MediaShout vs ProPresenter: Which is a better fit?

Karen: My name is Karen. I am an administrative assistant. I give MediaShout a five rating. For more information, click below. When I came to work at this church, there was no media program at all. But I had seen the program MediaShout being used in another small church, and I thought, "Well, maybe this would be something that would make the church run more smoothly on a Sunday morning." So we started looking at programs, MediaShout and others as well. When we started looking for programs, I had heard of MediaShout and I had heard of ProPresenter. So I went online and I started to do some research. One of the things I love best about MediaShout, and one of the reasons we made that decision to go that direction, is because it gave us a 30-day free trial. And during that 30-day free trial period, I was able to learn how to use the program. And also, I had live phone support and lots and lots of tutorials and things to teach me about it. When I went and looked at the other program, it didn't have any kind of a free trial. And I wasn't sure about what the support would look like, because it really didn't tell you much about it on the website, so we went with MediaShout. MediaShout, at first, was incredibly intimidating to me. Now I'm pretty tech savvy, but I had never used any kind of a program like MediaShout before. But it was not hard at all. I got the basic tutorial and I printed it out and I used it as a guide, and within a week, I felt fairly comfortable. Within the end of the first month, I was very comfortable using the program. Now, I'm a lover of MediaShout, you can tell. I use the program every week. And at first it took me a couple of hours to put together the Sunday service. But now, I put everything together, including the announcements before church and everything in an hour, it's maybe even less. It's a real simple program once you get used to it. So here's what I suggest, go to the MediaShout website, download that free 30-day trial and see what it can do for you. I think you'll be amazed, even if you've never done anything like this before. We trained an 88-year-old man to be the guy who runs it in the church, and he and I work together all the time with 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.