Faithlife Proclaim

What Faithlife Proclaim is

Faithlife Proclaim is presentation software for churches. It drives the screens in your sanctuary — sermon slides, song lyrics, announcement loops, scripture passages, video clips, lower-thirds for live-stream — and the confidence monitors on stage that show the pastor and worship leader what is up next. It runs as a native macOS or Windows app on the operator’s laptop, with separate display outputs feeding the room and the broadcast encoder.

What makes it different from a fancy PowerPoint is the structure around a service. Every Sunday is a "service" object in the cloud — an ordered list of items (welcome loop, opening song, scripture reading, sermon, response song, announcements, closing) that the entire team edits during the week and then runs live on Sunday. The same service file is the live operator’s show file, the worship leader’s confidence monitor, the stream tech’s broadcast feed, and the post-service archive — one source of truth instead of four.

Why mid-sized churches prefer Faithlife Proclaim

The single biggest practical difference between Proclaim and almost every other worship app is that the service file lives in the cloud, not on one volunteer’s laptop. Three people can be editing the same Sunday morning service at the same time — the worship pastor adding songs from home, the tech director swapping the announcement loop from the office, the volunteer A/V lead tweaking the sermon scripture reference from a coffee shop — and every change appears on every screen within seconds. This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is transformative.

The downstream effect is that Sunday morning gets boring in the best possible way. The operator pulls up the service, plugs in the projector, and runs the show — no "did you send me the latest version?" Slack thread, no USB stick swap at 7:50am, no rebuilding a missing song because someone forgot to email the file. The cloud model also means a laptop dying mid-service is a recoverable problem instead of a catastrophe: log into any other Mac or PC, sign in, the service is right there.

Cloud-based, real-time collaborative editing — the differentiator

This is the feature Proclaim leads with, and it is genuinely unique among the big three worship apps. Every service is stored in the Faithlife cloud the moment you create it. Anyone on your team with editor access can open that service from their own computer and start working on it — adding songs, tweaking lyric arrangements, swapping a Bible passage, dragging in a video — and everyone else editing it sees those changes in real time, the way Google Docs works for documents. There is no "check out, check in," no merge conflicts, no "I made my changes on the wrong copy" disasters.

For a single-laptop, single-operator setup, this matters less. For any church where the worship pastor, the tech director, and a volunteer or two all touch the Sunday service during the week, it eliminates an entire category of weekly stress. ProPresenter and EasyWorship are both file-based — the service lives on one computer, and sharing means exporting, emailing, importing, and crossing your fingers that the fonts and media all came through. Proclaim sidesteps all of that. The trade-off (and there is one) is that you are betting on your internet connection. A flaky church-office Wi-Fi network will make the editing experience frustrating.

Logos and Faithlife ecosystem integration

Proclaim is made by the same company that makes Logos Bible Software, Faithlife Sermons, and Faithlife Equip — and the connective tissue between those tools is the second big reason churches pick it. Need John 3:16 in three translations on the screen for Sunday? Type the reference into Proclaim and the verse appears as a styled slide, in any translation your Logos library owns, with no copy-paste from a browser. Building a sermon series? The pastor’s outline from Faithlife Sermons can feed slide content directly into Proclaim instead of being retyped. Commentary blocks, study notes, and original-language word studies from Logos can drop in the same way.

If your church is already inside the Faithlife ecosystem, this saves real minutes every week and eliminates a class of typos and reference errors. If your church is not — if your pastor preaches from Accordance or a paper Bible and your slides come from a Google Doc — the integration is less compelling. Proclaim still works fine as a standalone presentation app in that case, but you are leaving its biggest secondary advantage on the table. The more of the Faithlife stack you adopt, the better the fit gets.

Modular subscription tier model

Proclaim is sold as a subscription, tiered by the size of the congregation rather than by feature set. Every tier gets the same software — full collaborative editing, full ecosystem integration, full output options. What scales with the tier is editor seat count, cloud storage, the size of the included media library, and the support level. A church plant of 60 people pays roughly $30/mo. A growing congregation of 400 lands somewhere in the $55–$75/mo band. A multi-site or large single-site church runs $110/mo and up.

This is a notable contrast with ProPresenter, which is sold as a one-time license per machine (currently around $399 per computer for the standard version, more for advanced editions and add-ons). The math depends on how many machines you run and how long you keep the software. A two-computer church paying $30/mo for Proclaim spends about $720 over two years; a two-computer ProPresenter church spends ~$800 once and is done — but is then locked to that version unless they pay again to upgrade. Proclaim includes every future upgrade automatically. Different models, different trade-offs.

Pricing

Where Faithlife Proclaim falls behind

No free tier. ProPresenter and EasyWorship both sell perpetual licenses you can use forever without further payment, and OpenLP is free. Proclaim is subscription-only — if your church genuinely cannot or will not pay monthly, this app is off the table no matter how good it is.

No motion-graphics ceiling. ProPresenter 7 is still the high end for layered video, alpha channels, programmable propresenter modules, and complex stage-display layouts. If you are producing a worship night with motion backgrounds, IMAG, custom transitions, and a video team running ten layers of compositing, Proclaim will frustrate you. For a typical Sunday morning, it is more than enough.

No iPad or Linux client. The operator station has to be Mac or Windows. Some churches that have standardized on iPad-based stage manager workflows will find this awkward, and Linux-based A/V purists are out of luck.

Cloud dependency is real. The local app caches enough to run a service even if internet drops at the worst moment, but the editing and collaboration experience during the week assumes a working connection. A church in a building with unreliable Wi-Fi or in a rural area with thin broadband will feel friction Proclaim users in well-connected buildings never notice.

Smaller theme marketplace than ProPresenter. The third-party ecosystem of paid themes, motion loops, and templates is broader on ProPresenter. Proclaim has a solid built-in library and a respectable add-on store, but the long tail of designer-made themes is thinner.

Faithlife Proclaim vs. ProPresenter vs. EasyWorship

Different strengths. ProPresenter is better at high-end production — multi-layer video, advanced stage displays, programmable modules, broadcast pipelines that look like a small TV station. EasyWorship is the established workhorse for traditional churches that want a one-time-purchase, Windows-native app with a familiar interface and a strong song database. Proclaim is broader on team workflow (collaborative cloud editing), ecosystem integration (Logos, Faithlife Sermons), and predictable subscription pricing.

On price model: ProPresenter is roughly $399 per computer (one-time) for the standard edition, more for advanced editions and broadcast tooling. EasyWorship is a perpetual license around $400 with a less aggressive upgrade cadence. Proclaim is subscription-only, tiered by congregation size, with every upgrade included. Over five years a two-machine ProPresenter church might spend less than a Proclaim church of the same size — but the Proclaim church gets every new feature for free and never has to budget a re-purchase.

On who should pick which: production-heavy churches with serious video teams and one or two operator stations should keep looking at ProPresenter. Established traditional churches that want a familiar, owned-outright Windows app should look at EasyWorship. Mid-sized churches with multi-staff worship and tech teams who already touch Logos or Faithlife Sermons should put Proclaim at the top of their short list — it is the worship app that respects collaborative workflow as a first-class feature instead of an afterthought.

Alternatives to Faithlife Proclaim