- Starting price
- $9/mo or $89/year; 14-day trial
- Free tier
- No
- Platforms
- Web · English and Spanish · Planning Center integration · CSV import
- Developer
- FlockConnect LLC
- Launched
- 2025; Starter generally available 2026
- Updated
- Aug 9, 2026
The verdict
FlockConnect has one of the clearest pastoral ideas in church software: track whether people are known and connected, make care ownership visible, and require a person to approve every AI suggestion. Its public documentation is unusually candid about roles, sensitive data, subprocessors, retention, AI redaction limits, and reviewed writeback. Buy what exists, though. Starter is a $9 notes-and-care-report product; Collie, relationship maps, connection health, SMS, and most of the distinctive pitch begin with Small, which is publicly priced at $49 per month but still marked coming soon.
Try FlockConnect ↗Opens flockconnect.com
FlockConnect calls itself a Church Relationship Manager, or ChRM. Where a church management system records people, attendance, groups, giving, check-ins, and events, FlockConnect tries to map the relationships between people and turn those signals into a pastoral care queue. Its public demonstrations show “connection health” across care contact, attendance, group life, friendships, and giving cadence; a weekly Mission Feed; relationship networks; suggested introductions; interaction notes; care reports; member assessments; calendar follow-up; geographic matching; and an AI companion named Collie that explains why it surfaced a person and waits for human approval.
The distinction is meaningful. A person can appear active in operational reports while having few trusted relationships, carrying a private burden, or slowly withdrawing. FlockConnect wants a team to notice before absence becomes a departure. It cites older church-growth research associated with Win and Charles Arn and Flavil Yeakley to popularize a “seven-friend threshold.” That is a useful ministry prompt, not a universal predictive law. Friendship count is difficult to define, people and congregations differ, and relational care should not become a mechanized retention score.
The current product is also narrower than its homepage. As of August 2026, only Starter is open for self-service purchase. It costs $9 monthly or $89 annually for any church size and focuses on member notes, interaction notes, care reports, a people directory, households, Planning Center People sync, calendar writeback, forms, analytics, and export. The pricing page says Collie and relationship insights begin with Small. Small through Network have announced prices from $49 to $499-plus per month but are still “coming soon.” A trial of Starter therefore does not validate the headline relationship-intelligence experience.
This review is based on the live marketing site, current pricing, public help center, Planning Center guide, privacy policy, and terms. We did not create a church workspace, import real member records, test permissions, run Collie, verify calculation quality, test Spanish localization, inspect security architecture, commission a penetration test, or interview pilot churches. Screens and workflows on vendor pages may be illustrative. The product is young enough that current availability, contract terms, and a data-protection review should carry more weight than roadmap breadth.
✓ The good
- A genuinely useful product category - relationship and care continuity are not reduced to attendance, giving, or database completeness
- Live Starter pricing is unusually accessible - $9 per church per month or $89 per year with unlimited pastors, admins, and volunteer Care Partners
- Human approval is central, not an afterthought - Collie is documented as advisory and cannot send messages or write externally on its own
- AI explanations preserve provenance - suggested actions include a “Why” line and the underlying records rather than an unexplained risk label
- Planning Center writeback is reviewed row by row - name or active-status changes move only when an authorized user chooses them
- Permissions acknowledge pastoral sensitivity - notes begin private and can be shared with selected roles or named care-team people
- Public privacy documentation is unusually detailed - sensitive categories, AI providers, redaction limits, subprocessors, retention, exports, and controller duties are named
- Giving is deliberately minimized - the relationship view uses cadence rather than raw gift amounts
- English and Spanish support broadens usefulness - pilots are described in the United States and Mexico
✗ Watch out
- The signature product is not generally available - Collie and relationship intelligence start at Small, which remains marked coming soon
- Starter may be mistaken for the full homepage demo - a $9 trial proves care notes, not the AI feed, relationship graph, drift detection, or mature integrations
- Only Planning Center People has native two-way sync today - other systems use CSV and Groups or Check-Ins are explicitly outside the current sync
- The evidence story is simplified - a seven-friend heuristic should not be presented as a universal causal cutoff or used to label an individual
- Churches carry the consent burden - the terms make the customer responsible for authority to process pastoral, child, location, giving-pattern, form, and communication data
- Pastoral data is exceptionally sensitive - prayer requests, care reports, religious affiliation, location, children, and health-adjacent details magnify breach and misuse consequences
- No published independent assurance was found - buyers should request security testing, incident history, availability evidence, DPA terms, recovery objectives, and access review
- Cancellation is not immediate deletion - the policy describes a 90-day reversible window plus possible backups, logs, provider retention, and legal holds
- The privacy policy contains launch-era wording - it describes the public marketing site and its Google advertising stack as not yet live even though the site is live, so implementation and policy should be reconciled
Best for
- Small churches needing an affordable shared pastoral-note and care-report system today
- Planning Center churches willing to pilot a separate relationship layer without replacing their operational ChMS
- Pastoral teams that can define note visibility, consent, safeguarding, retention, and care ownership before importing data
- Churches interested in future AI assistance but committed to source explanations and human approval for every member-facing action
- Bilingual English-Spanish ministries prepared to test the actual terminology and workflows with their care team
- Networks that want announced size-based pricing rather than per-seat charges and can wait for the larger plans to open
Avoid if
- You need Collie, relationship graphs, drift scoring, maps, or included SMS in production now—the public pricing page still marks those plans coming soon
- Your church does not have a lawful, transparent policy for pastoral notes, children’s records, assessments, location, giving signals, and sensitive religious data
- You need a complete ChMS for services, registrations, giving, accounting, check-ins, volunteer scheduling, mass communication, and member self-service
- You require native bidirectional integration with Breeze, Pushpay, Subsplash, Tithe.ly, Rock, or another non-Planning Center system today
- You want software to make pastoral judgments, send care messages, manage emergencies, or satisfy mandated-reporting duties autonomously
What FlockConnect is
Starter is a pastor-facing care workspace rather than a member social network. Adults with accounts can keep member notes, log interactions, file care reports, organize people and households, connect Planning Center, import CSV records, use forms or assessments, and place reviewed follow-up events on Google or Microsoft calendars. Church members do not create accounts; forms use time-limited, purpose-scoped secure links. Email comes first, and a limited opt-in SMS reminder can follow an incomplete assessment.
The future Small-and-above product adds the distinctive relationship model. Five signals inform a configurable connection-health view: recent care contact, attendance, group or ministry participation, friendship network, and giving cadence. Collie reviews permitted context, surfaces a short Mission Feed, explains the source records, answers natural-language questions, drafts a possible note or next step, and waits in an approval queue. Maps and drive time can help suggest nearby connections, while relationship views expose people with very few ties.
FlockConnect deliberately complements a ChMS. Its current native Planning Center integration imports name, email, phone, active status, and home address; updates from Planning Center can arrive automatically; name corrections and active status can write back only after review. Groups and Check-Ins are not part of that current sync, and email or phone do not write back. Other ChMS products enter by CSV, so ongoing freshness and deduplication become local operational work.
Why pastoral teams consider FlockConnect: databases hold people, but relationships require attention
Conventional church dashboards answer who attended, gave, registered, checked in, or joined a group. They are weaker at answering who actually knows a newcomer, whether a volunteer is carrying too much, whether the last pastoral contact was followed up, or whether two leaders both assumed the other person called. FlockConnect treats relational edges, care ownership, and recency as first-class data. Its best outcome is not “retention optimization”; it is a real person being noticed and contacted with care.
The danger is converting belonging into surveillance. Attendance gaps can reflect travel, disability, caregiving, work, another congregation, safety needs, or a deliberate boundary. Giving cadence is spiritually and financially sensitive. A low friendship count is not a moral failure. Churches should use scores as quiet prompts for authorized humans, never as membership grades, discipline evidence, public labels, donor targeting, or automated pressure. The person should remain more authoritative than the model built about them.
Care notes, permissions, and ownership: modest software with high-consequence information
Starter brings member notes, interaction notes, care reports, roles, selected-person sharing, directory and household context, forms, and follow-up into one workspace. Notes begin private; a user can expose them to permitted care roles or specifically named people. A shared record can prevent duplicated calls, preserve promises, and give a covering pastor enough context when the usual leader is unavailable.
Write the minimum. Do not store detailed counseling narratives, allegations, diagnoses, confession content, immigration facts, financial account information, safety plans, or children’s disclosures simply because a free-text field exists. Separate factual contact logs from interpretation, identify the author, correct errors, set review and deletion dates, restrict exports, and train volunteers that “pastoral” does not mean exempt from privacy, safeguarding, defamation, or breach risk.
Collie and connection intelligence: promising guardrails around an unproven model layer
Public documents say Collie uses provider-abstracted AI, context minimization and name pseudonymization where possible, zero-data-retention provider routes, provenance records, permission-aware input, and mandatory human approval. The named launch processors include Vertex/Gemini and Vercel AI Gateway, with OpenRouter configured but disabled. Collie can draft, prioritize, explain, and suggest, but terms prohibit treating it as pastoral, medical, mental-health, legal, financial, emergency, or mandated-reporting judgment.
Those are strong design choices, not proof of accuracy or fairness. Before enabling AI, test false positives and false negatives across age, disability, language, shift work, seasonal attendance, multi-site behavior, new families, leaders, low-income households, and people who opt out of giving. Confirm exactly which fields reach which provider, what “where possible” redaction leaves intact, who can view prompts and provenance, and how a church can disable, correct, or delete inferred labels.
Planning Center, calendars, forms, and SMS: controlled movement instead of silent automation
Planning Center uses official OAuth and an encrypted church-scoped connection. Import matches existing people rather than blindly duplicating them, conflicts are shown row by row, and a user selects which value to keep. Calendar follow-up uses generic event text and a secure link so sensitive care context is not copied into a calendar description. Assessments use secure member links; SMS is described as a limited fallback after an unread or incomplete email, with consent and opt-out respected.
Review still requires process. Restrict the owner who can authorize OAuth, audit scopes, revoke access during offboarding, decide which system is authoritative field by field, and test how deleted, inactive, merged, household, and child records behave. Calendar and SMS vendors become additional processors. A generic event title may still reveal care activity through timing or participant access, while a shared family phone can expose a reminder. Threat-model the real congregation, not just the happy-path diagram.
Pricing
Starter — available now
$9/month or $89/year
Any church size, unlimited account users, 14-day no-card trial. Centers on member and interaction notes, care reports, directory, households, Planning Center People sync, calendar writeback, forms, analytics, and export. Collie and relationship insights are not included.
Small — coming soon
$49/month announced
For up to 150 active adults, with the full relationship product and 250 SMS reminders monthly. Annual billing is advertised as two months free. Confirm release date and contract before budgeting.
Growing — coming soon
$99/month announced
For 151–500 active adults, with 1,000 SMS reminders. Other full-product capabilities inherit from Small.
Established — coming soon
$179/month announced
For 501–1,200 active adults and 2,500 SMS reminders. Pricing is by reviewed active adults rather than staff seats.
Large / Network — coming soon
$299/month / from $499/month
Large covers 1,201–2,500 active adults with 5,000 SMS; Network covers 2,501-plus or multi-site churches with custom volume. Treat all terms as roadmap pricing until purchasable.
Starter is a compelling low-risk commercial pilot at $9 monthly or $89 annually, with no size cap or seat charge. A small care team can evaluate notes, permissions, Planning Center People sync, reports, and export without committing to a large ChMS replacement.
Do not use the Starter price in a business case for the full homepage experience. The Small plan is the first plan documented to include Collie and relationship insights, and it remains unavailable. If the church needs those features, request a written launch scope, pilot terms, support arrangement, data-processing agreement, migration path, price protection, and remedy if the roadmap changes.
The size metric is “reviewed active adults.” Children, archived, inactive, and unreviewed people are excluded. Clarify how seasonal attendance, campuses, multiple congregations, duplicate households, online participants, missionaries, and people who request privacy affect the count, and who may change that status.
Price governance alongside software: permission design, data cleanup, staff and volunteer training, consent notices, access reviews, support, safeguarding, breach response, export testing, note retention, and pastoral follow-up capacity. Better detection creates more work if the team previously did not see the need; that human capacity is the point, not an implementation defect.
Where FlockConnect falls behind
Ship the generally available relationship-intelligence product before letting Collie, network maps, and drift detection dominate the main sales experience.
Publish a precise live-versus-roadmap matrix on every product page and make the trial screen state which demoed capabilities are unavailable.
Release a documented scoring model with configurable inputs, missing-data behavior, confidence, time windows, explanations, bias testing, and a complete disable path.
Support more native ChMS sources and broaden the Planning Center integration beyond People only when permission, conflict review, and deletion behavior remain equally clear.
Commission independent penetration testing and publish appropriate assurance, availability history, recovery objectives, encryption details, MFA enforcement, and incident response commitments.
Reconcile the privacy policy’s “website not live yet” and future Google AdSense language with the actual live site and current trackers, then expose a verified cookie and subprocessor inventory.
Provide administrator tools for retention schedules, legal hold, note sensitivity, bulk permission audits, member notices, consent withdrawal, child-data minimization, and deletion evidence.
FlockConnect vs. Planning Center vs. CareNote vs. a shared pastoral spreadsheet
Planning Center is the mature operational system: People, Groups, Check-Ins, Giving, Registrations, Services, Publishing, and more. FlockConnect is a specialized layer for relational and care awareness. CareNote focuses directly on requests, visits, volunteer coordination, care stories, and follow-up across many ChMS integrations. A spreadsheet is cheap and familiar but usually weak at permissions, auditability, secure links, reminders, field conflicts, exports, and simultaneous care-team work.
A small church may find Planning Center workflows or the $9 FlockConnect Starter sufficient. A dedicated care ministry may prefer CareNote’s mature workflow breadth. FlockConnect becomes most differentiated when its relationship graph and explainable, approval-gated Collie layer are generally available and proven. Run the same scenarios in each: a private member note, child record, hospital follow-up, opt-out, inactive record, role change, data correction, calendar write, AI false alarm, export, and cancellation deletion.
The bottom line
FlockConnect is unusually thoughtful for a young church-data product. It recognizes that pastoral care is relational, that suggestions need reasons, that AI should be a sheepdog rather than a shepherd, that writebacks should be reviewed, and that churches—not vendors—remain responsible for the people behind the records. Its public legal and help materials expose difficult details many larger products avoid. The honest buying recommendation is to separate present from promise. Starter is a low-cost care-note system worth piloting. The relationship graph, connection health, Collie feed, maps, and tiered SMS product are a coming-soon proposition worth evaluating only when the exact plan is available, contractable, testable, and safe with representative data.
Alternatives to FlockConnect
Planning CenterA mature modular ChMS whose native people, groups, check-ins, giving, lists, and workflows may cover the underlying operational need.
CareNoteA specialized pastoral-care coordination product with wider care workflow and ChMS integration history.
Take RootA ministry follow-up and people-care option; compare current integrations, permissions, automations, and data portability.
BreezeAn approachable all-in-one small-church ChMS for people, giving, events, forms, tags, and communication.
ChurchlyticsA data and dashboard path for churches that need custom cross-system analysis rather than a ready-made relationship workflow.Minimal encrypted care registerA narrowly scoped system may be safer when the team only needs ownership, dates, and next actions—not inferred engagement or AI.Frequently asked questions
How much does FlockConnect cost?
The live Starter plan is $9 per month or $89 per year for any church size, with unlimited pastors, admins, and Care Partners. Small through Network are announced at $49 to $499-plus monthly but remain marked coming soon.
Is Collie included in the $9 Starter plan?
No. The current pricing page says Collie and relationship insights begin with Small. Starter centers on member notes, interaction notes, and care reports.
Does FlockConnect replace Planning Center?
No. It works as a pastoral-care and relationship layer. The current Planning Center integration focuses on People data and reviewed writeback; Groups and Check-Ins are not part of that sync today.
Can Collie message members automatically?
The public terms and help pages say no. Collie can surface, explain, and draft, but a human must approve meaningful external writes and member-facing messages.
Does FlockConnect store giving amounts?
Its current public materials say the relationship layer uses giving cadence or pattern signals, not raw giving amounts. A church should still treat that signal as sensitive and tightly permissioned.
Can church members log in?
Members do not hold accounts. When a church requests a form or assessment, the member uses a time-limited, purpose-scoped secure link.
Is FlockConnect safe for pastoral counseling records?
It can hold pastoral and care data, but that does not mean every detail belongs there. Minimize notes, define consent and visibility, avoid clinical or allegation-heavy narratives, secure accounts, and obtain legal and safeguarding review for your context.
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.