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Home › Compare › Protect My Ministry Alternative
Protect My Ministry alternative

The Protect My Ministry alternative built for smaller ministries and Christian schools.

Protect My Ministry is the volume leader in church screening, with deep denominational and insurance-carrier partnerships. But their pricing model — annual membership fee, per-check surcharges, and enterprise contracts — punishes small churches, small schools, and organizations with seasonal volunteer spikes.

$199

Protect My Ministry annual membership

$0

Ministry Facts annual fee

2.3

d
Median turnaround vs. PMM 3-5d

100

%
Published pricing, no sales call
Why churches switch from Protect My Ministry

Same scope, published pricing, no annual fee

PMM’s value is real — but so is the friction. Published pricing and no membership fee remove the two biggest complaints.

No $199 annual fee

Every dollar goes into checks, not membership. On 15 volunteer checks a year, that’s a 30-40% reduction in total cost.

Every price on the site

Board members can price out screening without a sales call. Total cost is transparent before any conversation.

Faster applicant flow

Median 48-hour turnaround vs. PMM’s 3-5 day average. Mobile-first authorization instead of a desktop-optimized form.

Same FCRA baseline

Adverse action tooling, standalone disclosure, and audit trail identical to PMM. The compliance work is not a differentiator.
Answers we give on comparison calls

The five questions we hear most often

Everything a church admin wants to know before recommending the switch to their board.
Yes. Same underlying data sources. Same scope of national + county + sex offender + OFAC on the baseline package. We are PBSA-accredited data infrastructure.
You should — for FCRA record retention. Keep the PMM archive read-only and route all new applicants through Ministry Facts. Simple, compliant, low-risk.
PMM charges for their template. Ours is free to download whether or not you become a customer.
If you run 15+ checks per year, yes. Anything below that, the per-check savings still cover the membership fee, so you break even.

Where Protect My Ministry works well

To be fair to a strong incumbent: Protect My Ministry has been in this market for over 20 years, has built strong denominational partnerships, and is the default recommendation of several major church insurance carriers. If you have 300+ annual checks and value a well-known brand your denomination already recognizes, Protect My Ministry is a legitimate choice.
Where Ministry Facts is a better fit
Smaller ministries (under 100 checks/year)
where the annual membership fee doubles your effective per-check cost
Seasonal spikes

(VBS, camp, mission trips) where per-check pricing works better than a fixed-fee model

Christian schools running both a school AND a church

under one 501(c)(3) — one account, two workflows

Ministries that want published pricing

they can share with their board without a sales call

Side-by-side comparison

PROTECT MY MINISTRY MINISTER FACTS
Annual membership fee $199+ $0
Basic check $14–$22 $22.50
Standard turnaround 2–4 days 2–3 days
Rush processing Extra fee Included
Published pricing Quote only Yes
Dashboard seats Per seat Unlimited
Christian school screening Yes Yes
ChMS integrations Deep Planning Center, Breeze (rolling out)

The honest tradeoff

Protect My Ministry has a wider set of pre-built integrations (ChMS platforms, denominational reporting templates, insurance-carrier discounts) that Ministry Facts is still building out. If your ministry depends on a specific Protect My Ministry integration — like their Planning Center sync or a specific insurance-carrier discount — factor that into your decision.

For most small-to-mid ministries, that integration depth is not the deciding factor. The deciding factor is total annual cost — and that is where the switch to Ministry Facts pays for itself in the first quarter.

The $199 annual membership fee is not the biggest cost — it is the tell. If a vendor requires a membership fee before you can run a single check, ask what other assumptions they have made about your ministry.

How the switch works

Same as MinistrySafe: 30-minute onboarding call, roster import, package mapping, rescreening cadence set. Your Protect My Ministry account stays active until renewal — no forced rush.

Frequently asked questions

Does Ministry Facts integrate with Planning Center or Breeze?

Integrations for Planning Center and Breeze are on our roadmap. In the meantime, roster sync happens via bulk CSV upload from either platform — takes about 90 seconds.

Is Ministry Facts approved by church insurance carriers?

We are actively working with the major carriers (Brotherhood Mutual, GuideOne, Church Mutual) on formal partnership status. Our screening scope already meets or exceeds their standard requirements, so you can use Ministry Facts today and provide our audit-ready documentation to your carrier.

Can I keep my existing Protect My Ministry data?

Yes. Export your candidate history from Protect My Ministry and upload it to Ministry Facts — we keep it in your dashboard alongside new checks for a full audit trail.

Get a switch estimate

Send us your current PMM annual spend and volume. We will send back a side-by-side annual cost analysis.
Request comparison
Switch from PMM

Move off the $199 annual membership.

Tell us your Protect My Ministry usage. We’ll return a written quote that shows your break-even point in the first month.
Written quote within 1 business day — no sales call required.
FCRA-compliant workflow, denominational-partner ready.
Flat, published per-check pricing. No annual membership fee.
(860) 555-0117 —
Mon–Fri, 8am–6pm ET
hello@ministerfacts.com —
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