Religion has played a central part in human history and is still a foundation in many societies. Faith-based organizations are in some countries the largest providers of social services and were pioneers in the humanitarian aid sector. There is in academia a growing interest in faith-based organizations and a perception that they have an advantage over their secular counterparts. This study has identified those established theories and provided a comprehensive overview of the research field. It has been argued that faith-based organizations for one should be more cost-effective than their secular counterparts. The faith of their staff members is a significant part of their motivation. They, therefore, accept lower salaries or volunteer to a higher degree. It has also been argued that projects implemented by faith-based organizations could be more rooted in local communities due to a long history of cooperation and collaboration. The claims have been mostly theoretical or supported by qualitative studies. This study contributed to filling the quantitative research gap by analyzing key differences between projects implemented by faith-based and secular organizations that were financed by the United Nations Country-Based Pooled Funds. The data selection provided a scenario where the institutional pressure from strict processes, monitoring, and evaluation theoretically minimizes differences between implementers and therefore tested the study’s hypotheses in a least-likely scenario. The analysis found that there was no significant difference between how many beneficiaries the projects reached. Faith-based organizations did however implement projects that with 95 % certainty costed between 2.20 to 7.87 % less compared to their secular counterparts. Their projects with 95 % certainty also had a four percent higher direct-to-total project cost ratio. This provides support for the theoretical claims and contributed to building a foundation for future research in this emerging field. The study surprisingly also found a significant and large difference in project cost between national and international implementers. Projects implemented by national organizations with 95 % certainty cost between 27.98 and 31.50 % less than projects implemented by international organizations. They with 95 % certainty also had a six percent higher direct-to-total project cost ratio. It was not in the scope of this paper to determine what these results depended on but they give further fuel to the current localization debate in both academia and public administration.