Church Management Software comparison chart

Churches have to track a lot of people information to better facilitate ministry. And of course, as the church gets larger, there's going to be more data. This implies that sometimes a church would outgrow one ChMS for another over time.

There've been a handful of softwares that have been around for years in the category called "church management software" (ChMS) These track not only addresses and financial donations in some kind of a database (or databases), but some track ministry involvement, correspondence log, and more.

According to this comparison chart compiled by Christian Computing Magazine, there are 27 church management softwares. (implying at least 27 exist.) The chart is very handy in that you can get a side-by-side comparison between various ChMS features. [cache]

Which church management software does your church use, and what works well? Please describe your church context so we can better understand how a specific software works for your church.

(please don't let this comment thread degenerate into a shouting match of one-ups-manship, ok?)

-- DJ CHUANG, Director at Leadership Network

Comments

[Justin]

I've been looking at ChMSes lately for our church, but have yet to find one which fully supports Chinese. Having custom fields and export to PDF seems to be the the tricky parts.

[Trevor]

How's it going. My name is Trevor and I work for Excellerate ChMS. I thought I would let yall have my email address in case anyone had any questions. It's trevor@excellerate.com Also, we have a new child check-in system coming out in the next week and the chart above was compiled before we finalized what is in that system, so if that's something you're interested in, you might want to check out www.excellerate.com so you can read more about it.

[Steve]

I'm trying to access this comparison chart, but get an error: You don't have permission to access /ccmag/ on this server.

Is there an alternate link to this chart?

[djchuang]

The new link to the CMS Chart is http://bit.ly/4agkn [I've updated the blog post to point to this new link]

[Jay]

In regards to the chart and Icon Systems software called IconCMO. We released the payroll module which allows the church to pay their employees and other vendors. This is not noted on the chart because the chart was done right around the time we were releasing this module. So if you are looking for CMS software that does payroll please make a note that IconCMO provides this functionality which also works on a fund accounting basis as per FASB guidelines.