Resource Review · Church Management Software
ChMeetings
A church management platform built for the whole world, not just the United States — and the only serious option with a real free tier for small congregations.
- Editor rating
- 4.4 / 5
- Starting price
- Free, then $19.99/mo
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web · iOS · Android
- Developer
- ChMeetings
- Launched
- 2017
The verdict
ChMeetings has quietly become the favorite of small and mid-sized congregations outside the US — multilingual, genuinely affordable, and the rare ChMS with a free tier that is not a 30-day trial in disguise.
Try ChMeetings ↗Opens chmeetings.com
ChMeetings is church management software (a ChMS, in the genre shorthand) that handles the unglamorous backbone of running a congregation — member records, attendance, events, donations, group communication, child check-in — and bundles it into a single web app with mobile companions for iOS and Android. It is not the loudest name in the category. In the United States, Planning Center dominates the conversation and Tithe.ly owns the giving lane. But step outside North America and ChMeetings starts showing up everywhere: small parishes in Brazil, growing Pentecostal churches in West Africa, Arabic-speaking congregations across the Middle East, Spanish-speaking parishes in Latin America. The product is built for them, not retrofitted for them.
The single biggest practical difference between ChMeetings and most of its competitors is the pricing floor. It does not start at $50/month. It does not require a sales call. It does not gate the core feature set behind a quote. Churches with 100 members or fewer can use it free, forever, and that is not a teaser — it is the deliberate on-ramp the company has built its growth around. The paid plans, when you need them, begin at $19.99/month, which is roughly a third of what Planning Center costs for a comparable congregation size.
The catch — and there is one, because there always is — is that ChMeetings prioritizes breadth over depth. It will do almost everything a small or mid-sized church needs. It will not do any one of those things as well as the best-in-class specialist tool. For congregations that need a single, affordable, multilingual system to run the whole operation, it is one of the best values on the market. For larger US churches with complex worship-team scheduling needs or sophisticated donor analytics, it is the wrong starting point.
✓ The good
- Real free tier up to 100 members — not a trial, not a tease, the actual product for small congregations
- Genuinely multilingual interface — English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, and more, with a translated UI rather than just translated help docs
- Affordable paid tiers — starting at $19.99/month, which undercuts Planning Center and Breeze for similar feature sets
- Integrated donations and communication — online giving, SMS, email, and push notifications all live in the same app instead of three subscriptions
- Child check-in that actually works on cheap hardware — label printers and tablets, no proprietary kiosk required
- Quick setup — most churches are running attendance and member records the same day, no implementation consultant needed
- Genuinely international support — the company answers tickets in multiple languages and time zones
✗ Watch out
- Worship-team and service-order tools are basic — Planning Center is in a different league here
- Donor analytics are functional, not sophisticated — no deep cohort or lapsed-giver dashboards (yet)
- Design language feels utilitarian — clean, but not the polished look churches accustomed to Pushpay or Subsplash will expect
- No native church website builder — Subsplash and Tithe.ly bundle one; ChMeetings does not
- Reporting is decent but the export options can feel limited compared to spreadsheet-first tools
Best for
- Small to mid-sized churches under ~500 members
- International and multilingual congregations
- Plant churches and revitalizations on a tight budget
- Congregations that want one app instead of five
Avoid if
- You run a multi-site megachurch with complex volunteer scheduling
- You need a fully bundled church website and app on one bill
- You want best-in-class donor analytics and segmentation
- You require deep custom integrations with US accounting platforms
What ChMeetings is
ChMeetings is an all-in-one church management system delivered as a web app with native iOS and Android companions. The product covers the standard ChMS pillars — a searchable member database, attendance tracking for services and small groups, an event calendar with RSVPs, mass communication via email and SMS and push notification, online and in-person donation handling, and a child check-in module that runs on a tablet plus a label printer. Pastors, administrators, and lay leaders share the same backend with role-based permissions, and members can self-serve through the mobile app to update their contact info, give, RSVP, and message their groups.
The company behind it is privately held and has been shipping the product since 2017. They are not based in Silicon Valley and they do not act like they are. Updates ship steadily rather than spectacularly, the documentation is multilingual, and the support team responds in the language of the church writing in. For a category dominated by US-based vendors with US-shaped assumptions about what a church looks like, that posture matters.
Why global congregations prefer ChMeetings
Most church management software is built in the United States, priced in dollars, and quietly assumes a 200-to-2,000-member suburban congregation with a paid administrator, a worship team that schedules months in advance, and a donor base that gives through ACH. That description fits a real slice of the global church. It does not fit the majority of it. ChMeetings was built by a team that took the global majority as the default user, not the edge case, and the product reflects that choice in a hundred small ways.
The interface translates into a long list of languages — English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, and more — and the translations are not afterthoughts. The donations module handles multiple currencies and regional payment processors, not just Stripe-in-USD. The SMS pricing is realistic for churches sending in countries where SMS is still the dominant communication channel. The free tier exists because the company knows that a 60-member congregation in Lagos or Lima cannot subscribe to a $79-per-month US product. None of this sounds like a feature on a marketing page. In practice it is transformative for the churches it serves.
Multi-language interface and international focus — the moat
ChMeetings ships with native interface support for English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, and a growing list of additional languages, and the language setting follows the user — so a single church can have its admin working in English, its bookkeeper in Spanish, and its pastoral team in Portuguese, all on the same database. Right-to-left rendering for Arabic is handled at the layout level rather than as a bolt-on, which sounds trivial until you have used software that did not do it. Email and SMS templates can be authored in the language of the recipient and the system will pick the right version per member.
Why this matters: the practical reality of running church software in a multilingual country is that the volunteer treasurer is not going to learn English to update giving records, and the youth pastor is not going to translate a UI in their head every Sunday morning. A multilingual product means the people who actually do the work can do the work. It is the single largest reason international congregations end up on ChMeetings instead of on Planning Center or Breeze — both of which are excellent, both of which are effectively English-only at the interface level.
A free tier up to 100 members that is actually free
The free plan covers congregations up to 100 members and includes the core feature set — member records, attendance tracking, events with RSVPs, basic email and SMS communication (with metered SMS credits), and donation handling. It is not a 30-day trial. It is not a feature-stripped demo. It is the real product, with the explicit promise that small churches can run on it indefinitely. The company gates premium-tier features (more communication volume, larger membership caps, advanced reporting) behind the paid plans, but the everyday operating loop of a small church is available at zero cost.
Why this matters: a free tier of this scope is genuinely rare in the ChMS category. Planning Center has free Services for very small teams, but its core People module is paid. Breeze ChMS is affordable but has no free tier. Tithe.ly is free to give but charges processing fees and offers limited admin tools at no cost. For a church plant counting every dollar, the gap between $0 and $50/month is the difference between using real software and running everything out of a shared spreadsheet. ChMeetings is one of the only serious products that closes that gap.
Donations and communication in one app — not three subscriptions
Most US churches end up paying for three things: a ChMS for member data, a giving platform for donations, and a messaging tool for SMS and push. ChMeetings bundles all three. Online giving works through integrated payment processors with support for multiple currencies, recurring gifts, designated funds, and giver self-service through the mobile app. The communication module covers segmented email, transactional SMS with prepaid credits, and push notifications, all sent from member-aware lists so a query like "everyone in the youth group who has not given this month" is one filter, not three database exports.
Why this matters: the integration is not just convenience — it is data quality. When giving, attendance, and communication live in the same system, the church can actually see the picture. Lapsed givers can be flagged automatically. Group leaders can text their groups without exporting a list. Year-end giving statements pull from the same database as the rest of the records. For small and mid-sized churches that do not have a tech-savvy administrator to wire three SaaS tools together, having it all in one app is the difference between using the data and merely collecting it.
Pricing
Free
$0
Up to 100 members. Includes membership records, attendance, events, basic communication, and donations. The genuine free tier — not a trial.
Starter
$19.99/mo
Up to 500 members. Adds SMS credits, more communication features, and unlocks additional reporting. The on-ramp for growing congregations.
Growth
$39.99/mo
Up to 1,500 members. The balanced default — full feature set, child check-in at scale, and the donation tools most mid-sized churches need.
Pro
From ~$59.99/mo
Larger congregations and multi-campus setups. Pricing scales with member count; contact ChMeetings for current rates above ~3,000 members.
The free tier is the headline. Up to 100 members, no credit card, no countdown — the standard small-church operating loop available indefinitely at zero cost. Most small congregations will live here for years.
The paid plans start at $19.99/month for up to 500 members and step up to $39.99/month for up to 1,500 — which is roughly the size at which most churches start noticing they have outgrown their spreadsheets and need real software. The Growth tier is the balanced default for established mid-sized congregations and is the plan most paying customers land on.
Above 1,500 members the pricing scales with congregation size and the company quotes per situation; expect numbers in the $59–$99/month range depending on membership and feature mix. Even at the top of the published tiers, ChMeetings undercuts comparable Planning Center bundles by a meaningful margin.
Payment processing fees on donations are separate and follow the underlying processor rates — typically 2.9% + a small per-transaction fee — which is normal for the category. There are no setup fees and no required annual contracts.
Where ChMeetings falls behind
No first-party church website builder. Subsplash and Tithe.ly both bundle a polished site-and-app builder; ChMeetings expects you to bring your own. For churches that want a single vendor for site, app, and management, that is a real gap.
Worship-team scheduling is basic. Planning Center Services is the gold standard for service order, song library, key tracking, and volunteer rotation, and ChMeetings is not trying to compete with it head-to-head. Music directors at midsize-and-up churches will feel the difference quickly.
Donor analytics are functional rather than rich. You can see who is giving, what they are giving, and to which funds — but you will not find the deep lapsed-giver cohort dashboards or year-over-year segmentation that purpose-built giving platforms surface.
Design polish lags the category leaders. The interface is clean and clear, but it does not have the visual gloss of Pushpay or Subsplash. Churches whose members will judge the product by its aesthetics may notice.
US-centric integrations are thinner. Accounting handoffs to QuickBooks and other US tools work but are less seamless than what you get from a US-first vendor.
ChMeetings vs. Planning Center vs. Tithe.ly
These three products are often shopped together but they are not the same kind of tool. ChMeetings is an all-in-one management platform built for global, small-to-mid-sized congregations with affordability as the organizing principle. Planning Center is a modular suite — People, Services, Giving, Check-Ins, Groups, Calendar, Publishing — that is best-in-class in several lanes (especially Services for worship teams) and is the default choice for US churches above ~500 members. Tithe.ly started as a giving platform and has expanded into a broader stack including church apps and websites, with giving still the strongest part of the product.
Different strengths. Planning Center is better at worship-team workflow, depth of feature in each module, and the polish a US megachurch culture expects. Tithe.ly is better at donor experience, giving conversion, and the bundled site-plus-app deliverable. ChMeetings is broader at a far lower price point and is genuinely usable in languages other than English, which neither competitor really is.
The honest decision tree: if your church is in the US, has 500+ members, and worship-team scheduling is a daily pain, start with Planning Center. If giving is your central problem and you want a giving-first vendor that also does an app, look at Tithe.ly. If you are a small or mid-sized congregation — especially one outside the US, or one operating in a language other than English, or one trying to consolidate three SaaS bills into one — ChMeetings is the value pick and is hard to beat on price-to-coverage.
The bottom line
ChMeetings is the church management software for the global majority of congregations — small to mid-sized, often multilingual, often outside the US, and almost always working with a tighter budget than the category leaders assume. It will not out-feature Planning Center on worship-team scheduling or Tithe.ly on donor experience, and it is not trying to. What it does, it does for a fraction of the price, in the language the team actually speaks, with a free tier that is genuinely free. For the churches it fits, it is one of the best values in the category and worth a serious look before defaulting to the US-default options.
Alternatives to ChMeetings
Planning Center
The US standard for mid-to-large churches. Best-in-class worship-team scheduling and a deep modular suite. Pricier, English-first.
Tithe.ly
Giving-first platform that has grown into a full church stack with apps and websites. Strongest where donations are the central problem.
Subsplash
Bundled app, website, giving, and media platform. Polished design language, higher price floor, popular with US churches that want one vendor for everything.
Sermonary
Sermon prep and outlining software for pastors. Not a ChMS — pair it with one of the above if you also need member, giving, and event tools.
Frequently asked questions
- Is the free plan really free, or is it a trial?
- Really free. Up to 100 members, no credit card required, no expiration. The company gates higher-tier features and larger member counts behind paid plans, but the everyday operating loop of a small church — members, attendance, events, basic communication, donations — is available at $0/month indefinitely.
- What languages does ChMeetings support?
- The interface is translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, and a growing list of additional languages. Language settings follow the user, so a single church can have admins, treasurers, and pastoral staff each working in their own language on the same database.
- How does ChMeetings compare to Planning Center on price?
- Roughly one-third the cost for comparable congregation sizes. ChMeetings starts at $19.99/month for up to 500 members; Planning Center bundles for a similar church will typically land in the $60–$100/month range depending on which modules you turn on.
- Does ChMeetings handle online giving?
- Yes. Online and in-person donations are part of the core product, with support for recurring gifts, designated funds, and giver self-service through the mobile app. Processing fees follow the underlying payment processor rates and are separate from the ChMeetings subscription.
- Can ChMeetings do child check-in?
- Yes. The check-in module runs on a standard tablet plus a label printer and does not require proprietary kiosk hardware, which keeps the setup cost low for small churches.
- Is there a native mobile app for members?
- Yes — iOS and Android apps let members update contact info, give, RSVP to events, message their groups, and receive push notifications. Staff and lay leaders use the same apps with role-based permissions for admin tasks.
- Will ChMeetings replace our worship-team scheduling tool?
- For small teams, probably. For larger music ministries that need song libraries, key tracking, multi-week rehearsal scheduling, and tight integration with chord charts, Planning Center Services is meaningfully deeper and most worship leaders will prefer it.