How we review church software

We build church software and we review church software. Covenant OS competes with Planning Center and Breeze. Berean competes with Logos and Accordance. A disclosure line at the bottom of a page does not contain that conflict, so the rules that do are written here, ahead of the reviews, along with the steps every row goes through and the tests a tool can fail.

What we own

Church Posting is a family business run by Will Hamilton and Scott Hamilton. We build products that compete with tools reviewed on this site. Here is the full list.

• Covenant OS, a church management system. In development and not available to buy. It appears on the Run the church page, last in the list.
• Berean, study and sermon preparation. In development and not available to buy. It appears on the Study and preach page, last in the list.
• The poster at social.churchposting.com, a social scheduler in early access. It appears on the Talk to your people page, last in the list.
• Church SEO Experts, search work sold as a service. It is not software and no bucket here covers agencies, so it has no row. If we ever open one, that row carries the plaque and follows every rule on this page.

That list is the conflict of interest on this site, stated in full. It sits at the top of the method rather than in a footer, and it stays there whether or not a product of ours ever ships.

What the "By Church Posting" plaque means

The plaque appears on any row for a product we own equity in, built ourselves, or partner with. Read it as a warning label. The review beside it was written by a competitor with money in the outcome, and you should weigh it accordingly.

The plaque never appears on a tool we merely like, and it never appears on a tool that pays us, because no tool pays us. If a partnership ever begins or ends, the plaque moves the same week and the change goes in the log at the bottom of this page.

Why an owned tool is never ranked first

An owned product is never ranked first in its category. In practice our rows sit last in every list they appear in, after the tools a church can sign up for today. The rule holds when we think our product is better, and it holds hardest then, because you have no way to check that claim and every reason to discount it coming from us.

None of our three products is generally available today, so the rule currently costs us nothing. It is written down now, while it is cheap, so that it is already binding on the day it turns expensive. If an editor believes an owned product is the right answer for a particular church, the case gets made inside the row. The row still does not move.

Where these reviews stand today

Every row published on July 28, 2026 rests on the vendor's own published pricing, documentation, and contract terms, read on the date printed in the row. No row on this site yet rests on a paid account we opened and ran, and none of them claims to. The export test below has not been run against any of these systems.

That is a real limit. A dated price you can check against the vendor's own page is worth more than a paragraph describing an interface nobody opened, so the prices came first. As accounts are opened and tests are run, each row will say which test it passed and on what date, and the log at the bottom of this page will record it.

The method, step by step

This is the order a category page gets built in. Steps one, two, three, and seven are complete for every category on this site. Four, five, six, and eight are the work in front of us, and no row claims otherwise.

1. Start with the purchase, not the product. Write down the decision a church is actually making and who makes it: an elder board, a treasurer, a volunteer with 40 minutes on a Thursday. The buyer determines what counts as a failure.
2. Build the list without prejudice. Every tool a church can sign up for today, including free and open source options and the paper-and-shared-folder answer that beats software for some congregations. Vendors with the largest marketing budgets do not get to define the field.
3. Read the pricing page and copy the numbers exactly. Percentages, per-transaction charges, caps on free tiers, add-on costs, setup fees. Stamp the date. If no price is published, that is a finding and it goes in the row.
4. Sign up and use it where we can, on the plan a church of that size would actually buy. Free tiers get tested as free tiers, with their caps.
5. Run the export test. Described in full below. It runs before feature testing because it decides whether the rest matters.
6. Read the terms that cost money later. Term length, auto-renewal, cancellation notice, who owns your phone number and message history, what happens to purchased content and custom fields when you leave.
7. Find the failure. Every row names who should skip the tool. A draft that reaches an editor without a skip line goes back to the writer.
8. Work the price in dollars a year at a real church size, so a percentage becomes a number a treasurer recognizes. A 2.9% card rate and a 1% bank rate are the same sentence on a marketing page and thousands of dollars apart on a budget.
9. Publish with the date, then come back. Prices move. Rows carry the date the price was read, and the log at the bottom of this page records when we returned.

What disqualifies a tool

A disqualified tool gets no recommendation row. If churches use it widely anyway, it gets a row that names what it failed, so a church already inside it knows what to ask for.

• Your records cannot be exported into a file you can open without the software. The membership roll belongs to the church.
• The published price contradicts the contract, or the fee schedule stays hidden until after a sales call and the company will not send it in writing.
• Congregation data is sold, shared, or used to train anything, or the privacy policy leaves that door open.
• Attendance, giving, or Bible reading is gamified. Points, streaks, and leaderboards attached to worship are a decision about people, and it is the wrong one.
• A multi-year term is required from a church under 200 members.
• The product advertises to your members inside itself.
• The company will not say plainly who owns the phone number and the message history.
• The vendor offers anything of value in exchange for a review, a placement, or a link. That ends the conversation and the offer goes in the row.

How pricing is verified, and on what date

Every dollar figure on these pages was read off the vendor's own published page by a person, on the date printed beside it. Prices are not taken from comparison sites, press releases, older reviews, or averages of what people say they pay. Each row links to the page the number came from, so you can check it against what the vendor says today.

Processing fees are printed the way the vendor states them, with the percentage and the per-transaction charge together. A rate quoted without the per-gift charge understates what a church pays, and the smaller the average gift the wider that gap gets.

When a vendor publishes no price, the row says the vendor publishes no price. It does not repeat "contact us for pricing" as though that were an answer, and it does not guess at a range. Pushpay is the current example: we checked their pricing page on July 28, 2026 and it carries no rate and no fee schedule.

Prices on this site were last read on July 28, 2026. A figure older than six months gets re-read or comes down.

The export test

This is the test we run first, because a church that cannot get its records out does not own them. It takes about an hour on most systems.

1. Create a real record set inside the software: households with relationships, giving entries across at least two designated funds, attendance across several weeks, and notes on a member record.
2. Ask the software for everything, using whatever the vendor calls a full export. Note whether it is one action or a support ticket.
3. Open the result without the software. CSV in a spreadsheet. A proprietary backup file that only the vendor can read is not an export.
4. Check what is missing. Custom fields, notes, giving designations, and household relationships are the fields most often dropped, and they are the ones that took years to build.
5. Time it. An export that takes three days and a phone call is a different product from one that takes a click, whatever the feature list says.
6. Read what the contract says about export after cancellation. Some products lock the button the day the account closes.

Ask any vendor how you would leave before you sign, and get the answer in an email. Keep that email with the contract, because the person who answered it will not be there in five years and the file will.

What we cannot verify

Some things sit outside what a publisher can check. Pretending otherwise would be the same lie as an invented price.

• Enterprise contracts. We have not signed a large church agreement with Pushpay or anyone selling through a sales call, and we are not going to spend five figures to review one. Where a vendor sells only that way, we say so and stop.
• Support quality at your size. We can report what happened to us. A church of 4,000 gets a different support experience than a church of 90, and neither of us should pretend our sample settles it.
• What a company does next. Roadmaps, acquisitions, and repricing are outside anything we can test today. When a vendor is acquired, the row gets re-read.
• Anything told to us privately. If we cannot see it ourselves or point you at a published page, it does not go in a row.

Right of reply, and corrections

Before a review states that a tool failed a test, we email the company, name the test, and print their answer if one arrives. From July 28, 2026 the procedure is countable. The first email goes out at least 30 days before publication, followed by two more, so three attempts in total. If nobody answers, the row says the company was emailed three times and did not respond, with the date of the first message.

A factual error gets fixed the day we can confirm it, and the fix goes in the log below with its date. We do not quietly edit a price. When a figure changes, the row shows the new figure and a new date, so a reader can tell the difference between a price we re-checked and a price that has sat untouched.

If you have an invoice that contradicts something on these pages, send it. A dated bill outranks anything a marketing page says, and it outranks us.

If you make church software

You can ask to be reviewed. Two conditions. State your affiliation in the first line of the email, and state the limits of your own product before we find them. A submission written as marketing copy gets read as marketing copy, and being reviewed is not the same as being recommended.

There is no fee, because there is nothing here to buy. A submission moves a product into the queue and nothing else.

Why these categories and not others

A category exists here when a church makes one purchase decision inside it, when at least three tools can be named that a church can sign up for today, and when we can print what each of them costs or say plainly that the vendor publishes no price. That rule is on the apps index as well, because a reader should be able to check a taxonomy the same way they check a price.

Applying it cost us two pages. Giving and accounting were separate, and no treasurer treats them as separate decisions, so they became one. Texting and social scheduling were separate, and both answer the same question about how a church reaches people, so they became one. If a new decision clears the bar, a category gets added. Nothing sits here to fill out a grid.

Who writes these

Reviews are written and edited by Will Hamilton, who runs Church Posting with his family. One editor means one person to blame. When a pastor or a treasurer sends a correction that changes a row, the log below records it.