We are using the Rock to help us bring together the reach of the web and the power of data to make disciples.

I love how flexible it is. We generally don't have to worry about workarounds like we did in systems past. We love how it fixed so many of our difficult problems without becoming a problem itself. The community is also a great part. You aren't buying into a company, you are joining a community.

Waiting for the newest features and tools. It can seem like forever when it's something you didn't even know you needed until you heard it's coming soon. Then you have to wait until it's polished and ready. When it's here though, it's basically Christmas.

We were stuck on another piece of software that still looked and ran like it was from the early '90s, but unable to afford anything better, for years. We got into Rock very early after its launch and haven't looked back! From an admin standpoint, I've been extremely happy with the direct access to the data it's afforded me, while keeping the users in a wonderful and user-friendly environment that's available from anywhere. Most reports are available easily enough per the documents, but every once in a while you'll find a more esoteric view of your data that can't be done "out of the box" yet (the reporting functions are growing quickly). No problem- the amazing community has helped us generate any reports we could hope for using powerful tools like SQL queries. And that's an important point to mention, despite the fact that there's no official support for Rock, the community is by far the best support for any product I've ever seen. Since launch, we've digitized so many previously analogue processes and saved our pastors so much time in their days, thanks to the power and accessibility of Rock - everything from inquiry forms, requests, signups, checkins, spiritual growth process tracking and followup, can be centralized in Rock itself, making it our one stop shop for our staff A word of personal advice: if you're trying to save a few bucks, you may be looking at running Rock locally on a Windows Server, but if you do, understand that you'll need to be comfortable configuring SQL servers and web servers, as well as firewall rules and SSL certificates. I highly recommend any of the many hosting companies who support Rock instead, if that's not your particular cup of tea...many of those companies make Rock a nearly turnkey solution.

Flexibility and power afforded to the admins- open source with plugin structure means that you can leverage anything available in the incredible data stored in Rock

It's not as easy for end users to generate any little report they can think of on the fly, so it's extremely helpful for the administrator to be passingly familiar with SQL

Overall the system was adequate for my daily operations.

The customer service was very difficult!

We moved from Arena to Rock in tandem with some changes we were going through as far as how we do ministry. Rock either has a feature or gives you the tools to make the feature, for whatever your church can dream of. Rock is a very powerful ChMS solution that continues to get better without forcing you to make budget cutbacks in ministries to afford it. A really easy to overlook benefit to using Rock, it's really easy to understand what you're looking at when a page loads because the pages are designed with that in mind. This is a huge benefit when training Volunteers or rotating staff (like interns). The community is great! There's a strong community of Rock users that share a Slack channel and help one another innovate at their church and to fix problems when they arise. You no longer have to sit through the tier-0 checklist you normally get when calling tech support, rather you get to have a conversation with real people that have been working with Rock since before you ever knew about it. Being a part of this Rock community is what keeps me from being afraid of tackling all of my church's ChMS needs "without a team". The most exciting thing about Rock is how customizable it is. Rock's Workflow Engine allows you to be very attentive to all of your attendees without having to manually check up on each person. You can do processes as simple as texting someone who visited for the first time a thank you message and an invite to coming events. You can even build full-featured follow-ups to someone joining a small group to make sure it's a great fit. The possibilities are actually limitless. It's honestly a blessing to use Rock to leverage our technical skill to empower our ministries to do things that they've never tried to do before in fear of the administrative overhead. My church has only scratched the surface of what Rock can do, and it's already making a difference after being on Rock for less than a year

Customization, Community, Growth Potential

Host Server has to be Windows Server running IIS, Database has to be SQL

Our mission is to love people as we lead them into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ. This software helps our teams do exactly that by making the technology invisible and bringing relationships and connections to new levels.

Rock is so powerful and open. Our church is a fairly large multi-site church in West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. We had been looking for a product to transition to for several years that met the needs of our ministries. Rock has met all those needs. There are tons of great features and a growing app store and eco system that allow you to add just about anything you and your church can dream up. There's great community support that's free and several amazing vendors that can support churches of ANY size or develop custom code for a feature you wish you had. You can run it on your local server or install it in the cloud. It's easy to learn, intuitive and works on ANY device. It's mobile friendly and your teams can expect to be able to do anything from their smartphones that they can do from a computer. The developers have a great roadmap and have a track record of hitting or beating expected release dates. It's also great to finally feel like we have a voice with our CHMS platform. Can't say enough good things about it.

I honestly haven't found anything that I don't like. It's really hard to find anything. If had to choose something that I like "least" I guess it would be the documentation needs to be updated a little but that's being SUPER geek nit picky because the documentation is MUCH better than our former software.

Full-featured church management system that scales to churches of any size. The product is highly extensible and built on cutting-edge technology.

Rock comes with a ton of functionality out of the box, and the user interface is snappy, clean, intuitive, mobile-friendly, and highly customizable by non-developers. The Rock community is just as responsive as the product, so the combination of superb/forward-thinking innovation and community support makes this product second to none. Amazing, new features are always being added to the product by the core team or by developer/partner contributions to Rock's app store. The mission statement at Southeast is "to connect people to Jesus and to one another." Rock is one of the tools that helps us accomplish this goal on a daily basis. I look forward to seeing the Kingdom impact that this product will have as it gets rolled out to more churches and organizations across the globe.

It not only takes a village to raise children, but also to speed up the development of an open source project. Rock needs more people with skin in the game giving financial, prayer, development, product evangelism, training, and documentation support. The sky is the limit with God's blessing and the backing of more Kingdom workers.

The organization of member information enables us to minister more effectively to their entire family.

It's so easy to use. You can create whatever data metrics you choose. I love how I can keep track of our church members and put faces with names.

You have to really think about what categories you need with the program. There are also several steps to forming groups.

Awesome, the team behind Rock has been incredible and the community via slack has helped me more than I can count and we are still just implementing the tool. If you are a developer church or if you are an admin that just needs to get your church organized, Rock has a solution that fits the smallest and largest of churches.

The team that supports Rock is incredible, and the people/Churches that use Rock are incredible. The ending result is a momentum that has fast forwarded Rock RMS past most, if not all, of the top applications that have been around for twice as long as Rock has.

Nothing to report here. Rock so far has worked to close the gap on anything that arises as an issue.

We have been able to have our entire organizations RMS as well as our web page tied together in one application. So learning it is huge, but the time saved is well worth it.

There is nothing held back as far as access to your data. The community all works together to support and create add ons as well as core features. So enhancements are made quickly.

It was overwhelming at first because it was so massive with its features. But given time, you can easily jump in and swim like a pro.

As our church has grown, the issue of scalability was quickly becoming an issue. We had over 20 years of data to transition, so not just any church management tool would work. Rock is sleek, user friendly, but most importantly is ready to scale with the global church! It's already allowing us to reach more people and has simplified processes for our admin volunteers, which has already made more margin for staff to do ministry.

Our church LOVED the switch to Rock. Its simple, clean and intuitive user interface made the easiest tool to train our staff team on. People were literally cheering and clapping throughout the training over the simplest of things.

Likely a localized problem, but we had to migrate an EXTENSIVE amount of data over from our former database. We love all the data because it's so rich and has helped us grow, but we're still slowly gaining back some of the reporting capabilities we took for granted in our previous system. We miss the ability to mine all the data for great reporting, trend and pattern watching, too.

We loved the fact that there would be a cheaper and just as effective alternative to Community Church Builder. It has all of the bells and whistles that we would need and seems like a super slick platform.

Well, it'd be great if we could get it launched. We wished that there were people that Rock RMS would suggest us to contact in case we wanted help in launching the platform, building/setting up the server, etc. At this point they provide several manuals on how to implement, which is great if you are super "tech savy" and know your way around servers and deployment of sites, but we don't. So in other words, there isn't a lot of direct support to get implemented...people that will help you or do it for you, from start to finish. I did post some questions on their forum and answers were given really quickly (which we did appreciate) but the answers were given at a level that you'd have to have enough server/web knowledge to understand what they were saying.

The fact that Rock is so customizable and learning how to utilize that customization capability is so easy, makes this an incredible software. It has impacted the way we interact with our congregants in every way. Also information is easily accessible to our staff and easy to find.

To utilize it's full capability you need a staff member who is devoted to learning the ins and out. You don't need to hire someone specifically for Rock but you do need someone on staff who is willing to learn the ins and outs and put the time in to make it great for your organization.

Implementing the Rock RMS system was the biggest thing that we did to be able to better understand - and structure - our church data. It is user friendly for ministry leaders, yet powerful enough to build strong analytics from it. The open source model creates a network of partners that can help you out if you don't have a large IT team.

There is still a learning curve with Rock, and probably a few too many data fields (that can cause confusion at times).

We have been using Rock for about a year, and have already started to allow our church staff to focus more on ministry and less on administration to allow us as a staff to focus on the people and not on the event/administration.

Flexible and Powerful, but also easy to use with great documentation and a great community of support

We have yet to find any problems with this system. The community is there to support and work with you whether you are a church of 50 or a church of 30,000

We have been using Rock for over a year and are very happy with the change from our previous management software.

Rock is so user friendly and intuitive. I use Rock daily for data capture and retrieval and event set-up.

I have not found anything that I dislike about the software at this point. I have had no difficulties in finding solutions to my needs.

I recently walked through the implementation of Rock RMS at a church I was working for. The software functionality is incredible and sports the latest in developmental advancements and functionality from Content Management to Customization. I don't think I have seen a more powerful resource management system (especially that is open source). The collaboration and creation of this software has been miraculous. I attended the Rock RMS conference in Phoenix about one year ago and could see that so many brilliant people were pouring their heart and soul into developing, testing, and refining this software. While it may always be in development, the team behind the software is great and the software itself offers capabilities well beyond other systems. While the implementation and setup may require some special skills (as well as the customization), there is support to help from a willing and intelligent community, which is the backbone of any great software.

This product can be tailored to handle anything.

May be difficult to initially customize.

We have been using this system for over a year, and the customization you can do is immeasurable.

This system is easy to use out of the box, but also has many areas for customization.

There is not a customer support area, but there is a huge community of users that can be utilized.

The Rock RMS is a church management software that we recently began transitioning to from another leading provider. Our big attractions to The Rock were based in it's cost-effectiveness (it's an open sourced platform) and it's power. With knowledgeable programmers, it can be integrated to perform nearly anything your team can think of. It can also integrate with Planning Center Online. In addition, there are many options out there for help getting started with RockRMS if you are lacking the expertise within your local church.

The length of time it takes to transition from our current church management platform to The Rock. It's understandable why it takes so long but it should be noted that it isn't a quick transition.

It can be entirely customized to your church's needs. This means you can build the system to fit the ministry, as opposed to having to alter your ministry based on the limitations of the Church Management Software.

A bit of a learning curve for an average joe, but there are great resources available and a very helpful community.

It's customization makes it so adaptable

communications module is a little clunky, but I know there is some improvements in the works.

Extremely well-documented software, very high quality, we've encountered very few bugs and glitches.

Everything is highly customizable. The content channels allow you to maximum flexibility to present all types of information whether blogs, video, or documents.

I'm a fan, no negatives for me.

They allow a church to choose whatever backend processor they want to choose without profiting on the tithes and donations to the church. They let churches choose My Well Ministry.

There is nothing from from our standpoint that we don't like about Rock RMS.

Pro: Open source. Strong community. Community driven development. Excellent documentation. Con: As of 2015 it's still early version, but growing stronger each release. Rock RMS is a collaborative effort of several churches and developers who know exactly what church software should do - or be flexible enough to handle. In addition, Rock is a very powerful Website Content Management System (CMS). No more needs for a separate staff mobile app. Rock uses Twitter's Bootstrap as it's visual framework which means everything you can do on your desktop scales beautifully down to tablet or phone. In addition, that means anything your congregation needs to do (online giving, prayer request submission, etc.) works perfectly from their mobile device as well. If you want a church app for your congregation, Rock can be the brains for it. One of the founding churches has put their source code on GitHub for anyone to use.

I've been a long time user of another church management software. I have a lot of friends that have switched over to Rock RMS. I've heard people say that Rock would be a good fit for my situation. There's no cost to download and try out the program, so I gave it a try, just to kick the tires a little. My reaction was mixed. It has a nice clean interface. You can tell this is not the first time for these programmers. It seemed solid and organized.

I was surprised how much it couldn't do out-of-the-box. There was quite a bit I heard that it could do, but then learned those features required extra setup or installing some kind of add-on that was written by someone else that may or may not be able to help you if you had any trouble with it. I am not ready to start over all the customizing that has been done with my current program. But, maybe someday.