Resource Review · Worship Apps
OpenLP
The free, open-source worship presentation app that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux — and quietly powers thousands of small churches that can’t justify a ProPresenter subscription.
- Editor rating
- 4.3 / 5
- Starting price
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- Windows · macOS · Linux
- Developer
- OpenLP Project (volunteer community)
- Launched
- 2004
The verdict
OpenLP is not slick, but it is genuinely free, genuinely capable, and genuinely cross-platform — including Linux, which no commercial competitor takes seriously. For a small church or a mission context, it is the obvious starting point.
Try OpenLP ↗Opens openlp.org
OpenLP has quietly become the favorite of small churches, church plants, mission teams, and anyone who has ever stared at a $499/year ProPresenter renewal and wondered whether there’s another option. There is. OpenLP is free, open-source, actively maintained, and has been since 2004 — long enough to have outlived several commercial competitors.
It doesn’t look like ProPresenter. It doesn’t feel like EasyWorship. It doesn’t pretend to be either. What it does — display song lyrics, project Bible verses, push images and video to a second screen, run a service plan from start to finish — it does well enough that thousands of congregations on five continents Sunday-morning their worship through it without paying anyone a dime.
This review is the honest version. OpenLP has real rough edges — the UI is from a different decade, the learning curve is steeper than the commercial alternatives, and you will occasionally need to read a forum post to fix something. But for the right church, in the right context, it is not a compromise. It is the right tool.
✓ The good
- Actually free, forever — no subscription, no licensing tier, no per-seat fee, no "Pro" upsell hiding the features you need
- Runs natively on Linux — the only serious worship presentation app that does, which matters for older hardware, mission contexts, and Linux-shop volunteers
- Cross-platform without compromise — the Windows, macOS, and Linux builds are first-class, not afterthoughts
- Plugin architecture extends the core — Songs, Bibles, Custom Slides, Images, Media, Presentations, and Remote each plug in cleanly and can be disabled if you don’t need them
- Built-in Bible plugin with importable translations — KJV ships free, and you can add ESV, NIV, and dozens of others via the import tool
- Service planning that travels — save a full Sunday order to a single file, hand it to whoever’s running tech next week, and it just opens
- Active volunteer community on the forums — slower than paid support, but knowledgeable and patient, and the install base is large enough that someone has usually hit your problem before
✗ Watch out
- UI is dated — the interface looks and feels like a 2014 desktop app because, in many ways, it is one (the bones are older)
- Steeper learning curve than ProPresenter — nothing is hidden, but nothing is obvious either, and the first Sunday will not be smooth
- No native cloud sync — service files live on a local drive, and getting them to the next volunteer means Dropbox, a flash drive, or a network share
- Limited stock content — no built-in motion backgrounds library, no integrated theme store, no "download a worship countdown" button (yet)
- Mobile remote app exists but is rough — functional for next-slide control, not a polished iPad show-caller experience
- Help is community-only — no phone support, no live chat, no SLA; if it’s 9:55 a.m. and OpenLP won’t open, you are reading a forum thread
Best for
- Small churches and church plants on tight tech budgets
- Mission and developing-world contexts where licensing or internet is unreliable
- Linux-based church computers or volunteer-donated hardware
- Tech teams comfortable with open-source software and forum-based support
Avoid if
- You want a polished, modern UI out of the box
- You rely on motion backgrounds, stage display screens, and broadcast-grade output
- Your volunteer rotation has zero patience for a learning curve
- You need paid phone support with a guaranteed response window
What OpenLP is
OpenLP — short for "Open Source Lyrics Projection" — is a desktop application for projecting song lyrics, Bible verses, images, videos, and slideshows during a church service. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux as a free, open-source download under the GPL license. The project has been actively developed since 2004 by a volunteer community, and the current version (3.x branch) is a stable, modern Python/Qt codebase used by thousands of congregations worldwide.
Functionally, it sits in the same category as ProPresenter, EasyWorship, Faithlife Proclaim, and WorshipTools Presenter — a tool the booth volunteer drives during the service to push the right slide to the projector at the right time. The difference is the price, the source code, and the operating systems it supports. Everything else — service planning, dual-screen output, song database, Bible search, video playback, themes — is in the box.
Why small churches and mission teams choose OpenLP
The single biggest practical difference between OpenLP and the commercial alternatives is the absence of a recurring bill. ProPresenter is currently around $499 a year. EasyWorship runs roughly $19/month or several hundred up front. Faithlife Proclaim and WorshipTools Presenter both have subscription tiers. For a 40-person church running on a $200 monthly tech budget, that math doesn’t work — and OpenLP is the answer that lets the projector stay on.
Beyond the money, there is the platform question. OpenLP is the only serious worship presentation app that treats Linux as a first-class target. That sounds like a niche concern until you’re running a mission school in a country where Windows licenses are a luxury, or you’ve been handed a donated tower that won’t run anything newer than Ubuntu, or your volunteer tech lead is a Linux developer who refuses to boot Windows. In all of those cases, OpenLP is not the cheap option. It is the only option.
Free and open-source: the differentiator that changes everything else
OpenLP is released under the GNU General Public License — meaning the source code is public, the application is free to download and use, and there is no licensing server checking whether you paid. Install it on the booth computer. Install it on the youth pastor’s laptop. Install it on the spare machine at the back of the sanctuary. Install it on twelve mission-team laptops headed to East Africa. There is no per-seat charge, no activation limit, no "you’ve exceeded your device count" warning. You download an installer from openlp.org and it works.
This sounds like a small thing. In practice it’s transformative for the kind of church OpenLP serves. A small congregation doesn’t lose access to its worship software because the budget got cut mid-year. A church plant doesn’t have to negotiate a vendor renewal in its first twelve months. A mission team doesn’t have to worry about software licensing across borders. The open-source license — the model that respects your work — is also the model that says you cannot be locked out. For thousands of users, that single property outweighs every UX advantage the commercial competitors have.
Cross-platform including Linux: the only worship app that takes it seriously
OpenLP runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and the Linux build is not a port-of-convenience — it is a peer of the other two. The application is written in Python with the Qt framework, which means the same codebase, the same features, and the same file format on every platform. A service plan built on a Mac at home opens on a Linux booth computer on Sunday without translation. The Linux packages are available for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE, with Flatpak and AppImage builds for everything else.
For most American megachurches this is irrelevant. For the rest of the world, it is the whole point. Older hardware that can’t run current Windows still runs Linux. Mission contexts where Windows licenses are expensive or impossible run Linux. Schools and small ministries that have standardized on Chromebooks and Linux desktops — increasingly common in developing-world contexts — can use OpenLP without changing their stack. Every commercial worship app in the category requires Windows, macOS, or both. OpenLP is the only one that doesn’t make Linux churches choose between their operating system and their projection software.
Plugin architecture: the reason it can grow without bloating
OpenLP is built around a plugin system. The core application is small. Functionality comes from plugins — Songs (the lyric database), Bibles (verse projection), Custom Slides (free-form text slides), Images, Media (video and audio playback), Presentations (PowerPoint and Impress passthrough), Remote (the mobile control app), and Alerts (the on-screen ticker for "the toddler in the red shirt is needed in the nursery"). Each plugin can be enabled or disabled from the settings panel. A church that never projects video can turn off Media. A church that doesn’t use song slides — there are some — can turn off Songs entirely.
The plugin model is also why OpenLP has aged well. Adding support for a new Bible translation, a new presentation format, or a new feature doesn’t require rewriting the application — it requires writing a plugin. Volunteer contributors have been doing this for two decades, which is how the app has stayed relevant on three operating systems while remaining free. It’s also why the codebase is approachable for churches with developer volunteers: if your tech lead writes Python, they can read the source, file pull requests, or build a small in-house plugin without permission from a vendor.
Pricing
OpenLP
Free
The entire application. Every plugin, every feature, every platform. No tiers, no upsells, no premium content unlocks. Released under GPL — you can install it on as many computers as you want.
Donations
Optional
OpenLP is maintained by volunteers. Donations via the official site fund hosting, infrastructure, and contributor expenses. Entirely optional, and nothing about the software changes whether you give or not.
OpenLP is free. Not freemium. Not "free with paid add-ons." Not "free for personal use, paid for churches." Just free, in the open-source sense — you download it, you install it, you use it, and nobody bills you.
The project accepts donations through openlp.org, and those donations fund hosting, infrastructure, and the occasional contributor stipend. Donating is encouraged if your church can afford it. Nothing in the software changes if you don’t.
For comparison: ProPresenter is around $499/year for the standard subscription. EasyWorship is roughly $19/month or several hundred dollars one-time. Faithlife Proclaim is subscription-based, tied into the Logos/Faithlife ecosystem. WorshipTools Presenter has free and paid tiers. Across a five-year window, OpenLP saves a small church somewhere between $1,500 and $3,500 versus the commercial options — money that goes to missions, music, or the building fund instead.
The hidden cost is time. OpenLP is steeper to learn, and you will spend volunteer hours on the front end that a polished commercial app would have absorbed for you. Most churches that switch to OpenLP feel they come out ahead. Some don’t.
Where OpenLP falls behind
No native cloud sync. Service files live as local documents on whoever built them, and getting them to the next person on rotation means Dropbox, a network share, or a USB stick. ProPresenter, Proclaim, and WorshipTools all have first-party cloud — OpenLP doesn’t (yet), and for multi-site or multi-volunteer churches, that gap shows up every week.
No integrated stock content library. ProPresenter and Proclaim both ship with — or sell access to — large libraries of motion backgrounds, lyric themes, countdown videos, and announcement templates. OpenLP ships with a basic theme editor and expects you to bring your own art. For churches with a designer volunteer this is fine. For churches without one, it’s a real gap.
Dated UI. The interface works, but it shows its age — small icons, dense menus, a layout that assumes you know what every panel is for. New volunteers take longer to come up to speed than they would on a more modern app, and the polish gap versus ProPresenter is real.
Limited stage display. OpenLP can drive a second screen for the congregation, but the "stage view" for musicians and pastors — chord charts, next-slide preview, countdown timers — is thin compared to ProPresenter’s dedicated stage display engine. Bigger productions hit this ceiling quickly.
Community-only support. There’s a forum, a wiki, a chat channel, and an active developer community, but there is no phone number to call at 9:55 a.m. on Sunday morning. For churches that have a tech volunteer comfortable Googling, this is fine. For churches that don’t, the absence of paid support is a real risk.
OpenLP vs. ProPresenter vs. EasyWorship
Different strengths. OpenLP is better at being free, cross-platform, and unowned. ProPresenter is better at being polished, well-supported, and broadcast-ready. EasyWorship is better at being approachable for non-technical volunteers on Windows specifically.
ProPresenter — currently around $499/year — is the industry standard for medium and large American churches. It has the slickest UI, the deepest stage display, the best integration with ATEM switchers and broadcast workflows, and a team of paid engineers and support staff behind it. If your church has a tech budget that includes "ProPresenter subscription" as a line item, it is the obvious choice. If it doesn’t, the price is the conversation-ender.
EasyWorship sits in between. Cheaper than ProPresenter, more polished than OpenLP, Windows-only, and with a UI built for volunteers who have never touched presentation software before. For a small-to-mid Windows-shop church that can afford a modest subscription but not the ProPresenter tier, it is the comfortable middle option.
OpenLP is the answer when the question is "what if we cannot pay for any of these?" or "what if Linux is on the table?" or "what if we want to control our own stack?" For a 40-person church plant, a mission-field projector, or a tech volunteer who refuses to rent software, OpenLP is not a compromise. It’s the right tool for the constraint.
The bottom line
OpenLP is the thoughtful person’s worship presentation app — not because it’s the prettiest, but because it’s the one that respects your situation. If you have the budget, the Windows shop, and the polish requirements that point to ProPresenter, buy ProPresenter. If you don’t — if you’re a church plant, a mission team, a Linux house, or a congregation that simply refuses to add another subscription — OpenLP is genuinely capable, genuinely free, and has been quietly running Sunday mornings since 2004. The rough edges are real, but they’re worth knowing about going in rather than dealbreakers.
Alternatives to OpenLP
ProPresenter
The industry-standard commercial option — slick UI, deep stage display, broadcast-ready, around $499/year. The default choice when budget isn’t the constraint.
EasyWorship
Windows-only worship app with a friendly UI built for non-technical volunteers. Cheaper than ProPresenter, more polished than OpenLP, the middle option.
Faithlife Proclaim
Cloud-first worship presentation from the Logos/Faithlife ecosystem — strong integration with Logos Bible Software and Faithlife church management tools.
WorshipTools Presenter
Free-tier-friendly worship presentation app with paid upgrades — a closer commercial analog to OpenLP, with a more modern UI and cloud sync.
Frequently asked questions
- Is OpenLP really completely free?
- Yes. OpenLP is released under the GNU General Public License and is free to download, install, and use on as many computers as you want, in any context — small church, mission team, large congregation, or personal use. There is no paid tier, no premium features locked behind a subscription, and no per-seat licensing. Donations are accepted to fund hosting and infrastructure, but they are entirely optional.
- What operating systems does OpenLP run on?
- OpenLP runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The Linux build is a first-class peer of the other two — official packages exist for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE, with Flatpak and AppImage builds for other distributions. The same service files and song databases work across all three platforms without conversion.
- How does OpenLP compare to ProPresenter?
- ProPresenter is more polished, has paid support, ships with stock content, and dominates the medium-to-large American church market. OpenLP is free, open-source, runs on Linux, and is favored by small churches, mission teams, and budget-constrained congregations. ProPresenter is the better tool if you can afford it. OpenLP is the better tool if you can’t — or if Linux support matters to you.
- Can OpenLP display Bible verses during a service?
- Yes. The Bibles plugin is built into OpenLP and lets you search, project, and theme Bible passages directly from the booth. The KJV ships free, and you can import dozens of other translations — ESV, NIV, NLT, and many non-English versions — via the import tool. You can also project verses in two languages side-by-side, which is useful for bilingual congregations and mission contexts.
- Does OpenLP support video and motion backgrounds?
- Yes. The Media plugin handles video and audio playback, and you can use video files as backgrounds behind song lyrics or Bible verses. OpenLP does not ship with a built-in library of motion backgrounds the way ProPresenter and Proclaim do — you bring your own. For churches with a designer volunteer this is fine; for churches without, it’s one of the bigger gaps versus the commercial alternatives.
- Where do I get help if OpenLP breaks?
- The OpenLP forums, wiki, and community chat are the primary support channels. There is no paid phone support and no SLA. The community is active, knowledgeable, and patient, and most common problems have been hit and documented by someone before — but Sunday morning emergencies are on you. If your church doesn’t have at least one tech-comfortable volunteer, this is worth weighing seriously before switching.
- Can multiple volunteers share OpenLP service files easily?
- Yes, with some effort. OpenLP saves a full service to a single file that opens cleanly on any other OpenLP install. Sharing it means Dropbox, Google Drive, a network share, or a USB stick — there’s no native first-party cloud sync (yet). For churches with one or two tech volunteers this is fine. For multi-site churches or large rotating teams, the lack of cloud sync is one of the bigger workflow gaps versus the commercial competitors.