- Starting price
- $9/month
- Free tier
- No
- Platforms
- Web · Mobile browser · Home-screen shortcut
- Developer
- John Hicks / OurChurchCare
- Launched
- 2026
- Updated
- Aug 16, 2026
The verdict
OurChurchCare solves a real problem that broad church systems often leave scattered across memory, spreadsheets, and private messages. Assignments, contact outcomes, due dates, overdue alerts, and a coverage dashboard can make care more consistent. Its low price and clear privacy language are encouraging. Churches should still record the minimum necessary, separate observation from inference, restrict volunteers to assigned families, define deletion rules, and keep emergencies and clinical matters outside an ordinary care log.
Try OurChurchCare ↗Opens ourchurchcare.com
OurChurchCare is a lightweight web application for coordinating pastoral and congregational care. A church imports or creates family records, assigns each household to a deacon, elder, pastor, or volunteer, records calls, visits, and texts, and schedules the next action. Priority, due dates, recurring contact expectations, overdue notices, outcomes, and notes feed a dashboard that shows both activity and gaps.
Founder John Hicks describes the product as built by a pastor. Its deliberate scope is attractive: it is not trying to replace Planning Center, Breeze, Tithely, ChurchTrac, or another church management system. It works alongside them through CSV import and a mobile-friendly browser. The site does not claim a live bidirectional integration, so teams should plan a clear source-of-truth and update routine.
Pricing is simple. Basic costs $9 per month for five users and one hundred families; Standard is $24 for twenty users and five hundred families; Premium is $49 with unlimited users and families. Annual billing is advertised at the equivalent of two months free, and a thirty-day trial requires no card. Limits, founding offers, and annual totals should be confirmed at checkout.
We reviewed the public product, workflow, pricing, and privacy information without creating a church, importing records, testing role boundaries, requesting an export, or performing a security assessment. The privacy policy is unusually concrete for a young ministry product, but policy claims are not independent assurance.
✓ The good
- Focused care workflow - assignments, contacts, outcomes, follow-ups, frequency, and coverage live together
- Accessible pricing - the entry tier can serve a small church without a large software commitment
- Clear roles - administrators and staff have broad access while volunteers are limited to assigned families
- Low-friction trial - thirty days without a payment card supports a contained evaluation
- Privacy-forward claims - no ads, selling, marketing sharing, Google Analytics, or Meta tracking are claimed
- Practical mobility - a responsive browser and home-screen shortcut avoid a separate app deployment
- Exit window - the policy describes a thirty-day export period after cancellation
✗ Watch out
- Care notes are highly sensitive - spiritual, relational, health, and family context can harm people if exposed or misread
- No advertised live ChMS integration - CSV and parallel updates can create stale or conflicting records
- Broad staff visibility - the documented staff role can see all families, which may exceed need-to-know access
- Young service - public evidence does not establish long operational history, independent audits, or recovery performance
- Superadmin access remains possible - routine family access is disclaimed, but technical privilege still needs controls and logging
- Children can appear in records - even without child accounts, household notes require special restraint and safeguarding
Best for
- Small and midsize churches assigning families to deacons, elders, pastors, or care volunteers
- Teams replacing a fragile care spreadsheet while keeping their existing ChMS
- Leaders who can define note standards, role reviews, escalation, and retention before rollout
- Churches that value a focused low-cost tool over a large configurable platform
Avoid if
- You need clinical case management, emergency response, mandated-reporting workflows, or protected health record controls
- Your church requires SSO, SCIM, formal audit reports, regional hosting guarantees, or a negotiated DPA
- You expect real-time synchronization with your church management system
- Your care culture encourages detailed speculative notes without consent, correction, or deletion
What OurChurchCare is
OurChurchCare is a coordination layer, not the act of care itself. It answers who is responsible, when contact happened, what broad outcome occurred, and what needs attention next. It should not become a permanent narrative dossier about a person.
The strongest deployment starts with minimal fields: objective contact outcome, promised next step, due date, and access owner. Sensitive confessions, diagnoses, allegations, financial details, or third-party gossip belong in more appropriate and tightly governed processes, if recorded at all.
Why a dedicated care tracker can beat a generic database
Generic ChMS notes and spreadsheets can store the same facts, but OurChurchCare organizes the work around household coverage and the next pastoral action. That makes neglect visible without requiring a complex report builder.
The tradeoff is another database. Name the authoritative system for contact details, schedule CSV reconciliation, decide what can be copied back, and never export care notes casually. A smaller app is simpler only when data ownership is explicit.
Family assignments: turn good intentions into ownership
Households can be assigned to a pastor, elder, deacon, or volunteer, with role-based visibility and a dashboard of coverage.
Review assignments regularly, support volunteers who encounter complex needs, and give members a clear way to request reassignment or correction. An assignment is accountability, not ownership of a family.
Contacts and follow-ups: preserve the next useful action
Teams can record calls, visits, texts, outcomes, priority, notes, due dates, and recurring contact frequency. Overdue indicators make missed follow-up visible.
Use neutral, factual language and avoid copying messages or intimate detail by default. Record what was promised and who will act, then delete transient context when it no longer serves care.
Privacy controls: promising policy, limited public assurance
The policy names role boundaries, HTTPS, bcrypt, CSRF protection, tenant isolation, session cookies, breach notice, Stripe, truncated IP analytics, and post-cancellation export and deletion windows.
Ask how MFA, backups, administrator events, support access, vulnerability handling, restore tests, data location, and immediate deletion work in practice. Technical claims should become a documented church risk decision.
Pricing
Basic
$9/month
Up to five users and one hundred families. A sensible evaluation tier for a small church.
Standard
$24/month
Up to twenty users and five hundred families.
Premium
$49/month
Unlimited users and families. Confirm fair-use, support, storage, and export expectations.
Annual billing
Two months free
The site advertises annual savings and a thirty-day no-card trial. Confirm the total and renewal date.
The thirty-day no-card trial makes it possible to test with synthetic families before importing real people.
Basic is unusually inexpensive; Standard is likely the practical tier when care is shared by a larger volunteer team.
Premium removes user and family limits, but churches should confirm storage, support, export, backup, and future price-change terms.
Budget for governance and training. The subscription is cheaper than the human work required to keep sensitive notes accurate, restrained, and useful.
Where OurChurchCare falls behind
Add mandatory MFA and publish session, password, recovery, and privileged-access controls.
Offer more granular permissions for sensitive notes, campuses, ministries, supervisors, and temporary volunteers.
Publish immutable audit history for viewing, exporting, editing, deleting, assigning, and support access.
Provide documented API or supported ChMS integrations with field ownership, conflict handling, and deletion behavior.
Add member-facing consent, correction, access, and concern-reporting workflows rather than making privacy solely administrative.
OurChurchCare vs. Planning Center vs. Breeze vs. a spreadsheet
Planning Center and Breeze manage broader church operations and may hold notes, workflows, and groups. A spreadsheet is flexible and familiar but weak at permissions, reminders, and auditability. OurChurchCare narrows the interface to assignment, contact, follow-up, and coverage.
Choose it when the existing system does not make care accountability visible and the church can govern a second database. First test whether a well-designed workflow in the current ChMS can solve the same problem with fewer copies of member data.
Regardless of tool, pastoral wisdom cannot be reduced to contact frequency. Metrics should surface people who may be overlooked, not score volunteers or turn relationships into quotas.
The bottom line
OurChurchCare is a thoughtful, affordable answer to the quiet operational problem of making sure people are not forgotten. Its narrow workflow and detailed privacy statements distinguish it from a generic note field. The responsible church keeps notes spare and factual, limits access, reconciles household data, reviews assignments, tests export and deletion, and treats the dashboard as a prompt for human attention—not a measure of spiritual care.
Alternatives to OurChurchCare
Planning CenterA broader modular church platform that may keep care workflows beside existing people data.Breeze ChMSA straightforward full ChMS with people, groups, forms, giving, and communication.
NotebirdA dedicated pastoral-care and follow-up product with a different workflow and pricing model.ChurchTracA budget-friendly church suite for teams wanting fewer separate systems.Governed spreadsheetCheap and customizable, but difficult to secure, audit, remind, and maintain consistently.Frequently asked questions
What does OurChurchCare do?
It assigns families to care workers, records contacts and outcomes, schedules follow-ups, flags overdue care, and summarizes coverage.
Does it replace a church management system?
No. It is designed to work alongside products such as Planning Center, Breeze, Tithely, and ChurchTrac. Public materials describe CSV import, not live synchronization.
How much does it cost?
Published monthly prices are $9 Basic, $24 Standard, and $49 Premium, with a thirty-day no-card trial and advertised annual savings.
Can volunteers see every family?
The privacy policy says volunteers see assigned families, while administrators and staff have broader access. Confirm and test every role before importing real notes.
Does it use advertising trackers?
The privacy policy says it does not use Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, advertising cookies, or sell data; it describes anonymized visit counts and necessary sessions.
What happens after cancellation?
The policy describes a thirty-day period to export data, after which records may be deleted. Request and verify an export before ending service.
Should we record counseling details?
Usually not in an ordinary care tracker. Keep the minimum necessary and use qualified, appropriately governed systems and procedures for clinical, safety, legal, or safeguarding matters.
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.