Most churches don’t have one tool. They have five.
A database, a giving platform, an events or forms tool, a texting service, and a group chat nobody chose. Each one fine. Together, a part-time job for someone on your staff.
It’s the seams between them.
Nobody quits over a subscription. They quit over retyping the same family into a third system, and over a report that’s wrong because two tools disagree about who Jonathan Smith is.
The same person, five times
Added to the database, then the giving tool, then the check-in system, then the email list, then the group text. Change a phone number and you do it five times, or you do it once and four systems are now wrong.
Numbers that don’t agree
Attendance says 310, the directory says 480 members, giving says 190 households. All three are “right”. None of them answer the question your elders actually asked.
One person holds it together
Usually an office administrator who knows which system lies about what. When they leave, the institutional memory leaves with them.
The usual stack vs. Churchory products.
Each Churchory row is a product you can take on its own, on a free Core. We’ve deliberately left competitor names out. What matters is the stack your church actually runs. Bring your actual invoices to the call.
| What you need | The usual stack | Churchory |
|---|---|---|
| Member directory & families | A church database product, plus a spreadsheet the office keeps on the side | Free Core: one directory. Every roster, gift, registration, and chat message in the products you run points at the same person. |
| Small groups | Group lists in the database; sign-ups in a form tool; the actual conversation in a group text | The Groups product: discovery with a map and waitlists, rosters, attendance, meeting notes, weekly guides, and prayer requests. |
| Events & registration | An events tool, or a general-purpose form and sign-up service | The Events product: three-step wizard, RSVPs over email, potluck and role sign-ups, paid registration, per-event organizers. |
| Online giving | A separate giving platform with its own login, invoice, and donor list | Giving: online gifts through your church’s own Stripe account, funds, monthly giving and year-end statements. Givers are people in your directory, not a parallel list. |
| Kids check-in | A separate check-in product, with its own list of children | The Kids product: kiosk check-in, live room dashboard, tokenized family intake, curriculum. |
| Church-wide chat | Group texts, a Facebook group, or nothing | The Chat product: channels per ministry and group, DMs, moderation, and a chat audit view for administrators. |
| Care & meal trains | A meal-train website, or a reply-all email thread | The Care product: care trains with claimable slots, prayer chains, public links non-members can use, and follow-ups. |
| Serving & worship | A worship planning tool, plus a volunteer scheduler | The Sunday product: teams, rotations, availability, swaps, claimable opportunities, song library, service plans. |
| Your own app on the stores | Members download the vendor’s app and find your church inside it, and the branded alternative is usually the premium tier, quoted separately | Churchory Mobile, free with Core. With Churchory One it’s listed under your church’s own name, so members search for you and install you. The same products inside either way. |
| Logins your staff juggle | Four to six | One. |
| Invoices your treasurer reconciles | Four to six | One. |
| Who you call when it breaks | A ticket queue, then a tier-two escalation | The people who wrote the code. |
On a demo we’ll fill in a cost worksheet together (every tool you pay for, plus the hours it takes to run them) and put your own number next to ours.
Three things worth knowing.
You pay for what you use
Core is free forever. Each product is $99 a year (save $201 over paying monthly) or $25 a month, the same at any church size, so you take the one you need and add the next when you’re ready. Want every product? Churchory One is $599 a year, saving $949, or $129 a month, with your own branded app and every future product included.
Chat is a first-class product
Most church apps bolt on messaging and lose to the group text within a week. Ours has channels, DMs, mentions, replies, pins, reactions, media, and moderation, because that’s the bar it has to clear.
You get the founders
A husband-and-wife team who build this themselves. No ticket queue, no account manager. The trade-off is real, and we’re upfront about it on our security page.
How does Churchory compare with other church software?
Fair, sourced comparisons, including where the other tool is the better fit.