Free church management software, and the exact point each free tier stops
Which church management systems have a permanent free plan, which offer only a 30-day trial, which will not publish a price, and the member count where each free plan ends. Checked 29 July 2026.
Updated Jul 29, 2026
Search for free church management software and most of the first page is a listicle counting a 30-day trial as free. A trial is a purchase with a delay on it. Load your whole roll, six years of giving history, and the nursery roster into one, and on day 31 you are paying, because the alternative is doing the migration a second time.
This page sorts what stays free from what expires, and names the exact member count, check-in count, or donation count where each free plan stops. Every number below was read off the vendor’s own page on 29 July 2026, and every one of those pages is linked at the claim and again in Sources with the date checked. Fee schedules move, so confirm before you sign. Our method for verifying and re-checking prices is written out on how we review.
If the accounting ledger is the reason you are shopping, read church accounting software that keeps designated funds straight first, because a membership system and a fund ledger are two different purchases and only two products on this page do both.
Five things vendors mean by free
| What the word means | What it costs you |
|---|---|
| Free tier | $0 until you cross a published limit, then the step-up price |
| Free trial | $0 for 30 days, then full price with your data already inside |
| Free product, paid usage | $0 a month, a percentage of every gift |
| Nonprofit discount | A percentage off a list price. Not free |
| Free to download | $0 for the software, real money for hosting and a person |
Four of those five end with you paying. Only the first one has any chance of staying at zero, and only if your church stays under the limit.
What is free forever, and where it stops
Planning Center
Planning Center sells its products separately and each one has a free tier. People, the membership database, is the outlier. Its own page says “People is free for every church,” with unlimited people and no cost at any size. That is the single most useful free thing in church software. Households, custom fields, reporting, and the Church Center member app come with it.
The other products are free at limits a small church clears on an ordinary Sunday.
| Product | Free ceiling | First paid step | Second step |
|---|---|---|---|
| People | Unlimited people | none, it stays free | none |
| Check-Ins | 10 daily check-ins | $15/mo for 30 | $32/mo for 75 |
| Groups | 15 group members | $15/mo for 75 | $32/mo for 200 |
| Giving | 10 donations a month | $15/mo for 75 | $32/mo for 200 |
| Services | 5 team members | $15/mo for 20 | $32/mo for 50 |
| Calendar | 1 managed room | $15/mo for 5 | $32/mo for 15 |
| Registrations | 5 attendees per event | $15/mo for 20 | $32/mo for 50 |
Read those ceilings against a real Sunday. A church of 80 with a nursery and two children’s classes runs 12 to 20 check-ins, so the free Check-Ins tier ends on your first normal weekend. Check-Ins is priced on “the number of unique check-ins on your busiest day of the week,” and the page allows that “you can occasionally exceed your limit for spikes like Christmas or Easter,” which is the one place a ceiling on this list bends. Groups is capped at 15 group members across the whole account, not 15 per group, so two home groups of ten end it. Giving is capped at 10 donations a month, which 15 online givers pass before the middle of January.
Publishing has a free Essential tier covering app management, the home page, and analytics. Giving processing is 2.15 percent plus $0.30 on cards and 0 percent plus $0.30 on ACH bank transfer, with 1.5 percent added for international cards, and the ACH rate is the reason a church that already uses Planning Center should push bank transfers hard. Music Stand is $5 a month and is the only product on the platform priced as a flat add-on rather than on the ladder.
Every other paid product uses the same six-step ladder: $15, $32, $69, $115, $179, $239 a month. Each product climbs it separately. Turn on four products at the second rung and you are at $128 a month, which is more than Breeze charges for everything.
What Planning Center actually gives away is a free membership database with paid modules bolted to it. That is a good deal when the database is what you need, and a bad one when you turn on four modules and use two.
ChMeetings
ChMeetings publishes a “Free Forever” plan at $0, capped at 50 people. Above that: $12 a month for 100 people, $25 for 250, $40 for 500, $50 for 1,000, $60 unlimited. Annual billing is “Pay for 10 months instead of 12 when paying annually!”
The comparison matrix lists people management, email, online giving and pledges, event registration and payment, volunteer scheduling, worship planning, accounting, groups, check-in, forms, and a church app on every tier, free plan included. Four things are held back from the free plan and the page names them: text messaging, a branded church app, advanced reports, and priority support. A feature matrix that generous on a $0 plan is unusual enough in this category to be worth checking in a trial rather than taking on trust.
A church of 80 is already over the free line. The fix is $12 a month, which is the cheapest way to get a complete system on this page and the reason ChMeetings belongs in your first three demos even though almost no American church list mentions it.
Flocknote
Flocknote Starter is “Free for life!” at 0 to 40 members, $10 a month at 41 to 50, $17 at 51 to 70, and $25 at 71 to 100, climbing by member band above that: $42 at 101 to 200, $58 at 201 to 400, $73 at 401 to 600, and $90 at 601 to 900. Flocknote Complete runs a flat $75 a month above whatever Starter costs at your size, so the church of 80 pays $25 for Starter or $100 for Complete, and the church of 30 pays nothing for Starter or $75 for Complete. Online giving is included on every plan, including the free one.
Two things to know before you build on it.
Flocknote is a communications tool with a household database attached rather than a full management system. Starter names unlimited emails and standard texts, unlimited admins and groups, signups, giving, exportable giving data with automatic end-of-year tax receipts, attendance tracking, household grouping, and five text-to-join keywords. Nothing on either plan names worship planning or service scheduling.
The product is built for parishes and says so on its own price page. Complete adds “Sacrament Tracking for Catholic churches,” names religious education and sacramental prep in the attendance feature, and lists Word on Fire, Ascension Press, and Life Teen as content partners. That is not a warning, it is a fit question. A Catholic parish gets a system built for its actual workflow. A Protestant congregation gets a good communications tool with vocabulary that will read slightly wrong in a dozen places, so walk the trial before you commit the roll to it.
Tithe.ly Free Giving
Tithe.ly lists Free Giving at $0 a month with unlimited donations, a mobile giving app, pledge drives, and its Cover the Fees option. Processing runs 2.9 percent plus $0.30 on credit and debit, 3.5 percent plus $0.30 on American Express, and 1 percent plus $0.30 on ACH. Free product, paid usage: no subscription, and a percentage of every gift.
Their church management product is separate at $72 a month, the same figure Breeze charges, which is not a coincidence, because Breeze is now sold as Tithely Church Management. All Access, which bundles giving, management, worship tools, the app, and the website, is $119 a month against a stated regular price of $228. The unbundled pieces are text giving at $19 a month, worship team tools at $29, a custom website at $19, and a custom church app at $89. Premium onboarding is $599 one time, and the enterprise tier is aimed at churches over 2,000 attendees with negotiated processing rates.
Do the arithmetic on Cover the Fees before you treat that 2.9 percent as your real cost. The page claims churches “typically see around 60% of donors cover their giving fees,” which is a company statistic about its own customers rather than an independent number, so treat it as a hypothesis to test on your own donors in the first quarter. The fee accounting it creates is a decision your treasurer has to make before the first statement run, worked through in what giving platforms actually cost.
Where free means thirty days
These are the systems that show up on “free church management software” lists and have no free tier at all.
| Tool | Free period | Price after |
|---|---|---|
| Breeze | 30 days | $72/mo flat, unlimited contacts |
| ChurchTrac | 30 days | $9 to $90/mo by number of names |
| ChurchTools | 30 days | $39 to $399/mo by number of people |
| Tithe.ly ChMS | 30 days | $72/mo, or $119 All Access |
| Servant Keeper | none advertised | $79.99/mo Core, $159.99 Complete |
Breeze is $72 a month flat with no contract, no setup fee, and no tier by contact count. Text messaging includes 250 a month, then $10 per 500. Worship Tools is a $29 add-on and the bundle with Tithely Sites and Apps is $119. The plan sheet names unlimited contacts, unlimited admin users, unlimited emails, and free data export and import, and that last one matters more than it sounds.
One thing to raise on the sales call. A banner across the top of the price page reads “Breeze has been rebranded as Tithely Church Management,” and Tithe.ly sells the identical $72 figure as Giving plus Church Management. Ask which product roadmap you are buying and what happens to the Breeze interface, because the interface is the reason most churches pay the premium.
ChurchTrac prices by the number of names you keep: $9 a month at 75, $18 at 125, $36 at 250, $54 at 500, $72 at 1,000, and $90 unlimited. Accounting adds $15 a month and messaging adds $7, and that $7 buys 250 message credits with further blocks of 250 at $7. Annual billing charges 10.8 months for 12. Archived names do not count against the limit, which is the detail that keeps a 200-year-old congregation off the next tier.
Put those two side by side and the crossover is sharp. For a church of 80, ChurchTrac is $18 a month and Breeze is $72, for systems that do broadly the same work. Breeze does not win on price until you are near 1,000 names, where ChurchTrac has climbed to $72 and keeps going while Breeze stays flat. If you are under 500 people and you pay Breeze $72 a month, you are paying about $650 a year for a nicer interface. That may be worth it to the volunteer who has to use it every week. Decide that on purpose rather than by default.
ChurchTools is a German product billed primarily in euros: €29 a month for 100 people, €49 for 200, €79 for 500, €129 for 1,000, €209 for 2,500, and €339 unlimited. The dollar prices on the same page are $39, $59, $99, $159, $249, and $399. No minimum term, licenses settle on the first of the month, 5 GB storage included, and each tier caps resources and ministry roles as well as people, so a small church with a large room list can hit a ceiling that has nothing to do with attendance.
Two costs the tier table hides. Setup, migration, and training are billed at 99€ an hour rather than included, which is the opposite of the American products on this page, most of which import your data free. And church plants get the first year free, which is the most generous new-church offer in this comparison. American churches should also price the currency risk and ask where support hours fall before committing.
Servant Keeper is $79.99 a month for Core or $159.99 for Complete, dropping to $73.32 and $146.66 on annual billing at $879.89 and $1,759.89 a year. Core covers member and giving records at four users, with check-in a $199 option. Complete runs eight users, includes check-in, adds 1,000 SMS a month, a website with 50 GB of storage, and 25 hours a month of 720p streaming. No free tier appears on the pricing page. At $960 a year for the entry plan, Servant Keeper needs to beat ChurchTrac by a wide margin on something your church specifically needs, and for most congregations under 300 it does not.
The ones that will not tell you the price
Realm, from ACS Technologies, names three plans in its own navigation, Inform, Connect, and Multiply, and attaches a dollar amount to none of them. The product page offers demo registration and a phone number.
FellowshipOne publishes no price either, and its ownership is worth a question on the call. The product site is still live with its own product pages and a “Let’s Talk” button where a price would be. The Ministry Brands FellowshipOne URL now redirects to a product called Amplify, which also prints no price. Ask directly which product you are being sold, which one receives development, and what the migration path is between them.
Subsplash publishes its giving rates and nothing else: $0 a month, 2.3 percent plus 30 cents on standard cards, 1 percent on ACH, with rates falling as low as 1.9 percent on card and 0.5 percent on ACH under a program the page calls GrowCurve. Of Subsplash One and Enterprise it says only that pricing is “based on church size and usage.”
Hiding a price is a real finding rather than a gap in this page. It means the number is set per church, usually against your attendance or your annual giving, and it means the cheapest quote goes to whoever negotiates hardest. A church of 80 with no staff will not negotiate hardest.
If you still want a quote, ask for the annual total in writing in your first email, before any demo. A vendor who answers has told you something good about how they will treat you in year three. A vendor who insists on a call first has told you the number depends on how the call goes.
Open source and self-hosted, honestly
ChurchCRM
ChurchCRM is released under the MIT license on GitHub and its own site describes it as “100% Free” with “no licensing fees.” The install page prints the real requirements: PHP 8.4 or newer for version 7, MySQL 8.0.11 or newer or MariaDB 10.5 or newer, Apache 2.4 with mod_rewrite, 256 MB of memory as a floor with 512 MB recommended, a 30 second execution limit, and 500 MB of disk. It runs on shared hosting, a VPS, or your own server, and it covers member and family profiles, a self-service portal, groups, attendance, giving and pledges, and deposits.
Read that requirements list as a shopping list, because it is the honest price. PHP 8.4 rules out a lot of cheap shared hosting sold to churches, and the twelve PHP extensions the page names are the thing that turns a fifteen-minute install into a support ticket with your host.
MIT is the permissive end of the license spectrum, so nothing about the code will ever restrict your church. The software really is free. Hosting is not, and neither is the person.
Rock RMS
Rock RMS is the one to be precise about, because almost every list calls it open source and the license says something narrower. The Rock Community License Agreement permits use, reproduction, derivative works, public display, sublicense, and distribution “SOLELY FOR INTERNAL USE BY FAITH BASED ORGANIZATIONS,” and the same document defines a faith based organization as a legal entity approved by the IRS as a 501(c)(3). Any other use requires a commercial license from Spark Development. Your church can download it, run it, and change it at no cost. That is a real grant and a generous one. It is not an OSI open source license, and if anyone on your team is reasoning about it as though it were MIT or GPL, correct that before you build anything on top of it.
The bigger number is hosting. Rock’s own pricing page asks for a donation of $4.45 per average weekend attendee per year, prints a calculator that puts a 100-person church at $445, and hands hosting to two partners, saying that “while cloud hosting prices may differ from partner to partner, the Spark donation stays the same across the board.”
Here is what those two partners actually charge, which as far as we can find nobody else has put side by side.
| Attendees | Rock Cloud | Cloud 9 |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 1,000 | $419/mo | $405/mo |
| Up to 2,500 | $1,119/mo | $1,025/mo |
| Up to 5,000 | $2,319/mo | $2,050/mo |
| Up to 10,000 | $4,419/mo | $3,945/mo |
| Setup fee | $249 | $249 |
The two ladders are close at the bottom and separate as you climb: Cloud 9 is $14 a month cheaper at 1,000 attendees and $474 a month cheaper at 10,000, which is $5,688 a year at the top of the table. Get quotes from both.
Either way, free software with a hosting floor near $5,000 a year plus a $445 donation is the most expensive option on this page for a small church, and it is priced that way because Rock is built for organizations with staff. Rock does publish a grant program for churches that cannot carry the donation, so ask before you rule it out on the pledge alone.
Rock also runs on SQL Server, which is a different class of infrastructure than the PHP and MySQL stack ChurchCRM wants. Self-hosting it well is a job.
What self-hosting actually costs in someone’s time
Write these down before you volunteer for it:
- Patching. Security updates arrive on the project’s schedule and installing them is your job, not a vendor’s.
- Backups you have restored. A backup nobody has ever restored is a folder, not a backup. Test one, on a different machine, before the system holds your only copy of the roll.
- TLS certificates. Automated renewal breaks eventually and the failure mode is a browser warning on the page where people give money.
- Major version upgrades. PHP and MySQL both move. A version that shipped fine in 2026 stops receiving security fixes, and the upgrade is a project rather than a click.
- Payments. The moment donations run through software you host, the compliance question is yours. Most self-hosting churches route giving through a hosted platform for exactly this reason, which means you are back to paying somebody.
- The bus factor. One person knows how it works. Write down what happens when that person moves, gets sick, or leaves angry.
- Member data on a box you own. A self-hosted roll holds addresses, children’s names, giving history, and pastoral notes, and the obligations that come with holding it do not soften because no vendor is involved. The specific list is in protecting member data.
Self-hosting is a real option only with a named person who has agreed in writing to a term of service and a documented handoff. If the plan is that somebody in the congregation will figure it out, that is not a plan. It is a future emergency with a volunteer’s name on it.
Nonprofit discounts, and where they are real
Church software is already priced for churches, so a nonprofit discount on a management system is rare. Nobody on this page publishes one. ChurchTools comes closest with a free first year for church plants, and ChurchTrac says it will write a custom quote for a plant.
Where the discount is real is the office stack sitting around the system. Microsoft states that “Microsoft 365 Business Premium is available at a 75% discount for eligible nonprofits,” and that “for each licensed Microsoft 365 E3/E5 seat, nonprofits can receive up to 5 additional Microsoft 365 F3 seats for volunteers.”
Google prints its nonprofit numbers per seat, which makes the comparison easy: Google Workspace for Nonprofits at $0 per user per month, Business Standard at $3.50 on a one-year commitment, Business Plus at $6.16, and Enterprise at a stated 70 percent or more off list. The free and discounted editions cap at 2,000 users.
Check your eligibility before you build a plan on either. Google’s eligibility page requires that you be “a nonprofit charitable organization in good standing” and names three kinds of organization it will not verify: governmental entities, hospitals and health care organizations, and schools, academic institutions, and universities. Religious organizations are not named on that page in either direction. Microsoft’s eligibility page does not name them either. So confirm with the program rather than trusting any list that says churches qualify.
That distinction is worth holding on to. A 75 percent discount on a paid seat is a discount. It is not a free tier, and the price returns to list if your eligibility lapses.
Two questions that decide more than the price
Can you get your data out yourself? Ask every vendor, free tier included: can I export every field for every person, including giving history and custom fields, as a CSV, without contacting support? Then make them show the button on screen. The full version of this test, and what to do when the answer is soft, is in choosing church management software.
Only one product on this page advertises the answer on its own price sheet. Breeze lists “Free Data Export/Import” as a plan feature. Everybody else leaves it to the sales call, and a free plan with no export is the cheapest trap in the category, because nothing about it feels like a commitment until you try to leave.
What happens at the ceiling? A free plan capped at 50 people is a plan you outgrow during the one season you least want a migration. Before you adopt any capped free tier, look up the price one rung above your current size and decide now whether you would pay it. If the answer is no, pick something else today.
Decide in ten minutes
| Your situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Under 40 members, no online giving yet | Planning Center People plus Flocknote Starter. $0 |
| 80 people, nursery, roughly 30 online givers | ChurchTrac at $18/mo, or People free plus Check-Ins and Giving at $15 each |
| One login, one bill, nobody wants modules | ChurchTrac $18 to $36, or Breeze $72 if the interface wins the volunteer |
| Serious worship and volunteer scheduling | Planning Center Services, paid |
| Over 1,000 names | Breeze at $72 flat beats ChurchTrac at $90 |
| A named developer under a written agreement | ChurchCRM, self-hosted |
| No developer, under 1,000 attendance | Not Rock |
| Catholic parish | Flocknote earns its place. Everyone else, weigh the fit |
| Church plant, first year | ChurchTools free for a year, or ask ChurchTrac for a plant quote |
| Restricted funds and a real ledger | None of the free tiers. See church accounting software |
| Room double-booking is the actual pain | Planning Center Calendar, one room free. See church event planning software |
We are building a management system of our own, Covenant OS. It is in development, there is nothing to buy, and nothing here should push you to wait for it. When it ships it will be reviewed on this site beside the tools above and it will not be ranked first in its own category, which is a standing rule written out on how we review. Choose from the list above and choose this month.
Do this week
Open Planning Center People and load your roll into it. It is free at any size, it costs nothing to walk away from, and having your membership data in one clean place makes every later decision cheaper.
Then get two numbers off last month: how many online gifts came in, and how many children were checked in on one ordinary Sunday. Those two counts decide whether anything else on this page stays free for you, and they take about twenty minutes to find.
Compare the same systems side by side in the church management directory, and price the giving side separately with what giving platforms actually cost. If texting is the piece you are missing, the per-message and per-contact rates are collected in church texting services.
Sources
Every page below was fetched on 29 July 2026 and every figure in this guide was read off the page linked here on that date. Prices in this category move without notice, so re-check before you sign anything.
Church management systems
- Planning Center pricing and processing rates: planningcenter.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
- Planning Center per-product ladders and free ceilings: People, Check-Ins, Groups, Giving, Services, Calendar, Registrations. All checked 29 July 2026.
- ChMeetings plans and free-plan feature matrix: chmeetings.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
- Flocknote Starter and Complete bands: flocknote.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
- Tithe.ly plans, processing rates, and onboarding fee: get.tithe.ly/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
- Breeze price, texting allowance, rebrand banner, and export line: breezechms.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
- ChurchTrac name bands, add-ons, annual multiplier, and archive rule: churchtrac.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
- ChurchTools euro and dollar tiers, service rates, and terms: churchtools.de/en/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
- Servant Keeper Core and Complete, user counts, and annual totals: servantkeeper.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
The ones that publish no price
- Realm plan names and demo routing: acstechnologies.com/realm. Checked 29 July 2026.
- FellowshipOne product site: fellowshipone.com. Checked 29 July 2026. The Ministry Brands FellowshipOne path redirects to Amplify, also checked 29 July 2026, which prints no price either.
- Subsplash giving rates and the church-size language: subsplash.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
Open source and self-hosted
- ChurchCRM license: github.com/ChurchCRM/CRM. Checked 29 July 2026.
- ChurchCRM cost language: churchcrm.io. Server requirements and PHP extension list: churchcrm.io/install. Both checked 29 July 2026.
- Rock Community License Agreement, including the internal-use clause: rockrms.com/license. Checked 29 July 2026.
- Rock donation rate, calculator, and hosting-partner language: rockrms.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
- Rock Cloud hosting tiers and setup fee: rockcloud.com/pricing. Checked 29 July 2026.
- Cloud 9 hosting tiers and setup fee: 9embers.com/cloud9. Checked 29 July 2026.
Nonprofit programs
- Microsoft 365 nonprofit discount and F3 volunteer seats: microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/microsoft-365. Checked 29 July 2026.
- Google Workspace for Nonprofits per-seat figures: google.com/nonprofits/offerings/workspace. Checked 29 July 2026.
- Google for Nonprofits eligibility and the three excluded categories: google.com/nonprofits/eligibility. Checked 29 July 2026.
Corrections made on 29 July 2026
An earlier version of this guide said flocknote.com refused automated requests and that we could not read its feature list. The page served on 29 July 2026 and the full member-band ladder above comes from it. The same version credited Tithe.ly Free Giving with end-of-year tax statements and a QuickBooks integration; the price page names neither, so both claims are gone and the list now matches the page. The earlier version also said Google does not print its nonprofit per-seat figures, which is no longer true.
