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If you’re a church leader, you know that administrative duties like managing membership records, organizing events, handling communications, and stewarding finances can consume much—if not most—of your team’s time and attention. So, which church management tools can make your daily admin tasks simpler and easier?
Effective church management software (or “ChMS”) is essential to unlocking the full potential of your ministry and maximizing your impact. With the right technology in hand, you can streamline administrative tasks, enhance communications, and foster community involvement. On the other hand, using complicated or disconnected church software can result in broken processes, loss of important information, and frustrated team members.
Let’s explore how the best church management software can help your church harness the power of technology to empower your ministry and serve your congregation in new and inspiring ways.
Church management software (or “ChMS”) is a digital solution that enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of church administration. It serves as a centralized platform, integrating multiple tools and functionalities to streamline essential operations—such as member management, event coordination, volunteer tracking, communication, and financial management.
By leveraging software for church management, church leaders can optimize daily administrative processes, allocate resources more strategically, and free up valuable time and energy to focus on fostering community, nurturing relationships, and advancing the church's overarching mission. Ultimately, it empowers church leaders to manage their organizations with greater agility, effectiveness, and impact.
Now let’s look at the key ChMS features, pros, and cons of the 10 best church management software platforms on the market. In the process, you’ll also discover the transformative benefits of having a church management system and gain valuable insights to lead your church with confidence and efficiency.
Simply put, Subsplash offers the best overall solution for seamless church management. This user-driven ChMS puts your people database at the center of your administrative and engagement tools. Your admin team can seamlessly manage your volunteers and service teams, plan services, send text messages and emails, and coordinate child check-in—all with the same people database that supports groups and messaging, online giving, and more!
Along with church management, Subsplash is widely regarded for creating immersive media and mobile experiences through custom-branded church apps, full HD live streaming, and reliable hosting for your sermon audio and video files. When people connect with your church online, real-time analytics and reports make it much easier to gain a holistic understanding of how they’re engaging with your church every day—not just on Sundays.
Subsplash ChMS features
This comprehensive church management software from Subsplash delivers a surplus of essential features such as child check-in, volunteer management, team management, service planning with SongSelect®, texting and emails, and reports and analytics. And because your people database is the same across the entire Subsplash Platform, when church members update their in-app profiles, use group messaging, register for events, create online giving accounts, and more, their profile information is automatically updated in your ChMS. The integrated database saves your admin team time from manual data entry and ensures your people data is always up to date!
The Subsplash church management system is complemented by engagement tools such as online giving, church websites, custom church apps, and group messaging so you can effortlessly set up multiple funds and recurring giving, quickly create new websites with a drag-and-drop editor, and facilitate real conversations between your church groups and individuals—without using multiple platforms or setting up integrations!
Subsplash truly does it all, empowering your church to thrive in today’s online, mobile-first era with a dedicated support team to ensure your team succeeds.
[.blog-contact-cta]Schedule your free demo today[.blog-contact-cta] to see the power of a centralized platform that brings all these vital elements together, ensuring a seamless and hassle-free experience for your church community.
Planning Center is well known for products that help leaders coordinate and manage their church teams and worship planning schedules. Since then, their cloud-based church management software has grown to include a variety of other tools.
Planning Center ChMS features
PCO offers a wide range of features, including worship planning, volunteer management, check-ins, communication tools, church events, membership management, attendance tracking, and integrations with third-party live streaming and online giving platforms.
Pros: Planning Center has a user-friendly interface, customization options, and many other third-party integrations, making them one of the more versatile church management platforms on the market.
Cons: PCO relies on integrations with third-party services and tools for important tasks such as live streaming and video management. This can make the initial setup complex and require more technical capabilities from their users. They also lack an option for churches to create their own custom mobile app available in popular app stores.
Another church management solution is FaithTeams. Its platform comes with administration tools, a member database, as well as online giving.
FaithTeams ChMS features
Key features for FaithTeams include check-ins, texts and email, service planning, forms, attendance tracking, and volunteer management.
Pros: FaithTeams offers a simple church database software along with a couple of communication features that could be helpful for small to mid-sized churches.
Cons: As is the case with many standalone ChMS platforms, FaithTeams primary offerings help with administrative tasks, but they don’t offer important community nurturing tools like group messaging, a church website builder, live streaming, media libraries, or mobile apps.
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Churchteams is a church membership software platform that offers standard ChMS features to help leaders manage their groups, volunteers, and online giving.
Churchteams ChMS features
The top features offered by Churchteams include member profiles, group management, check-in system, online giving, event registration, email and text messaging.
Pros: Churchteams offers a good number of essential ChMS features along with a texting option and their own online giving solution.
Cons: Although they offer the standard ChMS features, ChurchTeams doesn’t offer important tools for connecting members with their content, such as sermon videos, live streaming, website builder, or custom church apps. Also, their giving solution lacks an option for non-charitable payments, meaning they can’t collect payments for things like t-shirts, concert tickets, or other non-tax-deductible purchases.
Shelby Systems is one of the church management software options offered by their parent company Ministry Brands Holdings, LLC.
Shelby Systems ChMS features
The top church software features offered by Shelby Systems are membership management, contribution tracking, volunteer management, check-ins, church calendars, texting and emails, and volunteer management.
Pros: Similar to many other ChMS offerings, Shelby System includes fundamental tools for managing a church’s teams and congregations.
Cons: Shelby Systems as a standalone ChMS does not offer many important tools such as worship planning, online giving, websites, or church apps. Those features are only available by using other Ministry Brands subsidiary software. This can create extra work and be more complex than using a unified platform like Subsplash.
Elvanto offers a cloud-based church management system to help churches manage their groups, event calendars, volunteers, and service planning.
Elvanto ChMS features
Elvanto’s main offerings include church database software, form builder, event registration, check-ins, volunteer scheduling, worship planning, online giving, and SMS or email communications.
Pros: Elvanto offers a helpful church management system with versatile features and a user-friendly interface to manage their members, staff, volunteers, and services.
Cons: Like most other software for church management, Elvanto requires integrating with other platforms for online giving, community building tools such as group messaging, and engagement tools like live streaming, church apps, and websites.
Churchtrac offers a church membership software that includes a ChMS and basic non-profit accounting features.
Churchtrac ChMS features
Primary features offered by Churchtrac are membership management, directories, emails, texting, online giving, check-ins, event management, accounting, service planning, and a web application.
Pros: Churchtrac offers a church accounting feature that helps churches take care of their fund accounting. They also offer many popular ChMS features on their platform.
Cons: Churchtrac’s accounting feature lacks payroll options, and their ChMS does not include community-focused tools like live streaming, group messaging, custom church apps in the app stores, or curated media libraries.
Similar to Churchtrac, Flockbase is a church management system with an emphasis on church accounting features to help with payroll, budgets, and check printing.
Flockbase ChMS features
Beyond their accounting features, Flockbase offers ChMS features like membership management, online giving, check-ins, attendance tracking, email and texting.
Pros: Flockbase differentiates itself from other ChMS platforms with their integrated accounting and payroll features.
Cons: Compared to other software for church management, Flockbase does not offer important features like church calendars, event management, service planning, and volunteer management. It also misses on more advanced engagement tools like websites, church apps, live streaming, and group messaging.
Breeze offers church management software with many popular ChMS features and online giving.
Breeze ChMS features
Breeze’s features include event management, volunteer scheduling, check-ins, emails, texting, group management, and online giving.
Pros: Breeze supplies churches with a user-friendly church management interface for managing people, groups, online giving, and church events.
Cons: Breeze’s ChMS features are helpful for church staff managing data, but their offerings for creating engagement with their community are limited. For example, they don’t offer built-in church websites, mobile apps, live streaming, or group messaging.
ChMeetings is a church management system that helps churches manage their people, events, online giving, and communications.
ChMeetings ChMS features
The main features available with ChMeetings are event management, check-ins, member directories, online giving, texting, email, group management, and custom forms.
Pros: ChMeetings offerings are pretty simple and straightforward. They also recognize the need for churches to build community in that they offer a basic church app option.
Cons: ChMeetings mobile app is very basic and lacks more advanced features offered by competitors like Subsplash. Their platform also lacks end-user focused features such as group messaging, live streaming, and church websites.
There’s an old expression that “the right tools make all the difference.” Providing your church’s administrative team with the best tools for the job is critical, and we hope that the above comparison of church management software has been helpful in showing which tools are available to help you and your team do more, become more effective, and succeed in reaching your goals.
Subsplash stands out from other church management systems for its comprehensive range of ChMS features designed to cater to a wide range of churches, from new plants to mega-churches and multi-site organizations. By harnessing the power of Subsplash, tech-savvy churches can effortlessly connect with their congregation right on their phones and smart devices, engage them with an immersive media experience, and build community with group messaging and other powerful tools.
[.blog-contact-cta]Schedule your free demo today[.blog-contact-cta] and discover how your church can better know, connect, and grow your church community!
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