ChMeetings vs. Servant Keeper
If you are looking for a Servant Keeper alternative, this comparison introduces you to ChMeetings as a potential option, in your search for the best ChMS for your church. While Servant Keeper is a powerful, comprehensive platform, ChMeetings offers similar features in a more user-friendly manner and for a more affordable price.
ChMeetings is cloud-based, cost-effective, feature-rich, and user-friendly. Servant Keeper, owned by Faithlife, works on the web and desktop, comes at a fixed cost plus fees, focuses on feature depth, and is rather complex.
Table of Contents
What Makes ChMeetings Stand Out?
To save you time, here’s what we think in a nutshell:
- ChMeetings may be a good choice if:
- Want to pay based on your church size and avoid extra fees;
- Don’t have dedicated IT or servants who are very comfortable with technology;
- Prefer a streamlined, cloud-based tool;
- Want to provide people with access to a church app, from any device.
- Servant Keeper may be a good choice if:
- Want a flat base rate and don’t mind extra fees;
- Are a large church, with many team members, a large IT infrastructure, and staff;
- Want a more complex tool and prefer offline access;
- Do not want or need to provide members with access to a church app.
- The lowest cost for ChMeetings is $12/month. The highest cost for ChMeetings is $60/month or $600/year.
- Servant Keeper’s lowest cost is $64.99 monthly and $714.89 annually The highest cost is $269.99 monthly and $2969.89 annually
- Online giving fees may also be lower with ChMeetings (fixed 2.2% + $0.30/donation in the USA and Canada via Stripe). Servant Keeper only mention “competitive rates”
- ChMeetings is fully cloud-based, develops fast, and keeps up with modern bestpractices in tech, design, and church management.
- Servant Keeper offers a cloud version but still depends on its desktop-based origins, leading to potential access limitations, increased complexity, more experienced staff and more effort during training.
- Choose any paid plan and we’ll move your data from anywhere, for free. No catch, we just do it because we want you with us in the long run.
- Servant Keeper charges $249 for data transfer if you choose their lowerpriced plan (Good, The service is free with the more costly plans.
- While being very userfriendly, and affordable for small to medium churches, ChMeetings comes with features tailored to large churches and Dioceses. From Elections, to Power-BI analytics, to your own, private database, ChMeetings can handle the requirements of large communities.
- Servant Keeper does not provide any such features.
- ChMeetings has a modern interface, focused on simplicity and designed to be easy to use by anyone, techsavvy or not.
- Our support resources are easy to follow, too, so servants can learn fast.
- Servant Keeper’s interface is less approachable, and their support resources are loaded with information, but contain many broken images and are very hard to navigate.
Cost Comparison Between ChMeetings and Servant Keeper
Below is a snapshot of what churches can expect to pay for ChMeetings and Servant Keeper:
| Feature | ChMeetings | Servant Keeper |
|---|---|---|
| Free Trial | 30 days | |
| Pricing is based on the number of people | ||
| Free plan for 50 people | ||
| Lowest plan price |
$12 monthly $120 annually |
$69.99 monthly $769.89 annually |
| Highest plan price |
$60 monthly $600 annually |
$249.99 monthly $2749.89 annually |
| Extra costs |
US Text messaging starts at $10 per 1000 standard GSM messages
Free data transfer included with any paid plan You pay online giving fees to your chosen payment processor, not to ChMeetings. These vary based on your processor (PayPal or Stripe), but are some of the most competitive on the market (e.g.; .fixed 2.2% + $0.30/donation in the USA and Canada via Stripe) Free, no-limitations mobile app with all plans, including the Free plan. Optional Branded Mobile App for $50 per month, charged on top of any paid plan. |
Text messaging is unavailable for their lowest plan, includes 1,000 texts/month with the midpriced plan, and includes unlimited messages with the highest priced plan.
$249 data transfer fee Servant Keeper only mentions “competitive giving rates”. The lowest plan (Good - $149/month) does not include the mobile app. The mid-priced plan includes a “Basic” app, and their highest plan provides a customizable mobile app, but it is not clear if this is branded or not. |
Feature Comparison: Chmeetings Vs Servant Keeper
ChMeetings provides the features you need to smoothly run your church, without the headaches of legacy technologies. Here’s what features you get with ChMeetings and not with Servant Keeper:
- Member Portal and Mobile App where members can stay connected with your church; Additionally, our mobile app provides almost all the features available in the web app, so you can manage your church on-the go, anytime.
- Built-in event management and volunteer scheduling, without 3rd party integrations that cost extra;
- Automated tasks to help you skip repetitive work;
- Built-in accounting with no need for 3rd party integrations incurring extra costs;
- Service Planning with options to add songs, scripture or notes, and to use templates;
- Digitally signed forms.
- Features exclusive to our optional Branded Mobile app, including group chat and a media library.
Here is a detailed feature comparison between ChMeetings and Servant Keeper:
| Feature | ChMeetings | Servant Keeper |
|---|---|---|
| All-in-One Mobile App for both members and admins | Separate apps for managing members and events. Available with different tiers depending on your plan, Admin only | |
| Member Management | ||
| Member Portal & Mobile App | ||
| Custom Profile Fields | ||
| Groups | - plus Smart Groups | |
| Group Chat | - with the optional Branded App (Costs $50/month extra) | |
| Mass Email | ||
| Mass Texting | - Costs Extra | - Costs Extra |
| Event Management | Requires third-party app | |
| Check-In | ||
| Service Planning | ||
| Volunteer Scheduling | Requires third-party app | |
| Member Portal | ||
| Member Portal Builder / Web Page Builder | Requires third-party app | |
| Media Library (Publish media content for members to view online) | - with the optional Branded App (Costs $50/month extra) | |
| Follow-Ups | ||
| Appointments | ||
| Digitally Signed Forms | ||
| Online Giving | ||
| Pledges | ||
| Sacrament Manager | ||
| Accounting | - starting with the Small plan | Requires third-party app |
| Reports | ||
| Integrations | ||
| Diocese Plan | ||
| Multilingual | - 22 Languages |
Detailed Comparison
Are you looking to choose a Church Management System or to find a Servant Keeper alternative? Are you considering ChMeetings, too? Let’s see how ChMeetings compares to Servant Keeper on cost, features, performance, and user-friendliness.
Cost
ChMeetings offers higher value for a more affordable price, compared to Servant Keeper
Servant Keeper costs $64 per month for unlimited people, with no annual billing options. ChMeeting’s Unlimited plan costs $60 per month. If you pay annually, you get 2 months free, so you only pay $600 instead of $720.
If you are a small church and don’t need to store unlimited people, you will pay less for ChMeetings, too. Our plans start as low as $12 per month ($120 per year), and we provide a free plan, which is unavailable with Servant Keeper.
Additionally, Servant Keeper charges extra for licensing and data transfer. ChMeetings requires no licensing and we’ll move your data for free as long as you subscribe to any paid plan. Texting is charged extra in both ChMeetings and Servant Keeper, but fees are lower in ChMeetings.
There is no available information regarding the fees charged for Servant Keeper online giving.
ChMeetings charges no transaction fees; the only ones you pay come from your chosen payment processor.
Servant Keeper offers multiple, low-rating mobile apps designed to only handle specific tasks such as check-in or ministry. There appears to be no app for members, only for church admins.
With ChMeetings you get the highest-rated ChMS mobile app for free, which helps you do 90% of your work on the go. There is also an optional branded app for $50/month, so people can find your church in Google Play and the Apple App Store. Branded apps are unavailable in Servant Keeper as far as we can tell. Their highest plan offers a “customizeable” church app, but it’s not clear what “customizeable” means.
Features Comparison
- ChMeetings is more feature-rich and does not require third parties for major features
- Both Servant Keeper and ChMeetings are Church Management platforms that will help you streamline your work.
- Both provide core features such as member management, communication, and giving.
- Servant Keeper focuses on the complexity of each core feature, while ChMeetings cares more about providing more options that perform the major tasks that most churches require.
Performance
ChMeetings performs better than Servant Keeper
We are not active users of Servant Keeper, so we can’t speak objectively about their system’s performance, but we looked at some of the feedback users left on Capterra within the past year.
Here is what we found:
- ChMeetings Most people are happy with ChMeetings’s overall performance too, and say it’s scalable, fast, and responsive. Some mentions needed improvement to the notification system, integrations, and API.
- Servant Keeper Many people are satisfied with Servant Keeper’s overall performance and say it’s a good fit for their church. Some; however, report bugs, slowness, complicated workflows that increase training efforts, issues generating reports, difficulty using it on Mac OS, and time-consuming and complex updates,
User-Friendliness
ChMeetings is much more user-friendly than Servant Keeper
The easier a platform is to use, the more successful you will be with it. Of course, oversimplification is not desirable, so the right balance must be struck. Here are our thoughts on how user-friendly both Servant Keeper and ChMeetings are:
You must install the Servant Keeper desktop app to use this software. ChMeetings is completely cloud-based.
- While a desktop app is useful when you need offline access to your data, it can be difficult to keep up with version upgrades, data syncing, and maybe higher security risks. Servant Keeper’s download requirement complicates your work in the long run.
- ChMeetings is fully cloud-based, so version upgrades are automatic, your data is always up-to-date and security risks are significantly reduced. Everything is much simpler and accessible in one app, from any device. The obvious disadvantage of a cloud-based app like ChMeetings is that you must have an Internet connection to access it.
Servant Keeper has a complex, rather outdated user interface. ChMeetings is streamlined, cross-device compatible and constantly improving the design.
- We think the world of technology is past the era of miles-long menus and complicated interfaces that one has to research before using. This seems to be the case with Servant Keeper, since the platform’s design does not feel intuitive and modern, and the information architecture is not that well organized.
- The modern UX design within ChMeetings makes it intuitive, so you don’t have to read the documentation first. We do our best to save you time and frustration and make ChMeetings suitable for 21st-century churches by being clear and making everything easy to understand.
Servant Keeper’s informational resources are complex, not well organized, and difficult to access. ChMeetings focuses on clarity and strives to always keep you informed.
- Servant Keeper’s homepage only links to a few subpages. To retrieve the rest, people have to search a rather extensive, hidden network of pages that are not linked to the homepage. There is no clear list of extra fees – we had to dig through support articles and third-party resources to validate them for you. The help desk is massive but not well organized. Most articles contain no product screenshots; where they do, images are often broken. Also, a lot of information is still unsearchable, being stored in PDF brochures. This doesn’t help; especially when you get started.
- Managing large amounts of complex information is not an easy task; however, the ChMeetings team are continuously working on enhancing information accessibility. We made many recent improvements and continue updating our help center. Our help desk is easy to use and organized by major features. Everything is searchable with no PDFs involved. We can always do better — if you have feedback, please let us know.
Capterra Ratings
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ChMeetings vs. Servant Keeper FAQ
What is Servant Keeper?
Servant Keeper is a legacy church management software primarily used for desktop-based church operations.
Why switch from Servant Keeper to ChMeetings?
ChMeetings is cloud-based, mobile-friendly, faster to set up, and offers modern features like push notifications, integrated calendars, and online giving.
Is ChMeetings easier to use than Servant Keeper?
Yes, ChMeetings is designed with a modern user interface that is intuitive for both church staff and members.
Can I migrate data from Servant Keeper to ChMeetings?
Absolutely. Our team helps churches seamlessly import data from Servant Keeper, including members, groups, and giving history.
Does ChMeetings have a mobile app?
Yes, ChMeetings offers fully functional mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Is ChMeetings secure?
Yes. ChMeetings uses encryption, cloud backups, and secure login to ensure your church’s data is protected.
Can ChMeetings handle large churches or dioceses?
Yes, ChMeetings supports churches of all sizes, including multi-site and diocese-level organizations.
What support is available during the transition?
We offer live support, onboarding assistance, and documentation to guide your team during and after migration.
What’s the pricing difference between Servant Keeper and ChMeetings?
ChMeetings offers clear, transparent pricing starting from $12/month, while Servant Keeper requires a custom quote.
Can ChMeetings integrate with my website or other tools?
Yes. ChMeetings offers integrations via APIs and supports embedding forms and calendars into your website.