Upgrade Your Church Software with a Church Community Builder (CCB) Alternative

What is ChMeetings?

ChMeetings is an all-in-one Church ChMeetings is an all-in-one church management software focusing on ease of use, high value for money, and features that suit most churches, regardless of size or denomination.

ChMeetings may be for your church if:

• You want to optimize the costs incurred by your ChMS.
• Features such as Appointments, digitally signed forms or multiple languages are mandatory for your church.
• You want a platform that is easy to use for pretty much everyone, with fast and reliable support.

What is Church Community Builder?

Church Community Builder is a long-standing church management system and has been recently acquired by PushPay. It provides a wide range of features, particularly suitable for mid-to-large-sized churches.

Church Community Builder may be for you if:

• You are a large church.
• You absolutely need features like facility management, sacrament tracking or text giving.
• Your servants are tech-savvy and can work with more complex software.

Ease Of Use Comparison

ChMeetings Ease Of Use Review

Chmeetings is designed to serve a wide range of church software users, including administrators, pastoral leaders, volunteers, and members, focusing on modern design and ease of use. Let’s see how people in your church may find working with ChMeetings:

• Church administrators benefit from comprehensive tools for managing members, events, donations, and communication, all in one platform. The user-friendly interface and comprehensive help center make it easy to start quickly with minimal training.
• Pastoral and ministry leaders can use Chmeetings to track engagement, attendance, and group activities, with simple and easy-to-manage reports, lists, and communication tools that are built for simplicity and efficiency.
• Volunteers and event organizers can smoothly manage schedules, organize events, and coordinate activities, with easy-to-navigate features that simplify planning.
• Church members can use the platform to stay connected, and register for events, submit forms, browse content, volunteer, give, and more. All this can be done by pretty much anyone who can use a computer or mobile phone.

Overall, Chmeetings is designed to be used by everyone in your church. Its modern interface is optimized for simplicity and efficiency, to allow people in every role to benefit from using it. The intuitive user interface, comprehensive help center, and highly responsive support team enhance effectiveness and reduce the need for training when first getting started.

Church Community Builder Ease Of Use Review

Church Community Builder caters to a variety of software users within a church setting, each with specific needs. Here are a few use cases you may consider:

• Church administrators benefit from comprehensive tools for managing members, events, donations, and reporting, though some aspects may require some setup and training.
• Pastoral and ministry leaders can easily manage engagement, follow-ups and small groups with intuitive tools.
• Volunteer coordinators and event planners may find it useful for scheduling and organizing church events and volunteers.
• Church members can manage communication, attendance, and participation, with user-friendly features accessible through mobile apps.

Overall, Church Community Builder offers powerful features with a moderate learning curves for administrative users but may be easy for casual users. Training and support services from Pushpay help streamline the onboarding process.

Value For Money

ChMeetings Value Overview

ChMeetings offers high value for money in several key ways that make it a strong choice for church management:

• 1. Affordable and scalable: ChMeetings provides flexible and affordable pricing plans, catering to churches of all sizes, offering the option to scale in price and feature requirements as your church grows. Our platform even offers a free plan, perfect for churches on a tight budget, and managing smaller congregations. Our paid tiers are competitively priced compared to many other church management systems, ensuring churches get a robust set of tools without overspending.
• 2. Comprehensive features: Despite its cost-effectiveness, ChMeetings is an all-in-one solution that includes a wide range of powerful features. It handles member management, event scheduling, attendance tracking, donation management, communication, and more, all in one package. This means churches don’t have to spend extra on multiple software solutions, boosting overall value.
• 3. User-friendly interface: ChMeetings is designed to be intuitive and easy to use, reducing the time and resources needed for training. Churches can get started quickly, maximizing benefits without extensive technical support.
• 4. Accessible: ChMeetings is cloud-based, meaning churches can access it anytime, anywhere, and on any device. This flexibility is valuable, particularly for remote servants or volunteers, and eliminates the need for costly on-premise hardware or software maintenance.
• 5. Responsive: ChMeetings offers highly responsive customer support, and our team is known for continuously adding new features based on user feedback. This active improvement cycle ensures churches always get the most out of their investment with us.

Overall, ChMeetings combines affordability, rich functionality, and ease of use, making it a high-value solution for churches looking to manage their operations efficiently while optimizing costs without missing out on growth opportunities.

Church Community Builder Value Overview

Church Community Builder offers high value for money for several reasons, making it a popular choice among churches of various sizes.

• 1. Comprehensive Features: Church Community Builder provides an all-in-one solution for church management, covering essential areas like member management, group management, volunteer coordination, event planning, donation tracking, and communication tools. Its integration with Pushpay’s giving and engagement platform enhances its functionality, creating a seamless experience for both financial and community management.
• 2. Scalable: Church Community Builder is designed to support churches as they grow, with scalable tools that can handle the needs of both small congregations and large megachurches. This flexibility ensures that churches get the right level of service for their current needs, and they can continue using the software even as their community expands.
• 3. PushPay Integration: Church Community Builder is owned by PushPay, so it’s deeply integrated with their giving and engagement platform. This simplifies the donation process for members and adds insightful reporting tools for church administrators, thus reducing complexity and increasing efficiency.

In summary, Church Community Builder from Pushpay offers high value for money through its comprehensive feature set, scalability, and integration with PushPay, providing churches with the tools they need to keep up with operations and foster growth.

Features Comparison

Let’s start our comparison with an overview of the features provided by Church Community Builder and ChMeetings. Just note that, with both solutions, we listed a summary of essential features, but their availability depends on the plan you choose. If a feature is available with a higher-price plan, but not a lower-price plan, we still list it as Included.

Feature	ChMeetings	Church Community Builder
Mobile App
Member Management
Custom Profile Fields
Groups
Mass Email
Mass Texting	Extra Cost	Unknown Cost
Event Management
Check-In
Service Planning
Volunteer Scheduling
Member Portal
Web Page Builder
Website Integration
Follow-Ups
Appointments
Digitally Signed Forms
Online Giving
Online Giving Fees	Yes Paid to payment gateway (PayPal or Stripe), not to ChMeetings	Yes Paid to CCB/PushPay
Giving History	Unlimited	7 Years
Text Giving
Pledges
Sacrament Tracking
Accounting
Facility Management
Reports
Integrations
Branded App With Media Library	$50/Month $500/Year	Included With Plan
Diocese Plan
Multilingual	Yes - 22 Languages	English and Giving in Spanish

Feature Offered By Both Platforms

Both ChMeetings and Church Community Builder offer a wide range of features that help churches streamline their work. For instance, you can use any of the two platforms to manage members, organize events and volunteers, communicate, manage follow-ups, create pledge campaigns, or collect giving. Both platforms provide the option to manage your accounting, offer mobile access to church servants and members,

Both platforms also offer a Diocese plan, as well as the option to create a branded mobile app. Church Community Builder includes the Branded App with the plan, but it is difficult to tell what the costs are since their pricing is not public. ChMeetings provides this as an additional service, charged at $50/month or $500/year. It’s important to think about whether such an app is suitable for your church right now, so you can assess whether it’s worth paying for it or not.

Feature Offered By ChMeetings And Not Church Community Builder

Let’s now discuss some of the features offered by ChMeetings, that are not available with Church Community Builder:

• Member Portal: This feature lets you provide members with access to personal accounts, where they can browse the content you publish, manage their profile, give and access their giving history, register for events as attendants or volunteers; and more.
• Appointments: You can schedule appointments between people in your church - be they servants or members. People can make and manage their appointments easily. from their accounts.
• Digitally Signed Forms: This lets you create forms that people can digitally sign, thus simplifying any formalities you may conduct.
• Giving history: is unlimited with ChMeetings; while PushPay’s products keep your data only for 7 years.
• Multiple Languages: If you are not located in an English-speaking country or your church has an international congregation, this may be important to you. ChMeetings provides 20 languages while Church Community Builder only provides giving in Spanish.

Feature Offered By Church Community Builder And Not ChMeetings

Now, let’s explore the features that you get with Church Community Builder and not ChMeetings:

• Facility Management: This may be useful if you are a large church.
• Sacrament Tracking: This feature lets you track a member’s sacrament journey. It may be important to consider this feature if sacrament tracking is already an established practice in your church. In ChMeetings this can potentially be tracked as notes on the member’s profile.
• Text Giving: This feature is useful if your members are more accustomed to using text for giving. In ChMeetings, giving is easy to track, both online and in person.

What Else Distinguishes ChMeetings From Church Community Builder?

Transparent Pricing And Fees

At ChMeetings we publish every cost involved with using our platform, including fees for text messaging or payment processing - it’s all there in our product interface or documentation, where relevant. All our fees are also listed on our pricing page so you always know what you pay, for what, and to whom. Our Diocese plan is the only one where pricing depends on your needs, which is why we don’t list it.

Free Move-In

If you move to ChMeetings and choose any of our paid plans, we’ll move your data for free.

Free Trial

PushPay asks prospects to contact them before getting access to a trial. All they provide is a guided tour which doesn’t let you explore their solution on your own.

ChMeetings gives you a 14-day free trial, which you can instantly access and use, to get a pretty good idea about whether our platform fits your church. You can also add demo data to work with during the trial, so you don’t need to spend time adding it yourself. We provide a quick guided tour too, and also include overview videos for many major features. After the trial, you can continue with our free plan or subscribe. Check out our Pricing page for details.

Free Cancellation, Anytime

PushPay requires a 90-day cancellation notice. With ChMeetings you can cancel anytime, with just a few clicks and zero fees.

Both PushPay’s Church Community Builder and ChMeetings are platforms that will improve your church work. However, the aspects we discussed above may make a difference in your decision. If the features that ChMeetings does not offer are not mandatory for your church, we encourage you to try our platform to see if it may fit your needs. ChMeetings is suitable for churches of all sizes and provides high value for a low price; as shown by our customer feedback. We invite you to take a look and get in touch if you have questions or comments.