ChurchBuddy vs OnStage

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.

OnStage is a service-planning platform for churches, bringing event preparation, people, songs and team communication into one place. Teams can set up events and rehearsals, create setlists, assign people to positions and reuse event templates. Its song library handles chords, lyrics and song structures, with PDF import, annotations, key changes and capo settings. Team and event chats support messages, attachments, polls, replies and read receipts. Events, rehearsals and blockouts can sync to Google Calendar; that sync is available on iPhone, iPad and Android. The app also supports offline access during rehearsals and services, and runs on Android, iOS, macOS and web. Starter is free, does not expire and does not require card details, but is limited to five members, 200MB of storage and five events per month. Paid plans are billed monthly or yearly, with member sizes from 20 to 1,000 and different storage and event limits. The listed 20-member plan costs $10 a month; yearly billing is available at 15% off.