PowerChurch Plus vs Nucleus: Which is a better fit?

Steve: Hi, I'm Steve. I'm a youth pastor. I give PowerChurch Plus a four out five. For more reviews like this click below. We used PowerChurch Plus for several years up until last year. We used it on a daily basis for keeping track of our church database; who was in attendance and who was participating in our local church. What we appreciated most about PowerChurch Plus is that it helped us keep track of our church members and attenders. What I disliked about PowerChurch Plus, and what caused us to move on from PowerChurch Plus, was that it did not integrate as well with our money income collecting system. When people wanted to give to the church, donate to the church, or pay for things like conference registration, the software that we used for keeping track of those funds did not mesh well with PowerChurch Plus.

Addison R.: Hey, I'm Addison. I'm an online pastor and I would give Nucleus a five out of five. Before Nucleus, we like 13% of the internet were on WordPress through a CMS using a template, stuff like that. We looked at a lot of options when we were looking at changing over our internet. What we were looking for was a mobile responsive design. We were looking for something that was going to be easy to use for people, but visually appealing to people who cared about what your website look like. We looked at a company called The Church Co who basically is very similar to WordPress in a lot of ways. And we looked at Nucleus. When we came to Nucleus, there were a lot of reasons that drew us into it. First of all, your homepage is beautiful. It's modeled after Instagram and YouTube user interfaces, and it just looks great. You see it, it looks familiar. It looks professional. But at the same time, we wanted ease of use. As a church, we have volunteers that are changing this thing. We want people to be able to go in and edit things. So we couldn't have something where they were messing with code. And we couldn't have something where it was possible to, frankly, mess it up too badly. So we sat down and we said, "Okay, here's a product that looks great. It's always going to look great no matter what we do to it. It's really hard to mess up." Yes, you lose some customization there, but what you have is a product that looks good all the time. That anytime somebody goes on your website, it's going to look great. And then of course there was Brady and the team at Pro Church Tools. Their responsiveness kind of in our one-month free trial was incredible. There's a chat bot that's built right into your content management system. If you have questions, if you need a custom piece of code, if there's something that your website can't do, you throw it in there. And honestly, usually within three or four hours, you have an answer from somebody on their team who's helping you to have the thing that you need for your website. And they are always working. Just in the time that we've been with them, they've done several content upgrades. They've done several updates to how it works. And they've added features that we've asked for. So it really has been a great experience. So the hardest thing about church ministry has always changed, right? So when you're working with people, a lot of times, people like the sameness, they like the security of what was there before. So getting people on board was probably the most challenging part, but on our end it was incredibly easy. I think it took me about like six to eight hours of just kind of sitting in front of the computer, going through our old web page page by page and building out our new page. And then once it was done, we really didn't have to do much in the way of selling it. We sent it out to kind of a small group people. We said, "Hey, can you thumb around? Can you give us feedback?" And the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The onboarding process was pretty simple. We just worked with Bluehost who does our URL and stuff like that. And we had to have it redirect to the right place, and all that type of stuff. That's what you do when you have to change over website stuff, we had to go into our Google side, have them do a crawl, all that type of stuff to have everything update and switch over. But as far as the things that Nucleus could control, it was incredibly easy for me as one person who doesn't have a ton of coding experience. I mean, I couldn't code a website from scratch. I've never built anything on GitHub. I don't have that type of knowledge base, but I was able to just kind of design a beautiful website right there on my computer as I sat and watched football on a Sunday afternoon. I think when you're considering Nucleus, you have to basically make kind of a front-end decision and that front-end decision is, "Do I want infinite customization or do I want something that's just going to work?" And the fact is you probably work in church ministry, the website probably isn't your only job. It probably isn't the only thing you have going on. The reality of your situation is probably a lot more like, "Man, we are ready to kind of maybe spend a little bit of money on this, but if we're going to spend money, it just needs to work." Because you had to get this approved by 14 people just to spend of that $1,200 or whatever the full year is. And you just want it to go. You want to hit go live and you want it to work out. And you want it to be able to be managed by a volunteer. So in my mind, Nucleus is kind of an open and shut case because when you sit down with it, it's like I said, the downside is it's going to look the same. Your website is largely going to look similar to every other Nucleus page. And that might be frustrating for you, but what you lose in customization, you gain back in the fact that it just works. It doesn't look a lot different from maybe another Nucleus page, but it's going to work every time you get into it and you can easily train a volunteer to get into it. And there's no concern that they're going to mess up the homepage, that they're accidentally going to hide something, that they're going to put in some type of rogue CSS that's going to mess up the way the banners look. And they are responsive in what they're going to add. There's a Facebook group full of church leaders who are asking for things and they're building them into the platform as they go. So when you're considering Nucleus, I think you have to ask yourself, "Do I want customization?" If customization is important to you, I really wouldn't recommend it. But if you're willing to kind of work within kind of their ecosystem, I think you're going to find yourself a lot happier. You're going to find yourself a lot more distressed. And you're going to find yourself not being the only person on your team who can edit the website. And instead, you can train people from various departments and even volunteers to edit the website and make minor updates.