ChurchBuddy vs Excellerate

ChurchBuddy is a free church management platform for coordinating ministry work across web, Android, and iOS. It handles volunteer scheduling, worship-service planning, recurring service templates, availability, conflict detection, automatic and bulk scheduling, and schedule export or printing. Churches can maintain congregation directories, family links, teams, groups, profiles, and Excel imports, with granular access control. Event tools provide registration forms, CSV responses, QR and badge check-in, plus transportation, housing, and meal management. Sunday school functions cover classes, curricula, teacher, parent, and student portals, attendance, gradebooks, report cards, and check-in scanners. The platform also lists announcements, push notifications, texts, email, targeted messaging, a unified calendar, room and resource booking, service timers, dashboards, analytics, form building, and online giving with payment processing. Integrations include WorshipBuddy songbooks, BibleBuddy resources, cloud storage, background checks, live streaming, and automated workflows. The maker says data is encrypted at rest and in transit, with no ads or data sales. The plan is free, billed Forever, with no hidden fees, premium tiers, or add-ons.

Excellerate is church management software for organizing member and family records, attendance, giving, groups and visitor follow-up. Profiles can include customizable information alongside visits, meetings and small-group involvement. Visitor tools assign follow-up, capture results and feedback, and report on retention and assimilation. For groups and classes, the software supports attendance, online leader reporting and growth analysis. Contribution tools cover tithes and pledges, check scanning, imports from online giving services, statements and reports. Check-in can use barcodes, touchscreens or attendants for child pickup, events, youth and volunteers. ServePoint adds volunteer scheduling, reminders, conflict notifications and resource sharing. Users can adjust fields, tabs, picklists, views and reports; the support team also offers report creation. Excellerate has desktop products and Atom cloud access, which supports simultaneous users on computers, tablets and phones with automatic backups. The desktop church-management and check-in products are Windows-only and do not require internet access. Check-in can also work offline and at remote locations without a network. A 100-member desktop plan is listed at $145 once; cloud pricing is also listed.