Free church management software. Complete, and free forever.

1 What a ChMS is, and why it should not cost your church

A church management system, usually shortened to ChMS, is the software a church uses to keep track of its people: who is a member, who is visiting, who gave, who showed up, who volunteers, and who has quietly stopped coming. Most of it is ordinary record keeping. Most of it is also sold by subscription, often priced by the number of people you track.

Free Church ChMS takes a different road. It is a complete church management system that is given to every church at no charge, for as long as the church exists. There is no free tier that quietly runs out, no paid version waiting behind it, and no one selling your congregation's data. The idea is simple: the money a church would have paid a software company can feed children instead. Every charitable gift we receive goes to Good Samaritan.

2 What is in it

This is a full system, not a members list with a few extras. Everything below ships in the same free download.

See each one in detail on the features page.

3 How it compares with paid church software

Paid systems such as Planning Center, Breeze, Pushpay, Tithe.ly and Subsplash are good products, and many churches are happy with them. The honest differences are these:

• Cost. Free Church ChMS costs nothing. Paid systems charge monthly or yearly, often more as your church grows.
• Where your data lives. Here it lives on your own server in a single database file. You can download a complete backup in one click and move it anywhere.
• The trade. You have to host it yourself, which means a web host that runs PHP 8.3 or newer, or a computer you control. Paid products run the servers for you and offer phone apps and online payment processing. Free Church ChMS does not process card payments itself, though it records gifts and imports from Stripe, Pushpay, Tithe.ly and Givebutter.

There is a side-by-side table with sources on the comparison page.

4 Getting started takes an afternoon

1. Request your copy. We prepare it for your church and send it to you.
2. Upload the single file, app.php, to a web host that runs PHP 8.3 or newer. There is no database to set up.
3. Open the address, create your account, and you are the administrator.
4. Import your people from a spreadsheet, or connect the system you are leaving.

The install guide covers shared hosting, Docker, and trying it on your own computer first. The Knowledge Base has an article for every part of the app, and the app is written in English, so your browser's Translate feature will show it in your language.

Common questions

Is Free Church ChMS really free?

Yes. It is free for every church, ministry and faith-based nonprofit, with no trial period, no paid tier and no hidden fees. It stays free by license. You only pay for your own web hosting, which is often a few dollars a month, or nothing if you run it on a computer you already own.

What is a ChMS?

ChMS stands for church management system (or church management software). It is the tool a church uses to manage members, attendance, giving, groups, volunteers, communication and pastoral care in one place.

Do we need technical skills to run it?

Basic ones. If you can upload a file to a web host and open a web address, you can install it. It is one PHP file with a built-in database, so there is nothing to configure beyond creating your account. The install guide walks through it step by step.

Can we move our existing church data in?

Yes. You can import people, giving and attendance from CSV or Excel files, and it connects to Planning Center, Breeze, Church Community Builder and others to pull people across.

Who owns our data?

You do. It is stored on your own server, we never receive it, and there is no hosted copy. A one-click backup under Admin exports everything you have.

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