- Starting price
- Custom quote
- Free tier
- No
- Platforms
- Custom dashboard · Consulting · Existing church systems
- Developer
- Churchlytics / Josh Breland
- Launched
- 2019 or earlier
- Updated
- Aug 9, 2026
The verdict
Churchlytics articulates a real problem: churches often possess attendance, giving, groups, volunteer, web, and communication data without a reliable way to see it together. A consultant who begins with definitions and a data audit can produce a better answer than another generic dashboard subscription. The public website, however, is too sparse to support a confident purchase. Treat the introductory call as vendor discovery, request a paid fixed-scope audit before a larger build, and require a written architecture, security model, ownership and export plan, maintenance schedule, total price, and current reference customer.
Try Churchlytics ↗Opens churchlytics.com
Churchlytics presents itself as a church analytics and data-strategy service whose goal is to place an organization’s important information in one useful dashboard. The engagement begins with a short call, moves into a Church Data Audit, and then into custom dashboard design. That makes Churchlytics different from ChurchStats, Church Metrics, Gloo Insights, or a church-management report library: there is no public self-service application to open, fixed feature matrix to compare, or plan to buy online. The consultant is the product.
Founder Josh Breland brings church-side experience in communications and strategic initiatives, including work at College Park Church in Indianapolis. The site and older essays show a healthy emphasis on asking what a church is trying to accomplish before choosing numbers. Topics include useful church metrics, giving, web analytics, church-management systems, project management, search visibility, and the danger of collecting information without turning it into decisions. A companion Church Smarter Podcast reinforces the consulting and education posture.
The public evidence is thin at the review date. Churchlytics does not publish a price range, sample statement of work, named dashboard technology, data-source list, connector behavior, refresh frequency, implementation timeline, security page, privacy notice, data-processing agreement, retention policy, service level, support plan, export method, ownership language, or recent detailed case study. Much of the visible editorial content dates to 2019. The site still responds and invites conversations, but a functioning landing page is not proof of current delivery capacity or product maturity.
We reviewed the available service, about, blog, and podcast material and searched for public commercial, technical, privacy, and customer documentation. We did not conduct the introductory call, purchase an audit, access a client dashboard, verify current staffing, interview a reference, or inspect a proposal. This review therefore evaluates Churchlytics as an interesting custom-services lead with substantial diligence still required, not as a tested analytics platform.
✓ The good
- Starts with questions - the data-audit model can prevent a church from buying charts before defining decisions
- Church operating context - attendance, generosity, groups, communications, ministry flow, and pastoral concerns are familiar territory
- Custom scope - a dashboard can reflect the church’s terminology, campuses, systems, calendar, and leadership rhythm
- Cross-system ambition - the central promise addresses fragmentation rather than forcing every ministry into one transactional system
- Human interpretation - consulting can uncover conflicting definitions and broken processes that software alone will not detect
- Short first conversation - a 15-minute discovery call is a low-commitment way to test whether the service is active and relevant
- Educational posture - available essays encourage measurement in service of mission rather than measurement for its own sake
- Potentially tool-independent - a consultant may be able to work around the systems a church already owns
✗ Watch out
- No public price - leadership cannot estimate whether the audit, build, licenses, maintenance, or change requests fit the budget
- No technical architecture - buyers cannot tell what dashboard, warehouse, connector, hosting, or refresh method is proposed
- No security or privacy documentation - highly sensitive giving and people data requires more than an informal assurance
- No published integration list - Planning Center, Pushpay, Rock, Breeze, spreadsheets, accounting, web, and email sources are not confirmed
- Limited recent evidence - older articles do not establish current service capacity, product investment, or customer outcomes
- Consultant dependency - custom logic can become difficult to maintain if definitions, credentials, and transformation code are undocumented
- Unclear deliverable ownership - the public site does not say who owns dashboard files, queries, data models, or connectors after exit
- Not instant software - discovery, cleanup, modeling, validation, training, and adoption are a project rather than a quick account setup
Best for
- Churches with several data systems and a specific leadership decision they cannot answer reliably
- Organizations that want a data audit before purchasing another platform
- Larger churches with an internal owner who can validate definitions and maintain the finished workflow
- Teams prepared to negotiate security, ownership, documentation, support, and exit terms
- Leaders who value a custom scorecard more than a large generic report catalog
Avoid if
- You need transparent fixed pricing and immediate self-service onboarding
- Your church has not identified an owner, decision cadence, or source-of-truth definitions
- You cannot grant a consultant appropriately controlled access to church data
- You require public SOC 2, ISO 27001, subprocessor, uptime, residency, or incident-response documentation before a call
- A standard report inside your current church-management, giving, or accounting system already answers the question
What Churchlytics is
Churchlytics should be evaluated as a boutique professional-services engagement. The buyer is not simply licensing charts; it is hiring someone to discover the church’s questions, inspect source systems, reconcile definitions, design a model, and deliver a reporting experience. The quality of interviews, data logic, documentation, and knowledge transfer matters at least as much as the dashboard’s appearance.
A dashboard is the visible end of a much larger system. Attendance may mean worship headcount, check-ins, unique people, devices, households, or service totals. Giving may be cash received, pledge progress, recurring commitments, fund-specific revenue, or household generosity. Groups may be registrations, active rosters, weekly participation, or pastoral connection. If Churchlytics helps define those concepts and their provenance, it creates lasting value. If it merely combines exports into attractive charts, the church inherits a fragile report.
Why a custom church data audit can beat another off-the-shelf analytics account
Most church data problems begin before visualization. Ministries use different names for the same person, staff count events differently, old records are incomplete, campuses follow different processes, and the leadership question changes faster than a vendor’s report catalog. A consultant can sit with stakeholders, trace the numbers, expose contradictions, and design around the actual decision. That discovery is Churchlytics’ strongest implied advantage.
Custom work is also where risk hides. Require the engagement to produce assets the church can inspect and operate: a system diagram, source inventory, metric dictionary, transformation logic, access matrix, refresh runbook, error alerts, validation evidence, training recording, credential register, backup and export instructions, and an exit handoff. The dashboard should reduce dependence on one person, not encode it invisibly.
Church Data Audit: make the first deliverable valuable even if the build stops
A useful audit inventories systems, owners, exports, identifiers, API access, history, duplicates, missing values, retention, consent, reporting definitions, pain points, and the decisions leaders want to make. It should identify quick improvements inside existing systems as well as genuine integration needs. The result should be a prioritized roadmap with effort, risk, and cost—not simply a recommendation to proceed with the consultant’s dashboard.
Negotiate the audit as a bounded phase with a fixed scope and reusable deliverable. Supply representative, minimized samples before broad production access. Include the executive pastor, finance owner, ChMS administrator, ministry leaders, and someone responsible for privacy or safeguarding. If Churchlytics cannot describe the audit output, price, timeline, and data-handling method clearly, do not progress to implementation.
Custom dashboard: design for decisions, definitions, and data confidence
The site promises one beautiful place to view important church information. A worthwhile dashboard should answer a small set of recurring questions, show current period and trend, allow relevant campus or ministry filters, expose the definition and last refresh, indicate incomplete data, and link exceptions back to the responsible source workflow. An executive view and an operational view usually need different detail.
Beauty can disguise uncertainty. Every metric should state source, grain, inclusion rules, exclusions, time zone, update schedule, owner, and comparison logic. Reconcile totals with finance and operational systems before launch. Maintain a test set of known records. Display freshness and failure states rather than leaving last month’s number looking current. Do not infer spiritual maturity from attendance or giving alone.
Security and privacy: church analytics can expose a congregation in one screen
A combined dashboard may expose giving, attendance patterns, children’s participation, volunteer service, household relationships, addresses, group involvement, web behavior, and pastoral follow-up. Even when leaders want aggregate trends, underlying integrations can carry person-level records. Churchlytics publishes no clear privacy or security documentation, so the contract and architecture must fill that gap.
Require least-privilege source accounts, MFA, named users, role separation, encryption, approved regions, subprocessors, logging, backup, incident notification, vulnerability practices, retention, deletion, and a data-processing agreement. Prefer aggregate or pseudonymous data wherever drill-down is unnecessary. Never place counseling notes, prayer details, health information, child-safeguarding records, or narrative pastoral care in a general BI environment. Revoke consultant access at project end and verify deletion.
Pricing
Introductory call
15 minutes
The published process begins with a short conversation. Use it to confirm that Churchlytics is actively accepting work, identify the legal entity and team, describe one decision problem, and request a written audit proposal.
Church Data Audit
Custom quote
No price or standard deliverable is public. Ask for source inventory, metric dictionary, data-quality findings, access-risk review, decision map, recommended architecture, effort estimate, and a reusable written report.
Custom dashboard build
Custom quote
Confirm implementation, licenses, connectors, historical migration, validation, training, documentation, launch support, revisions, and acceptance criteria. Separate one-time labor from recurring software and hosting.
Maintenance and enhancement
Not published
Ask who repairs changed APIs, reconciles failed refreshes, adds metrics, updates permissions, corrects source data, and supports leadership. Obtain hourly, retainer, or fixed-service rates before launch.
Third-party software
Potentially additional
A custom dashboard may depend on BI, database, automation, cloud, or connector licenses. Require every dependency, account owner, renewal, capacity threshold, and exit cost in the proposal.
Churchlytics publishes no dollar figure, so any online estimate would be invention. Custom analytics commonly combines discovery labor, data cleanup, dashboard implementation, third-party licenses, hosting, connector work, training, and maintenance. Ask for those components separately.
A fixed-scope data audit is the safest initial purchase. It can create value even if the church chooses a different implementer or discovers that its existing ChMS reports are sufficient. Avoid an open-ended access arrangement described only as “getting all the data together.”
For the build, use milestones tied to artifacts and acceptance tests: architecture, approved metric dictionary, source connection, validated prototype, role testing, training, documentation, and production handoff. Hold back final acceptance until totals reconcile across at least two normal reporting cycles.
Recurring costs deserve a three-year view. BI seats, database usage, API middleware, automation tasks, storage, consultant retainers, and change requests can exceed the original build. Include price escalation and minimum commitment in the comparison.
The cheapest option may be disciplined use of tools already owned. Before funding a custom system, test whether consistent definitions, saved reports, scheduled exports, and a small leadership scorecard solve most of the problem. Custom integration should address a documented gap, not provide novelty.
Where Churchlytics falls behind
Commercial transparency. Even a typical audit range, example package, timeline, and included deliverables would help churches self-qualify.
Trust documentation. The site needs privacy, security, legal entity, data-processing, incident, subprocessor, retention, and deletion information before soliciting access to church records.
Technical specificity. Supported systems, connection methods, dashboard stack, refresh cadence, ownership, hosting, alerts, exports, and maintenance are not public.
Current proof. Recent dated case studies should show the original question, sources, implementation, validated outcome, staff adoption, and customer contactable by permission.
Service continuity. Current team capacity, support hours, response expectations, business continuity, and handoff if the principal becomes unavailable need definition.
Churchlytics vs. ChurchStats vs. native reports vs. a general BI consultant
Churchlytics offers discovery and a custom build, while ChurchStats offers a defined subscription platform with public pricing and reusable church-health features. The consultant can adapt to unusual systems and decisions; the product can reduce implementation uncertainty and key-person dependency. A fixed-scope Churchlytics audit and a ChurchStats trial are reasonable parallel tests when the problem is not yet clear.
Native Planning Center, giving, accounting, web, and email reports are far less expensive and preserve the original data context. They may be sufficient once definitions and reporting cadence improve. Custom integration earns its cost only when a recurring decision genuinely depends on reconciled cross-system information.
A general Power BI, Tableau, or Looker Studio consultant may bring a larger technical bench and deeper governance while lacking church vocabulary. Churchlytics’ ministry context can shorten discovery, but buyers should compare architecture, security, documentation, ownership, current references, support continuity, and full three-year cost—not simply whether a sample dashboard looks attractive.
The bottom line
Churchlytics has the right philosophical starting point: a church should clarify mission, questions, definitions, and data quality before celebrating a dashboard. Bespoke guidance can be exactly what an organization with several disconnected systems needs. The current public footprint does not establish enough about price, architecture, protection, maintenance, or recent results to recommend an immediate build. Take the short call, but make the next step a documented, fixed-scope data audit. Proceed only if Churchlytics supplies credible current references and a contract that leaves the church with validated numbers, understandable logic, controlled access, reusable documentation, and a safe exit.
Alternatives to Churchlytics
ChurchStatsA current church-health analytics platform with public plan pricing and configurable ministry metrics.
Church MetricsA focused church metric-tracking option for teams that can work within a standard self-service model.Gloo InsightsBroader church and community insight tooling inside the Gloo ecosystem, depending on the question being asked.
Planning CenterNative reports and lists may answer operational questions without a separate data warehouse.Microsoft Power BIA general BI platform for churches with capable internal data and governance staff; implementation remains your responsibility.Frequently asked questions
Is Churchlytics a software platform?
The public site describes a consulting process: introductory call, Church Data Audit, and custom dashboards. It does not present a standard self-service application, public feature tiers, or online checkout.
How much does Churchlytics cost?
No current public price was available at review time. Request separate figures for the audit, implementation, software licenses, hosting, migration, training, maintenance, support, and future changes.
Which church systems does Churchlytics integrate with?
The site does not publish a dependable current connector list. Provide your exact ChMS, giving, accounting, website, email, groups, and check-in systems and require a written connection and refresh plan.
What should a Church Data Audit deliver?
At minimum: a system and owner inventory, decision map, metric dictionary, data-quality findings, privacy and access risks, recommended architecture, prioritized roadmap, implementation estimate, and reusable written report.
Is church dashboard data sensitive?
Yes. Combining attendance, giving, household, group, volunteer, web, and communications records can reveal far more than any source alone. Use least privilege, aggregate where possible, exclude pastoral-care narratives, and contract for security and deletion.
How do we avoid vendor lock-in?
Own the source accounts and licenses; require exports, queries, models, documentation, credentials, source mappings, refresh runbooks, and training; and define transition assistance and deletion in the contract.
What is the best first metric?
Start with a decision, not a fashionable KPI. Choose one question leadership asks repeatedly, define the population and period precisely, reconcile it with the source, assign an owner, and test what action changes when the number changes.
Sources & further reading
More Church Management Software
B1 ChurchA genuinely free, open-source church platform - app, website, giving and check-in on one database - run by an Oklahoma nonprofit. The catch is not the price - it is that the vendor own docs call the native app deprecated.
Involv Chat (church.chat)Involv Chat combines ministry-team messaging, rosters, blocked dates and service scheduling in a focused church workspace—useful when leaders protect volunteer consent and resist turning attendance or gifts data into a spiritual score.
ChurchSoftwareChurchSoftware—formerly StoreHouse—offers an unusually broad church-management core for $0, including giving, check-in, accounting and a shared mobile app, while charging transparently for vendor-heavy extras.
Pastor Notes AppA two-app system that lets leaders publish sermon notes and invite live congregational response while attendees use the free Bible Notes companion—but its pricing math, refund terms and app privacy disclosures need correction before a church commits.
Take RootA low-cost, offline-friendly relationship tracker built specifically for evangelism and discipleship follow-up—more intentional than a spreadsheet, but its old generic privacy policy does not adequately describe the sensitive ministry data the product exists to hold.
Develop.MeDevelop.Me packages course building, cohorts, discussion, assignments, gamification and mobile learning for churches and mission-driven organizations—with unlimited learners on paid plans, but a vague free tier and a 2022 website privacy notice leave procurement questions open.