ChurchTools is a cloud-based church management solution (ChMS) that helps church leaders manage their members, groups, calendars, services, events, volunteers, songs, statistics and check-in. It gives members access to the church’s planning and organization.
Church leaders can keep member’s contact information organized in the membership database, which helps leaders manage users, small groups and relationships. Attendance, growth and participation reports are available.
Designated users can create schedules for services and events and assign volunteers to roles. Volunteers can accept or decline participation, while leaders get an overview of who's attending. ChurchTools reminds the volunteers of their tasks automatically. Events are displayed in the calendar, which can be integrated into the church's website.
Lyrics and song sheets can be uploaded to the service planning module or downloaded from CCLI-SongSelect integration. Rosters can be automatically generated and sent to those involved. Communication with email and text messages can be done one-by-one or with distribution lists.
ChurchTools offers services on a monthly subscription basis that includes support via email and other online resources.
Sascha from Die Bruecke Bad Kreuznach
Specialty: Other
May 2016
May 2016
When you start to use the software you realize that it makes a lot of sense. Once you start using it you and fill it with life you don't want to go back. The more people and teams use it, the more useful it is for everybody. You can manage your groups, teams, services, assign people, have built-in calendars and a powerful rights management. There is also a great community where you can share thoughts, ask questions, submit feature requests, read from others how they are working with the software.
You need to understand the concepts of groups, teams, the structures etc. and assign the permissions accordingly (who is allowed to do and to see what). This can be frustrating at the beginning, but I would think this is the same for every software which is implementing role and rights management.
Go for a trial setup, hosted or on your own server. Try it in a virtual machine (in which case you probably need to have some IT background). Also check out the tutorial videos, there are plenty of them and they explain the product and features and how to get started.
Mark from EFG Ochsenfurt
Specialty: Christian, Protestant
April 2016
April 2016
Its great that it runs online and everybody in our church can use it.
It combines so many tasks of our daily churchorganisation. Its fantastic.
There are still some feature requests that i have and i hope they will have the capacity to keep on building Churchtools.
You'll need some time to adapt the software to your church needs (of course)
And therefore you should have some experience with IT solutions.
Daniel from Netzwerk Gemeinde Erfurt
Specialty: Christian, Protestant
April 2016
April 2016
ChurchTools is a good way to manage your church. We use CT to list the members of our church. I like, that i can connect the groups in our church with each other, that every member can get new informations he need. As administrator i can autorize every group and member of our church to see only the informations and data he need. It is a great advantage over Google lists or Dropbox. The system is stable and good to use with all devices.
To first import your data is sometimes difficult, but there are different tutorials. They can help.
Set up a test system of ChurchTools and try. You will see how great it is and how you can adapt and customize it for your church. For my opinion it is useful, when you have 50 ore more members in your church.
Christoph from K21 - Kirche für das 21. Jahrhundert K.d.ö.R.
Specialty: Christian, Protestant
April 2016
April 2016
Combines a lot of organisational tasks in churches. Can be customised very much to your needs. Is being continuously improved. Good support line! Very helpful comments!
It needs some time to understand some of the concepts in order to configure it to your needs.
Start with standard configuration. Then try and customize.
Sandra from Gemeinsam für Hamburg
Specialty: Christian, Protestant
April 2016
April 2016
It´s very intuitive and you can adapt most of the software to your needs
The import is not always that easy - but the support is awesome
Use it from the beginning and do one big import, apart from this - try to adapt it as much as you can.
Josua from Freie Christengemeinde München
Specialty: Other
March 2015
March 2015
It's perfect for small and bigger Churches because you can just use what you need.
Once properly set up it is very user-friendly. I can give everyone the right to only use certain aspects of the software.
Just get used to it. Give it some time and you won't want to do church without it any more.
Ben from Hope Reformed Church
March 2018
March 2018
needs some tutorial on beginning and getting things set up. Would have liked a video tutorial. Maybe polish the UI a little bit?
There are many options for attendance and calendar. Makes it easy to sync up events with other ministry's in the church.
Fri from LIFE Church
July 2017
July 2017
The different levels of privacy/participation are smart and helpful. The different categories make it very neatly arranged and help get thins done in an orderly manner. The support team is great and they are so helpful when my computer skills are at their end.
There's is not yet an smartphone app version out there, waiting to be able to use it this way, too. Also, picking several people from a group to email to them (and neither one person only or the whole team) seems not to be possible.
Jan from CVJM Region Bad Belzig e.V.
Employees number: 2-10 employees
July 2017
July 2017
Easy for ressource management
Easy for having calendars for different groups/events
For free if you only have less users
Little bit tricky to admin sometimes.
Every thing else is great.
Why do i have to say 100 characters for cons - Ah, no it's enough ;-)
Dagmar from FeG Koblenz
July 2017
July 2017
As I am the secretary of a small church, I work daily with the database of CT. I organize all our events and maintain our resources. It is a lot easier for me with one tool providing all modules. Bevor I used different tools for my jobs. Now I have all information in one place and can deal with information within one single tool.
Our Sunday service teams use CT, too. For them it is very helpful, that different team members have access to the schedule and can drop off their information like ppt slides, songs, video clips etc. right in the event within "church service". That makes organizing the church service a lot easier.
I was quite surprised how easily I got along with churchtools without needing tutorials etc. Most things work self-explaining.
I can´t print our calender in a nice set-up. Maybe because I am a mac user?
And as we don´t use "check-in" it seems, that I am not able to print labels directly out of CT.
Ralph from JesusCentrum Nürnberg
Employees number: 2-10 employees
July 2017
July 2017
Makes the church organisation joyful
Extensive rights management, great support, fast development, I am always looking forward to a new version.
Until now we haven't notice anything negative. The aditional tables must run over the support, which is really fast and surely does this way to keep the data base integrity.
David from ev. Kirchengemeinde Wutachtal
Employees number: 11-50 employees
July 2017
July 2017
We administrate all ministries in our church and do the booking of locations. Even our services are planned with ChurchTools.
Egard from Freie Christengemeinde Leer
Employees number: 2-10 employees
July 2017
July 2017
The connectivity between the product elements is very good.
You can adapt the software very good for your individual situation in your church
I miss an App for I Pad, I Phone and Android and others mobile devices, but I hope that feature will come.
Carol from Alive Church
May 2017
May 2017
ChurchTools keeps all our information together in one place and the responsible person can always have an overall view of what is going on in the church, which rooms are being used, when, where and which kind of services, events, meetings we will have in the church and who will serve doing what in each service. Also the integration with CCLI-SongSelect makes the song management much easier for all worship teams.