WorshipTools Charts

What WorshipTools Charts is

WorshipTools Charts is a free chord chart manager and live performance tool built specifically for worship musicians. You import or write ChordPro files, organize them into songs and set lists, and pull them up on a tablet, phone, or laptop during rehearsal and Sunday service. The app handles the usual chord-chart chores — transpose to any key, apply a capo offset, switch between chords-and-lyrics and lyrics-only views, share a set list with the rest of the band — and it does it without putting any of those features behind a paywall.

It belongs to a small category of apps where the entire job is "be the music stand," and the competition is dominated by paid players: OnSong (about $30/yr or a one-time purchase depending on plan), Planning Center Music Stand (bundled with a Planning Center subscription), and a long tail of less-polished free options. WorshipTools Charts is the rare free entry that is actually competitive on features rather than just on price.

Why worship teams switch to WorshipTools Charts

The single biggest practical difference between WorshipTools Charts and OnSong is the price tag — and what that price tag means for a volunteer worship team. If you’ve got eight rotating musicians, asking each of them to buy their own OnSong license is friction. Asking the church to buy eight of them is a line-item nobody wants to defend. WorshipTools Charts removes that conversation. Everyone installs it for free, the worship leader shares the plan, and the band is on the same page (literally) within minutes.

The second difference is the model that respects your work. WorshipTools makes money on Presenter and hardware, so Charts has no incentive to grow a premium tier that quietly hollows out the free version. That matters in worship-tech specifically — this is a category where products have been known to start free, build a user base, and then flip to a paid model that strands churches mid-season. Charts has been free for over a decade and the business case for keeping it free is still intact.

The free model: the differentiator in a paid-dominated space

Almost every serious chord chart app in this category is paid. OnSong charges roughly $30/yr or a one-time license depending on plan. Planning Center Music Stand requires an active Planning Center Services subscription, which scales with your church size. MultiTracks Playback and Loop Community Prime are subscription products with their own per-user math. WorshipTools Charts is the one option in that lineup with no paid tier at all — not for the app, not for transpose, not for team sync, not for foot-pedal support, not for capo, not for the things that other apps reserve for "Pro."

This sounds like a small thing. In practice it’s transformative. It changes who can be on a worship team. A 16-year-old learning bass doesn’t need a credit card to read the chart on Sunday. A new volunteer keyboardist doesn’t need to expense the church for an app license before their first rehearsal. The friction of getting a new musician onto your team drops to "download this, I’ll send you the plan link" — and that is the whole pitch.

Team sync and set list management

The set list view is the part of the app you’ll live in. You build a plan, drag songs into the order you want, set the key for each song, and add notes — intro length, repeats, transitions, the part where the worship leader does the awkward "let’s sing that chorus one more time." When you share the plan with your team, every musician’s device pulls the same set list, the same keys, and the same notes. If the worship leader changes a key on Saturday night, every musician’s chart updates before Sunday morning.

The sync model is the everyday-musician killer feature. It is what turns Charts from "a free tool that displays chord charts" into "a free tool that runs a worship team." Mid-rehearsal you can transpose a song down a whole step because the vocalist is fighting a cold, and the change propagates to every device on the platform. That’s the thing volunteer-led teams actually need and the thing paid apps have historically charged for.

The Presenter ecosystem: charts plus stage plus slides

WorshipTools Charts has a sibling — WorshipTools Presenter — that handles the other half of a worship service: lyrics on the screen, slide announcements, video playback, stage display monitors. Presenter is the paid product in the lineup (a free core with paid add-ons), and it’s where the company actually makes its money. If you ever grow into needing a proper presentation setup, the two apps talk to each other: the same songs, the same database, the same set lists. The chord chart your bass player sees on stage and the lyrics the congregation sees on the back wall come from the same source of truth.

You do not have to use Presenter to use Charts. Most teams who land on Charts via word of mouth never touch Presenter — they’ve already got ProPresenter or EasyWorship or Faithlife Proclaim running on the booth computer, and they just need a free chord chart app for the musicians. But for a smaller church starting from scratch, the WorshipTools ecosystem is a coherent end-to-end answer: free for the band, paid (and reasonably priced) for the booth.

Pricing

Where WorshipTools Charts falls behind

No first-party multitrack stem player. If your team plays to click and guide tracks with stems — guitars, pads, synth beds — Charts can attach an audio file to a song, but it isn’t built to drive a full backing-track rig. For that you’re pairing Charts with Loop Community Prime, MultiTracks Playback, or Ableton, and accepting two apps in your stage workflow.

No built-in CCLI SongSelect import. Planning Center Music Stand pulls directly from SongSelect, which means a song is two taps away. With WorshipTools you’re more often importing a ChordPro file or pasting in a chart, which is fine but is more work the first time you add a new song to your library.

Annotation feels a generation behind OnSong on iPad. The basic markup tools are there, but OnSong has invested years in making Apple Pencil annotation feel like writing on paper — pressure, palm rejection, gesture polish. WorshipTools’ markup is functional and gets the job done, but iPad-and-Pencil purists will feel the gap.

Discoverability is uneven. Some of the best features — sync, foot-pedal pairing, capo behavior — live behind menus that aren’t obvious on first launch. There’s a learning curve, and the documentation is okay rather than great. Plan to spend an hour with it before your first rehearsal.

Support is community-forum-first. For a free product that’s reasonable, and the WorshipTools community is genuinely helpful. But if it’s 8:45 a.m. Sunday and sync is broken, you’re not getting a live chat agent — you’re restarting the app, double-checking Wi-Fi, and falling back to a printed chart.

WorshipTools vs. OnSong vs. Planning Center Music Stand

Different strengths. OnSong is the polished iPad-first chord chart app — the best gestures, the best annotation, the most thoughtful one-handed performance UI. It’s also the most expensive, and it’s iOS-only, which is a non-starter if any of your musicians are on Android. Planning Center Music Stand is the church-ops play — if your church is already paying for Planning Center Services for scheduling, songs, and song library, Music Stand is "free" in the sense that it ships with that subscription, and the integration with the rest of the Planning Center suite is unmatched.

WorshipTools Charts wins on two axes neither competitor can match: it is genuinely free for everyone on the team, and it runs on every platform without compromise. The trade is polish. OnSong is better at the iPad-as-music-stand experience. Planning Center is better at the "we’re running a whole church on this platform" experience. WorshipTools is better at "get my volunteer band on the same chord chart by Sunday without a procurement cycle."

A practical rule of thumb: if your team is iPad-only and the church will pay, OnSong is still the gold standard. If your church already runs on Planning Center, Music Stand is the path of least resistance. If you’re a small or volunteer-heavy team, or your musicians use a mix of iOS and Android, or you just don’t want to argue about software licenses anymore, WorshipTools Charts is the obvious pick — and the one most worship leaders end up recommending to other worship leaders.

Alternatives to WorshipTools Charts