ChurchTrac vs ProPresenter: Which is a better fit?

Jeff Q.: My name is Jeff. I am the senior pastor of Smoky Valley Baptist Church in Lindsborg, Kansas, and I would give ChurchTrac an absolute five rating. Before ChurchTrac, we were using an online version of Quicken and it was just very limited for our needs as far as the church goes. From all of my administrative and organizational purposes, I was using actual manual stuff. And I've got manual copies of visits that I've made, organizational type charts, that kind of stuff. And it's just cumbersome and not editable and certainly old school. So we went with ChurchTrac because the price was very competitive to every other program we've seen. And the other programs, it seemed like they had a trunk of their project that was for churches. ChurchTrac is written expressly for churches and it's like church people built it. It addresses everything we were needing, and it even opened us up to some things that we didn't know were possible. And so therefore we've kind of adapted some things ChurchTrac makes possible, online giving, online directory, just those types of things. The ability to mass email and mass text through partnering software, that's been eye-opening for us and that's really been a blessing. So getting started with ChurchTrac was very easy, and I am an old guy. I'm the guy that looks for a 14-year-old to help me with my phone. ChurchTrac was so easy to get started with. It has an iPhone component, a mobile phone component called Church Connect. And just really, it's very user-friendly. Besides that, the tutorials and the walkthroughs are just abundant on ChurchTrac's YouTube page. If I have any questions, I go through there and it's like an FAQ for people that need to see it spelled out and played out before them. And besides that, I've been a part of two of the Zoom meetings with the ChurchTrac representatives who have taken questions right there in a live format. And they've addressed all of my questions and really, I have yet to find anything I can't figure out. So it's been good. If I were to give any advice for a new user of ChurchTrac, we are a very small church. We've got 70 to 80 individuals in our church. I'm the only pastor. But I have other key individuals that I use in leadership, treasurers, deacons, that type of thing. And it's really been a blessing to me to know that I can authorize them with user access, with administrative access for different areas. In our situation, and in many churches like ours, the pastor keeps himself free of knowledge of the giving. I don't want to know who gives and who doesn't give and what they give. That just helps me to be able to shepherd and to minister to everybody equally. And so I can do that with ChurchTrac with the financial end of things. I can authorize my treasurers to know that information and I can restrict it from my own information. So that's been a real blessing. But if I had one big bit of advice, yeah, involve those other leaders. Don't just do it by yourself, and take full advantage. We're not using even a fraction of what ChurchTrac is offering at this point, and I'm looking forward to growing into it.

Daniel J.: Hi, my name's Daniel. I'm at South County Bible Church. I'm the Associate Pastor here. We've been using ProPresenter for about 10 years, and I'll give it four out of five stars. We use ProPresenter every week, although not on a day-to-day basis. We use it for projecting lyrics and video content in our sanctuary on Sunday mornings. We also use it for rehearsals, but that's just for preparing for that Sunday service. What we like most about ProPresenter is that it just works for the most part. You can import all kinds of different content. It connects to a lot of the different services like SongSelect and other places that you can subscribe to that'll help you create your slides easier. It seems like no matter what kind of file I throw at it, ProPresenter can read it. In the last couple of years as the new versions of ProPresenter have come out, they've switched to a subscription base. The good thing about that is that they do seem to have a lot of new content and a lot of new features as time has gone on, and it works for the most part. They do seem to release updates so quickly that sometimes I feel like they aren't completely bug tested because we've had to, probably three times in the last year, we've had to roll back to a previous version because the new stuff they've added doesn't work right away. We've had to implement a test and see rather than just update. To be honest, the cost every year to subscribe is pretty prohibitive. Thankfully, our church is financially able to do that, but it used to be you'd buy it and it would just work for three or four years and then you'd buy the new version, so paying every year is a little bit of a burden.