Best Church Management Software in 2025

Church management tools aid churches and religious organizations to automate and streamline routine daily tasks. This type of system offers undeniable benefits, but how do you select the best church management software programs as each one offers different tools? To avoid mistakes, churches need to carefully investigate a shortlist of platforms and do informed comparisons to ensure they pick an apt solution. To help you, we provide the lowdown on what is church management software and the top functionalities and elements to look for in it.

The best church management software providers offer a free trial or demo to enable potential buyers to do a comparison of the features before they invest their money. Utilize this opportunity to understand if each app’s feature set offers what you need. Visit the websites of these popular church software systems to check if they offer a free trial: Servant Keeper, Churchteams, Roll Call, and Breeze. These applications have high rankings in our church management tools reviews, so take a good look at them. 

• Small and family size churches. Though people are familiar with each other in small churches, still church managers need to record contributions, track attendance, and maintain membership data. They can invest in affordable installed or SaaS products to manage daily administrative tasks.
• Medium and large size churches. Churches that have 250 to 2,000 members usually have large budgets that need advanced accounting and reporting programs. These apps efficiently track spending by project, department, and fund, and automate member contributions, fixed asset tracking, payroll, and taxes.
• Megachurches. These churches have more than 2,000 members and may use multiple locations. So, they need a system that offers a single database that enables leaders to track and report from any location to manage events and outreach programs. Plus, the software should offer communication tools to assist volunteers and members to create groups, collaborate, and schedule activities.

• Servant Keeper: A member and volunteer management system suitable for midsize to enterprise-level faith-based organizations and churches. They can use it to reduce administrative overhead and streamline member management.
• Churchteams: A church management software solution aimed at churches overseeing multiple ministries and small groups. It supports membership management, contributions, check-in, mass communications and more.
• Roll Call: A church management platform with on-premise as well as cloud deployment options. It offers a church attendance portal, children’s check-in system, group and class management system, contribution tracking system, and centralized membership database.
• Breeze: A web-based solution catering to the requirements of small and midsize churches across the US. The app is intuitive and easy to use.
• Pushpay. Reliable mobile engagement and digital giving software built for churches of all sizes. The platform empowers church leaders and pastors to engage their members while inspiring them to share their generosity.

Desktop-based software

The main advantage of desktop-based systems is you can store everything securely on your computers. You own the solution and your data. However, you need to take care to perform regular backups so that your church data is safe in case a disaster or emergency crashes your on-premise computers.

Web-based or cloud systems

These solutions can be accessed from anywhere, anytime. Therefore, they are ideal for larger churches that have employees working in diverse locations. Top apps offer handy features such as enabling members to view their personal membership records as well as donation history from their home.

• Membership management. You can securely store and update important member, visitor, and volunteer data such as addresses, phone numbers, and activity involvement. Plus, you can utilize reporting and search features to customize lists and create directories for outreach.
• Check-in and child security. Check-in tools track member and visitor attendance at events such as retreats, camps, and seminars. Plus, they can integrate with touch screen technology to enable self-service check-in. Child check-in functionality helps to keep track of children present in specific church places such as nurseries and classrooms.
• Communications/outreach. These tools can be used to engage members through direct mail, email marketing, events, and activities.
• Volunteer management. Empowers churches to organize volunteers’ contact details, availability, work history and more. Scheduling features and outreach tools can be utilized to contact volunteers for planned events.
• Event and facilities management. Helps to reduce the time spent on managing group events and activities. Scheduling tools prevent double booking of resources such as video equipment, vans, and rooms. Other functionalities include tracking and reporting, payment process support, event listing search, and web-based registration.
• Accounting. Helps to securely track and report revenues and expenses for multiple funds.
• Contributions/donor management. Helps to securely collect and manage major, planned, and individual donations.
• Mobile access. Nowadays, church management software solutions are adding this feature to give teams and members an easy way to communicate. Mobile apps come in handy for volunteers who want to access rosters, directories, and songs while on the go.

What benefits can your church expect by subscribing to a church software solution? Here is the list of major advantages:

• You can maintain a secure contact database that contains details of all members, visitors, and volunteers.
• Reporting capabilities enable you to compile the data needed to make effective stewardship decisions.
• You can improve membership engagement by easily communicating announcements to select groups and individuals as well as the entire congregation.
• Securely track contributions and donations with back-end processing and reporting to generate statements and maintain records for audit purposes.
• Use automated activity and event scheduling tools to empower groups and members.

• Social media. Faith-based organizations and churches are keeping pace with the times and leveraging the popularity of social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter to engage members and volunteers. They are sharing information and content on these sites to get support for their events and activities. Plus, they are linking social media channels with other outreach mediums like email to improve communication with members.  
• Online donations. Surveys report that online donations are increasing at faith-based groups and congregations. To utilize the popularity of the internet, churches need to provide members and volunteers effortless ways to make online and mobile contributions.

Churches may fail to make full use of the software because of the following reasons:

• They may invest in a solution that does not integrate with other accounting, membership, and contributions tools, or is not capable of scaling to meet growth.
• Churches may overlook important regulatory, compliance, or accounting issues.
• Do not possess the software infrastructure and knowhow to support integration of applications from different vendors.
• Fail to provide adequate training to staff members to utilize the full functionality and features of the software.

The market is awash with a plethora of church management software. If you dive blindly, then chances are you’ll end up with a solution that’s not fit for your church. To be on the safe side, you have to put the following factors into serious consideration.

1. Examine your church and makes sure you have all the needs adequately listed. Then decide what your most pressing needs are and those that don’t require immediate attention. This way, it will be easy to pick software with all the features that you need to solve your problems. 
2. How big is your congregation? It is important to take this into account as it impacts the total cost of the software you choose. Remember, church management pricing may vary based on the number of church members or attendance. So, knowing the number of your followers can help you avoid shelling out extra money to manage non-existent members. 
3. What’s your budget ceiling? You now know your needs and the number of followers you need to manage. Next, you should calculate a friendly budget, an amount that you can spend without draining the church coffers. Finally, you need to explore those options that are within the set limits.

Owing to the competition witnessed in the church software arena, you will be spoilt for choice when picking the best for your church. As regards to the pricing, church management software vendors have different pricing schemes. The pricing may vary based on the number of users or features. 

Generally, the pricing may range between $10/month to $110/month. Of course, some vendor’s pricing will be outside this range on both ends of the spectrum. Further, there some free versions available, but their feature set is often limited and lacks advanced/premium tools.