basic bundled chat. Ask Church is a deep congregant assistant — grounded, cited, crisis-safe, bilingual. Keep your giving platform and add Ask Church on top.
Short answer: They're not really the same product. OnlineGiving is a church *giving* platform with a basic website chat bundled in. Ask Church is a deep congregant assistant — grounded, cited, crisis-safe, bilingual, and able to answer from your sermons. The honest recommendation: keep whatever giving platform you love and add Ask Church on top. It's the assistant a giving platform doesn't really have.
OnlineGiving (onlinegiving.org) is a giving platform — its core is online donations, with text marketing, a mobile app, forms, a church store, analytics, and a staff-facing AI suite around it. It's a real product with 600+ churches and tiered pricing ($0/$70/$140/$280 a month plus card processing). Most of its AI is built for *staff* — report summaries, data chat, content builders. It does include one congregant-facing feature, "Public AI Chat," that answers visitor questions from the church's content.
The difference is depth and focus. OnlineGiving's congregant chat is one bundled feature on a giving platform. Ask Church is built entirely around answering congregants' questions well and safely.
| Ask Church | OnlineGiving's Public AI Chat | |
|---|---|---|
| Core purpose | Congregant assistant (the whole product) | A bundled feature on a giving platform |
| Trained on your sermons (transcribed) | Yes (Canon) | Not stated |
| Cited source on every answer | Yes | Not stated |
| Says "I don't know," hands off to a person | Yes | Not stated |
| Runtime check re-verifies every answer | Yes | Not stated |
| Crisis-safety gate before any AI runs | Yes — hard-coded | Not stated |
| Answers in English and Spanish | Yes | Not stated |
| Online giving / donations | No — use your existing platform | Yes (this is their core) |
| Pricing | $99 / $249 / $500 mo | $0–$280 mo (giving plans; chat bundled at higher tiers) |
(OnlineGiving facts verified 2026-06-19 from onlinegiving.org. "Not stated" means we did not find the guarantee on their site — their chat is described in a single line with no detail on grounding, citations, crisis handling, or language.)
If OnlineGiving (or Tithe.ly, or Pushpay) runs your giving and you like it — keep it. Giving rails are the hardest thing to switch, and you shouldn't switch them to get a better website assistant. Add Ask Church alongside it. Your members get a real, grounded, crisis-safe assistant; your finance team keeps the giving platform it already trusts.
No. It's the congregant assistant. Keep your existing giving platform and add Ask Church on top.
Because a bundled chat and a purpose-built assistant aren't the same. Ask Church is grounded, cited, crisis-safe, and bilingual by design — the things a one-line bundled chat doesn't promise.
Yes. Ask Church is additive — it runs on your website regardless of your giving platform.
Updated 2026-06-19 · Ask Church by Vision Genesis · Knoxville, TN
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