11 Best Church Website Builder to Spread the Faith in 2020

Even if you dig deep, you will struggle to find detailed information about FinalWeb online. The company website has no About Us section to get you better acquainted with the team. This is a technique that more progressive church providers tend to employ.

From what we gathered from FinalWeb’s Facebook and Linkedin pages, it first started operating on the church builder market in 2000, after choosing Santa Clarita, CA, for its headquarters. Apart from religious organizations, the company also serves schools, universities, and various types of businesses and non-profit organizations.

There is even a reseller program for anyone looking to sell the FinalWeb solutions to others.

Looking to be a reseller yourself? Jump to our extensive guide of the best reseller services.

Back on topic, the lack of company information might be alarming. Still, don’t let that put you off FinalWeb. The California-based provider has proven to be a top-quality Christian web builder, and here’s why.

FinalWeb Ease of Use

The FinalWeb wizard starts you off with a choice between eight beautiful church templates. You can then choose if you want to quickly set up a page and put it online right away, or to take the long route, tweaking all the little elements.

FinalWeb’s dashboard offers a modern look and smooth navigation across menus and settings. Adding and editing pages is a breeze, and there are plenty of customizability options to work with.

All in all, FW looks like the best website builder for churches in terms of UI and UX.

FinalWeb Features

Even before you start designing your first page, FinalWeb greets you with a 5-minute video that offers a quick tour, explaining all the key features. No need to figure out which package is the best for you, as FW gives churches a single, all-encompassing plan.

The deal really looks to cover it all — you get unmetered space and bandwidth, as well as the ability to create sub-sites for different ministries. The plan supports up to 50 email addresses and a free SSL certificate for extra security.

Churches have a lot going for them.

Event Registration

Here we have a wonderful church web builder that lets members subscribe and participate in open events. It might not sound like a big deal, but you will be surprised by how many people find such an option useful. Especially if they don’t live close to your church.

Podcast Feeds

Your followers will never miss a sermon again if you integrate a podcasting feature into your site. FinalWeb allows users to subscribe to your feeds and view lectures in video and audio format. There’s even an in-built media player that lets you stream sermons directly from your web page.

FinalWeb Integrations

Donations and tithing make up a good chunk of any church’s budget. That’s why, among other things, FinalWeb’s tool integrates easily with PayPal. This allows you to take full advantage of online payments.

Other useful plugins include an online form builder and data tracking through Google Analytics.

FinalWeb Support

When you’re using FinalWeb, you’re never building church web sites on your own.

Self-learners can take advantage of extensive documentation and tutorial-rich knowledge base. Those resources can walk you through all the details surrounding the church app. Additionally, there’s a tips section, that gives you insights on the most popular integrations.

As for live assistance, you won’t find any chat support with FinalWeb. Still, there are phone operators available during business hours, between 8 am — 5 pm Pacific time. Ticketing is open for you 24/7.

Our church website builder review revealed that not a lot of companies actually offer live assistance. This is why we had to test the email support more extensively. We sent an email to all contenders with a few sales and basic tech questions, grading the response times and the usefulness of replies.

FinalWeb was one of the fast responders and gave us the most detailed information. We bugged them with a few more emails, just to be sure, but the operators always replied within a couple of hours.

Overall, FinalWeb is a trustworthy choice with well-trained support.

FinalWeb Plans and Pricing

• Church Website Plan — $29/mo

Building affordable church websites is one of FinalWeb’s main goals. And they give you all the tools to do it.

Every new premium client can benefit from free domain registration, so you can keep the site’s name and hosting in one place for easy management. This bonus is valid for the first year, after which the annual fee comes between $15-$18, depending on whether it is .com, .org, or another extension.

Тhe $29/mo rate for the site builder is fixed for all billing periods and doesn’t require you to prepay.

Simple, clear, cost-effective — that’s the FinalWeb church plan for you.

FinalWeb Verdict

A magnificent choice if this your first time building websites for churches. The FinalWeb platform is very user-friendly and offers stunning design options. If you take advantage of those, you can effortlessly put your ministry on the map (quite literally, too). There are plenty of customization options to go around, and even if you need extra help — assistance is always round the corner.

The Church Co was founded in 2015 by one Paul Cox. He has close ties with religion himself, having spent some time in the Hillsong Church in Sydney.

He started with a fundamental question — what do churches need online?

Out of all the answers he got, he managed to outline four essential categories of content — Pages, Blogs, Events, and Podcasts.

This is how it all started, but let’s see how far this church website builder has come.

The Church Co Ease of Use

TCC’s visual interface is nothing flashy, but it’s well-suited for beginners. Unlike the standard left-side menu, your main options here hide behind boxes (literally).

It might look a bit cluttered at first, but nothing is overly complicated, and we quickly got the hang of what’s what.

You can easily tell that The Church Co entered the market recently — the platform looks very modern and up to the latest trends. If you are planning to build more than just a plain informational page, this church app builder can shine a heavenly light.

The Church Co Features

The Church Co offers three paid plans, and they all come with unlimited storage, unlimited monthly traffic, and… you guessed it, an unlimited number of pages.

You can start your site-building journey with a TCC subdomain, or you can use a domain name of your own. It’s smooth sailing from there on, with great options like online form builders, popup announcements, and a breathtaking stock photo image gallery for your designs.

And just when you think that might be enough — even more features are coming your way.

Small Group Builder

You can easily call The Church Co’s solution, “a community church builder.”

On the TCC Premium and Ultimate plans, you can take advantage of a feature called Small Groups Builders. It lets any individual church member find a perfect community to fit in, according to their interests.

Maybe you want to learn more about theology? Or discuss Bible verses with people?

Small Groups lets you see group locations all over the map, not just where your church is. This way, you can connect with like-minded individuals, even when you’re on the road.

Prayer Wall

Prayers can give us peace, comfort, and hope for a better tomorrow. If anything is stronger than our invocation to God, it’s the prayers of many.

The Church Co helps you build great church websites that allow followers to submit a prayer request. Upon approval, it lets everyone join in and pray with you.

It takes so little to make someone feel better.

The Church Co Integrations

There are about ten different third-party app integrations available, with new ones added regularly. This includes top tools like MailChimp (email services), Google Analytics (data tracking), as well as church-specific add-ons like Tithely and Church Community Builder.

You can also try TCC’s very own Planning Center — plan events, create groups, allow for online giving — all these can be automatically integrated into your site.

The Church Co Support

You can easily find the chat messenger popup on the TCC’s website. The few times we tried that option, we never waited more than a couple of minutes to connect. As we found out later, the support promises a first response time of less than 30 minutes, so our tests were more than positive.

The company website can also point you to a phone and email contact. The operators admitted there are fewer people monitoring client requests on Sundays, but we never found any significant delays.

On the contrary, The Church Co was second-best in terms of first email reply. Their response came within minutes, addressing each of our questions with on-point information.

Hands down, the best church app builder in 2020, in terms of support assistance.

The Church Co Plans and Pricing

• Basic — $20/mo
• Premium — $50/mo
• Ultimate — $199/mo

TCC’s entry-level prices are on the low side, requiring a $20/mo investment. This Basic plan carries enough features to satisfy the needs of most church sites. Still, some of the advanced features require at least the Premium package and monthly rates there are much steeper.

All three deals come with no setup fees, but there aren’t any free trials either.

As for add-ons, there are a bunch of professional services with The Church Co, but they are quite costly:

• Strategy session — $1,499
• Template development — $4,999
• Extended SEO setup — $299

You can reach great heights without these options, but if you can afford them — the results are out of this world.

The Church Co Verdict

TCC is one of the reliable church builders that seem to have everything going for them. It’s site builder packages are robust and carry enough church-specific benefits to be among our top choices.

Customer care is of the highest standards as well, offering timely support at any time of the day.

Faithlife is more than your run-of-the-mill church builder. Founded way back in 1992 by two ex-Microsoft employees, the company spent over 20 years developing and diversifying its portfolio of Christian software.

Today, the Faithlife corporation is a huge organization, serving 4+ million clients from 190+ countries. Among the provider’s most prominent products you can find:

• Logos Bible software — electronic Bible studies
• Faithlife Giving — online donations
• Faithlife Sites — church website builder
• Proclaim — church presentation software
• Biblia — Bible translations and different versions

And that’s not even half of it.

But let’s focus on the site builder as this is why we’re here.

Faithlife Ease of Use

Once we signed up with Faithlife, we hurried to log in and start building our page. The screen took a couple of second to load and:

Error 500 — Internal Server Error

Uh-oh. Not the greatest of first impressions.

It seems this was a minor glitch, though, as a minute later we were already in. It was smooth sailing from there. We picked between seven free church website templates and structured our pages with the convenient drag-and-drop tool.

There are a few pre-built church pages, but you have the full freedom to customize new ones to your liking.

Faithlife Features

It’s very easy to get a website going with Faithlife Sites. The platform has one free and one paid plan. You can start your journey with the cost-free deal, and upgrade once you need more server power.

The amount of system resources is the main difference between the two church web builder plans. The free package comes with 4GB of file storage and a 1GB sermon archive. When you upgrade to premium, both limits go as high as 50GB.

Both plans are rich in features, but a couple of them really manage to stand out.

Live Streaming

Faithlife gives congregation members a fantastic option to listen and participate in sermons from a distance. The video streaming quality is of the highest standard, and you can easily store your past streams in the 50GB sermon archive.

Overall, this is an ideal way to engage more people in your church’s mission.

Digital Bulletins

Stay connected with your visitors and always let them know the latest news and events about your church.

Faithlife’s stunning visuals extend far beyond the website templates for churches. You can also design beautiful bulletins and newsletters with the user-friendly editor. Send news out automatically on a weekly or monthly basis, or simply choose a time of your liking.

Faithlife Integrations

You won’t find any FL integrations with popular apps, but that doesn’t mean the site builder cannot scale upwards.

The best thing about Faithlife’s products and services is you can easily pair them together and maximize your church’s exposure and reach new heights.

Take online donations, for example. Why waste time integrating with PayPal or Stripe, when you can use Faithlife Giving?

Building a YouTube channel? Not when you have Faithlife TV.

In short, for every popular functionality, FL has already built a solution of its own.

Faithlife Support

You can feel almighty when you’re building Faithlife sites, but what if things go wrong?

For starters, the product documentation is not that extensive, covering no more than 20-ish essential topics.

As for live support, we also struggled to find adequate assistance. The company seems to cover all communication channels — chat, phone, and email — but the availability is not 24/7. The live chat, for example, promises available online operators Mon-Sat, between 6 am — 6 pm PDT. However, our tests at 7 in the morning found no one on shift.

The email communication was our next point of testing, and, we have to say, Faithlife’s initial reply arrived fairly quickly.

But what a reply it was…

The “answer” to all five of our sales queries was a single link to the church website builder page. Not only were there no direct solutions to our questions, but the operator even tried to sneak in a promotional offer, trying to seal the deal.

Not the best if you feel you’d need more hands-on assistance.

Faithlife Plans and Pricing

• Free — $0/mo
• Standard — $19.99/mo

Faithlife is a great tool for churches on a budget. The free plan tends to cover all your essential needs. If you don’t need a lot of file storage, you can build amazing ministry websites at no cost.

The paid plan is affordable as well, valued at $19.99/month. That said, if you choose to prepay the whole year, you will save two full months in fees.

No add-ons are available during upgrade — each FL product has a different pricing structure, so you have to check for further info about each desired integration.

Faithlife Verdict

Would we recommend Faithlife as a top church website builder in 2020? Definitely yes!

The platform is very versatile and caters to the specific needs of churches and other religious organizations. But there is so much more to it. The Faithlife Corporation has been devoted to bringing accessible and useful Christian software for nearly three decades. You better believe they’re in this for the long run.

Mission is a platform that serves a noble purpose — helping churches and ministries put their name online and reach a broader audience with the word of God.

Online information for this website builder for churches is pretty scarce. The company website lacks an About Us section, and social media channels share no word regarding provider history or milestones.

We managed to find some organizations that already utilize Mission for their church websites, and they do look inspiring — check out Harvest Ridge Church, Life Mission Church, and Mission 2535, just to name a few.

Mission Ease of Use

We signed up for Mission’s 14-day trial and got a choice of four church website templates for the visual outlook of our page. While they were all eye-pleasing, a bit more variety would’ve been even better.

We had a minor hiccup with a timeout error, but once we got in our account, all doubts were cast aside.

Mission’s dashboard is a gem for first-time site builders. It shows detailed support documentation along with a Getting Started video tutorial.

If you’re familiar with WordPress, then you’ll have no trouble with Mission as the backend looks almost identical. You have a left-side menu with sections like Posts, Media, Pages, but also some church-oriented features like the Sermon Builder.

Editing and customizing websites for church organizations with Mission is fast, smooth, and error-free.

Nothing to fault here.

Mission Features

Mission’s church builder comes in a single plan with all features included. Looking at it, it seems to pack everything you need to promote your church or ministry.

All Mission templates and designs are fully responsive, so you won’t have to worry how your website looks on different screens.

You can choose to put your page on a Mission subdomain, but if you already have a domain — you can go ahead and connect it to your new site. There are no limits on pages and posts you can publish.

But that’s not all.

Sermon Builder

Sermons are a big part of your church website development. So Mission equips you with a separate tool dedicated to your pastor’s speeches only.

Through the sermon manager, you can upload audio in .mp3 format, embed YouTube and Vimeo videos, or share your podcasts to iTunes.

Talk about getting friendly with technology.

Cloud Hosted

One of the best feats is undoubtedly the cloud hosting storage, offering a much faster and more secure way of keeping your data.

Instead of your site and storage files residing on a single physical server, your information gets copied in the globally interconnected network that is the cloud. This way, you can access, share, and edit it easily from any location with an internet connection.

Mission Integrations

Mission lets you pair up with third-party tools for an enhanced experience, but doesn’t really give any specific information about the supported apps. According to our detailed church website builder reviews, the platform supports addons for ministry management, code embedding, and link creation.

But if you have a particular add-on in mind, you should best check with the customer care team if it will work on their system.

Mission Support

As we mentioned, Mission offers rich support documentation and video guides for first-time users. This adds a much-needed comfort and confidence that site-building is not an impossible task.

Philippians 4:13 — I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

The Mission website does not have a Contact Us page, and, according to the FAQ, the company offers email and chat support only. We only managed to find the latter.

The few times we had a chat conversation, the Mission operators were quite friendly and ready to help. The reps showed more than a basic understanding of the product, assuring us that building a church app is no biggie with their platform.

Still, supporting more than one communication channel would certainly do Mission well.

Mission Plans and Pricing

• Premium plan — $47/mo

Mission’s package is quite robust, but that comes at a price. Valued at $47/mo, it’s the second most expensive deal in our review.

The price remains the same come renewal, and no upfront payments are needed — all billing is month-to-month.

Mission invites you to try out the platform for free for 14 days before making a final decision. That’s plenty of time to test the service and see if it fits your needs.

Mission Verdict

Mission doesn’t give out much information about its team and values — it lets its product speak for itself. Some of the best church websites today utilize this site builder for their holy needs. First-timers and WordPress users will find Mission particularly easy to use, letting you focus on the fine details that will help your congregation grow.

Ministry Designs is a company that prides itself on its love for God.

The provider has been operating in the church niche for over 20 years, and you can tell that experience has been put in good use.

Ministry is committed to helping local churches find more exposure and better promote their vision, services, and events.

Let’s see how that’s working for them.

Ministry Designs Ease of Use

Just one glance at the Ministry website, and you can tell the company knows a lot about trendy church web design.

We got to pick between 21 stunning templates, and new ones seem to keep coming. Additionally, there is a gallery of 10,000+ modern-looking visuals you can use for your pages, newsletters, and media content.

The interface, unsurprisingly, looks magnificent as well. Overall, this ensures a smooth site-building experience.

Ministry Designs Features

Ministry offers one plan for churches and religious organizations, but it has plenty of features to go around.

It’s super easy to create a church website when you have the right tools. And Ministry Designs has them all.

Hosting-wise, the provider equips you with unmetered space and bandwidth, daily backups, SSL certificate, and email services.

As for the drag-and-drop builder, you have the full freedom to inspect and change every little detail. You get a built-in media player, options for audio and video podcasts, an event calendar.

There’s a strong focus on SEO as well — your church can get maximum exposure through RSS feeds, search-friendly URLs, and metatag generators.

Here are some fascinating statistics about the importance of SEO for your websites.

As for your mission-specific features…

Multilingual Websites

God is omnipresent, and He doesn’t divide us by age, gender, race, or the way we speak.

If you serve a multilingual community, offering your sermons and site content in more than one language is a great idea. This way, everyone that shares the same moral and religious beliefs can feel welcome and well-accepted in the House of God.

Easy Social Sharing

Ministry Designs also employs the power of social networks.

We get it, Facebook and Instagram might not sound like the best places for a church to try and spread God’s word. Still, with the right strategy, you can attract a lot of younger followers.

Churches like Fresh Life and Waters Edge are already rocking social media channels, and your organization could be next.

Ministry Designs Integrations

Our research found no information about possible third-party integrations, and we are yet to receive a reply from Ministry at the time of writing this church website builder review.

Update: As the reply came, it turns out the platform has in-built integrations with Disqus, Google Maps, Google reCAPTCHA, and Google Search. Strange the company doesn’t mention that anywhere, as any such add-ons can be good selling points.

Ministry Designs Support

Ministry’s support services are a bit iffy.

Some pages on the website advertise 24/7 chat and email assistance. And yet, the Contact Us page reveals working hours between 8 am to 5 pm EST.

Out of five chats that we’ve had with Ministry Designs, two failed to connect in the first ten minutes and forwarded us to email. In one case, the operator appeared after a while, but each reply was taking way too long.

On a positive note, we tested the screen share support feature, and it worked just fine. The rep managed to show us around and teach us a thing or two about the best practices for church websites.

All in all, we managed to get some proper help with Ministry, but it did require a lot of patience.

Ministry Designs Plans and Pricing

• Church Website Plan — $20/mo ($1,000 setup fee)

Ministry reveals a very affordable monthly rate, but the setup fee is far from fitting every pocket. Not every small town church can spare $1,000 for setup fees alone, especially with so many similar tools that don’t carry any extra cost.

Still, if the price is not a deal-breaker, you can seriously consider this deal.

You can also schedule a live demo, but there is no option for a free trial to test the Ministry platform for yourself.

Some of the best web templates for churches are just waiting around the corner, ready to help you build an inspiring website.

Ministry Designs Verdict

If you’re looking to bring a modern outlook for your church and reach a wider audience, you can trust Ministry Designs to do a good job. The navigation is smooth and intuitive, barely complicated even for the novice user.

Customer care is not a strong suit for Ministry, but if the case is not urgent — you can still get a proper resolution.

Sharefaith has been aiding churches in their online ventures for 15+ years, accumulating over 100,000 successful projects under its belt.

The company’s secret is that the whole team loves God, so they really want their church website builder to make a difference.

Sharefaith’s About Us page is a breath of fresh air, with its introductions of executive members through stylish caricatures. The company’s core values are well-presented as well:

• belief in God, the Father Almighty
• belief in the Holy Spirit, the church as the body of Christ
• belief that salvation comes through confession of sin
• belief that the Old and New Testaments are the infallible Words of God
• belief in the Great Commission

In short, you cannot argue Sharefaith lacks dedication.

Sharefaith Ease of Use

Signing up for a free trial on Sharefaith’s church building plans was no hassle. A setup wizard took us through the basics and revealed a choice of 27 responsive templates with a religious theme.

The insides of the Sharefaith account show a modern-looking dashboard with site editing options on the left.

While the backend looks good, it doesn’t always perform as expected. We’ve had some minor hiccups with page edits and the preview option, which tarnished an otherwise perfect experience.

Sharefaith Features

The Sharefaith platform does way more than to just create simple church websites. There are tons of other church-related services and solutions, separated into four distinct plans:

• Media — sermon storage
• Kids — curriculum and activities
• Web + Media — website and storage
• Sharefaith Suite — the whole package

The website plan gives you 100GB web space, which is good for hosting four websites. Those can only exist as one domain and three subdomains.

Even when your website goes online, you can still work on some design edits and change your templates as many times as you wish.

You can quickly tell Sharefaith wants to leave a mark in the Christian website builders niche. The company has developed packages with some unique features for churches and ministries.

Worship Manager

Sharefaith’s very own Worship Manager is an award-winning platform that helps you create wonderful sermon presentations through Powerpoint and Presenter. It comes in the form of a plugin and integrates with your website with a few clicks.

There are over 90,000 graphics to choose from, including pictures, videos, backgrounds, and more.

Sharefaith partners with CCLI SongSelect, giving all users access to the world’s largest database of worship song lyrics.

Online Church Giving

Here we have a complete solution for church tithing and online donations.

Sharefaith’s add-on eliminates the need to integrate any third-party payment solutions. It also comes with impressive features like event registration, real-time monitoring, and text-based giving.

Speaking of texting, Sharefaith tops the church website builder rankings when it comes to mobile app support. Smartphone users will be able to donate through a URL or donation button.

You can also set recurring and multiple payments through your Sharefaith app, given that your donors are willing to help regularly.

Sharefaith Integrations

Websites built on Sharefaith have some opportunities for enhancement through third-party products.

On the SF website, you can find information about AppleTV and Airplay integrations on mobile, as well as Youtube and Vimeo compatibility.

If you dig deeper, you can find bits of information about other tools, like the Logos Bible software. But if you have anything specific in mind, it will be safer checking with the support team first.

Sharefaith Support

Building your first church web page will often require some extra help to get things going.

The ShareFaith Helpdesk does a great job in that aspect. The knowledge base is full of helpful articles and video guides, covering topics like your hosting account, billing, the worship manager, and more.

Finding live assistance is a whole different ball game, though.

Support is available Mon-Fri, 8 am — 5 pm CT. There is a chat popup, which connects you to a chatbot. In testing, the latter was rarely helpful for anything more than the basic questions.

That leaves us with email support.

Sharefaith promises Christian web builder clients prompt email responses within 24 hours. In our case, they have certainly delivered. The SF team was one of the quickest to reply, answering all our questions with enough detail in a matter of hours.

Hopefully, technical issues get the same level of assistance with even faster response times.

Sharefaith Plans and Pricing

• Media — $25/mo
• Kids — $35/mo
• Web + Media — $45/mo
• Sharefaith Suite — $79/mo

There are a few options for churches to choose from, but our goals will require at least the Web + Media deal. The $45/mo account lets you build up to four separate sites, as long as they don’t take more than 100GB of space.

The Sharefaith Suite is the best deal in terms of features and customizability. Prices start from $79/mo, though, which might not be the best way to build affordable church websites.

One thing to watch out for — all rates are tied to a yearly contract. If you’re willing to pay month-by-month, prices get a little higher ($50/mo for Web + Media and $93/mo for the Suite).

Sharefaith Verdict

Sharefaith is a church-oriented tool that packs plenty of features. The platform acts as a central hub for many local churches, helping them reach out to new people and grow their communities. There are also special programs and options for kids and their parents.

The interface, however, can use a bit of improvement so that new clients don’t get easily confused.

OurChurch was founded in 1996 with the mission to become one of the best website builders for nonprofits.

In 2003, the company added web design to its services and started building a portfolio of beautiful WordPress-based websites for churches, ministries, schools, businesses, and even online shops.

OurChurch saw another expansion in 2005 — search engine optimization (SEO) was added to the mix of solutions, making the provider a one-stop-shop for Christian organizations.

Today, the platform is a proud partner and recommended solution of the United Methodist Church.

OurChurch Ease of Use

Navigating around the OurChurch website was rather clunky and laggy, so we didn’t have much hope for the backend of this church app builder.

But what a pleasant surprise!

The insides of this tool look almost identical to WordPress. So, if you’ve ever had a glimpse of how the most popular CMS operates, you’ll have zero trouble working with this one. Even if you haven’t — the learning curve is as smooth as they get.

The left-side options contain all the needed tools to help you add and edit menus, pages, media, and much more.

Who can turn down the full power of WP in such a simple package? With no setups and no installations to take care of, just choose one of the many ready-made WordPress templates and take it from there.

OurChurch Features

You don’t have to be an expert in church website design to make a stunning website with OurChurch. That’s the whole beauty of it — through various themes, plugins, and in-built features, you can make a page that looks like the handiwork of a professional developer.

OurChurch made a smart choice by taking advantage of the endless capabilities of WordPress. Simply put, the built-in features by themselves are not that impressive or unique.

Unlike many similar platforms, OC has strict limits on space (from 5GB), monthly bandwidth (from 20GB), and even email accounts (starting from 100).

In terms of security, however, you seem to be fully backed on all ends — OurChurch performs daily RAID and account backups, storing them on an offsite location. You don’t have to worry about updates either, as the system regularly checks your core application and plugins for new versions. I can then apply any changes automatically, whenever it is necessary.

A few other things might help your church domain become even more recognizable.

Custom Online Forms

OurChurch includes an online form builder that will help you get more personal with your congregation members.

Want to send out personalized invites for your next fundraiser?

Or maybe want to have people sign up their kids for the Sunday School curriculum?

How about making a unified point-of-contact with your church’s administration?

All possible with OC’s custom form builder.

E-newsletter

You want to keep your church out there as much as possible. An active church means an engaged community, and that’s the ultimate goal.

Let your members bask in the glory of God for more than just Sunday service. Send out regular newsletters with interesting information about sermons, weekly activities, donation campaigns, and see how your subscribers respond.

Such feedback is priceless and can even help you with great church website content ideas.

OurChurch Integrations

As we mentioned, WordPress can take a website builder to unprecedented heights.

Apart from OurChurch’s default choice of about 20 add-ons, you have the whole WP plugin repository at your disposal. This library contains over 50,000 plugins that make your church website look better, feel better, and perform better.

Some of the most prominent WP plugins include:

• WP Super Cache (caching)
• Wordfence (security)
• Yoast (SEO)
• Elementor (page builder)
• Smush (image compression)

As with any other plugin-powered website, make sure to keep add-ons to a minimum and always properly updated. That way, you can avoid any performance and security risks.

OurChurch Support

OurChurch mainly relies on an extensive knowledge base to assist all clients with the platform. We have to say, the sheer volume of text and video guides is absolutely impressive, compared to most other Christian website builders in this review.

As for live assistance, though, you are pretty much on your own.

The Contact Us page reveals email as a primary form of contact, with a phone line also available at Mon-Fri, 9 am — 5 pm EST.

Ok, let’s try the email then.

Some church builder providers responded to our questions within an hour or two. Others took a day. OurChurch never responded. We never got a reply, neither in the inbox nor the spam folder.

On the other hand, we got a daily dose of spam from OurChurch, in the form of beginner guides on how to do things in your OC account. Most were self-explanatory and not really of much help.

OurChurch Plans and Pricing

• Bronze — $6.97/mo
• Silver — $10.97/mo
• Gold — $16.97/mo

OurChurch is not exactly a free church website builder, but it’s as close as you can get to having one.

As the standard market prices often start from $20/mo and up, OC offers its robust solutions for as low as $6.97/mo.

Those lucrative rates do come with a catch — a three-year prepayment. But even if you can commit to a month-to-month billing only, you are still paying no more than $10.90/mo for the Bronze package.

There is a running deal on domains as well. Every new church or ministry can start with their own domain registered for free for the first year. This one looks like a limited-time offer, but such deals often run much longer after their alleged “expiration.”

OurChurch Verdict

This church website builder has what it takes to be among the top in its niche. It carries all ministry essentials and provides enough resources to run such a project.

Using WordPress as a core for its site builder is undoubtedly OurChurch’s greatest strength. The versatility of the CMS, paired with the simplicity of the OC framework, makes the tool an excellent choice for beginners and smaller organizations.

Nucleus is a solution that helps you create an online presence for your church. It is a part of an even bigger platform called Pro Church Tools.

PCT is the brainchild of Brady Shearer, who has an interesting question for all religious organizations:

There are 168 hours in each week. If your church service is 1 hour a week, what is your church doing to reach people the other 167?

Asking the right questions and keeping a close relation to God has helped Brady make Nucleus a preferred church platform for over 115,000 clients worldwide.

Nucleus Ease of Use

The Nucleus website often makes a parallel between the Old and the New ways when it comes to church site-building – it combines service announcements, sermons, and social sharing features. That’s great as it gives you a perspective of how far we’ve come and how much more we can do today.

This strive for modernization affected the ease of use, though.

First-time users can find the interface confusing, though. The account dashboard feels a little scattered, and the actual church website development takes much more time than the simplistic drag-and-drop environment with most similar tools.

Still, if you already know your way around website building tools, you can quickly get used to Nucleus as well.

Nucleus Features

As a centralized church and ministry platform, Nucleus offers sets of tools that help churches cover five of the key aspects of their online presence.

Nucleus Web

This was the main focus of our review. The Nucleus church builder makes you forget about the printed brochures or the complicated ways of getting your church found. It packs advanced features and customizability options that just make life easier.

Nucleus Sermons

The place to share the word of God with everyone. You can build custom playlists with your past services, add transcripts and scriptures, create podcasts — there is a lot you can do with the platform. Self-hosted sermons can even boost your SEO exposure.

Nucleus Social

Churches and social networks are not a common combination, but when done right — they can bring great results. Wow your visitors with engaging content, and set up regular posting to show visitors that going to a church is not only a Sunday activity.

Nucleus Giving

Even the best church websites suffer from unnecessary fees and donation cuts when they rely on third-party vendors. Nucleus’s very own online giving solution aims to maximize your church’s profits so they can see good use. It gives your members a quick and easy way to donate from every mobile device. In turn, you get an intuitive dashboard to manage all the processes.

Nucleus Media

Forget about the boring stock footage you can find on every other church website. Nucleus supports an ever-growing library of stunning 4k multimedia footage that will really bring out the progressive approach of your church.

These five aspects make up the core of Nucleus… its nucleus, if you will. Utilize each one, and you’ll make the most out of this church website builder.

Nucleus Integrations

You can find detailed information about third-party integrations in the Nucleus Help Center.

We found 16 tools that pair up well with this church-friendly solution. Among them were industry-leading names like Dropbox, MailChimp, and Hubspot. The specific needs of churches and ministries are also taken into account with integrations like Tithely (donations), Elvanto (church management), and RockRMS (community builder).

First-time Nucleus users can benefit from a helpful step-by-step tutorial for each add-on, walking you through the whole setup and activation process.

Nucleus Support

Finding assistance for your Nucleus church website is not exactly the easiest thing in the world.

There is no Contact page on the company website, nor are there any signs of email and phone contacts.

The answer required scrolling to almost to the footer of the homepage, where we found the small section saying: “Have a question or need help?” The short information there confirms the lack of other means of contact and reveals 9 am — 5 pm EST working hours for the support team.

We’ve had a few chats with Ryland and Mitchel, and we were positively impressed with their understanding of the platform, which they managed to present in a very newbie-friendly way for us.

Still, the lack of proper support at all times is a little concerning when you’re facing issues that require immediate attention.

Nucleus Plans and Pricing

• Nucleus Church — $99/mo

Nucleus is by no means a platform for building cheap church websites.

The all-in-one solution packs everything you need to boost your ministry’s online presence and, as such — cannot fit every budget. The $99/mo price tag can prove too much for many small and local churches, but the value for money for growing congregations is unmatchable.

And that’s the rate if you’re willing to pay for the whole year in advance. The month-by-month billing will bring your costs up to the whopping $125/mo.

Nucleus Verdict

The Nucleus mission is not just about putting a church page online. The software aims to build the best church websites in 2020 and help everyone find them easily. It’s a platform full of amazing features, but the high price tag and limited support make Nucleus less than ideal for smaller congregations.

Churchikon is a bright example that when something works, you don’t need to try and fix it.

It’s incredible, really. There is little to no information about Churchikon online. The website looks dated. Support seems to be missing.

Yet, the tool continues to be a preferred website-building solution to this day. Especially when it comes to non-profit businesses, churches, and schools.

How does Churchikon manage to stay afloat? Let’s have a look.

Churchikon Ease of Use

If there is one thing that can set Churchikon apart from other church builders, it is the enhanced simplicity of the tool.

Logging in for the first time might be a little shocking. For a website that seems so abandoned, the actual backend interface feels very modern and attractive.

There are top and left-side menus for every step of your page building — template design, new pages and functionalities, content structure.

The 30 pre-built themes offer great design variety and give church pages a unique Churchikon look and feel.

Churchikon Features

Depending on the scale of your project, you can choose one of two Churchikon packages — Basic and Premium.

The Basic plan is a little bare-boned. It only gives you the option to build a five-pager website, among which an image gallery and a contact page.

The Premium package offers many more opportunities to build great church websites. You can now connect your site to social networks, integrate a media player, or even an online store.

The big problem here is the lack of church-specific features. The most notable options here are:

Events Tool

This is your all-in-one calendar, where you can share valuable information, schedules, and upcoming activities around your ministry. Let your churchgoers know in advance about:

• Bible studies
• Choir practice
• Sunday school and service schedule
• Charity events and fundraisers

There is a built-in Maps widget in the Events tool, giving your members directions and coordinates on how to get to your church easily.

Mobile Website Builder

In 2020, this should be a given, but Churchikon puts a strong emphasis on responsive websites and making pages look great on all screens.

With the optimized church website builder, you can ensure your site will get optimal performance on all Android and iOS devices.

Our recent mobile marketing statistics reveal that 81% of online users own a smartphone. What’s more – by 2025, 72% of the total internet usage will come from mobile.

Those are opportunities your church doesn’t want to miss.

Churchikon Integrations

Churchikon doesn’t give out any information about possible integrations with third-party add-ons.

Instead, you can only find a way to add Facebook and Twitter sharing, as well as the Events Tool.

That’s it.

To add salt to the wound, all these options are only available for clients on the Premium plan.

Churchikon Support

Similar to their competitors at OurChurch, Churchikon is another one of those “ghost” providers that seem to have abandoned support services altogether.

The Contact page of this church app builder contains nothing more than an online form.

Sending an email through it goes God-knows-where, but our test results were rather conclusive — three support requests and zero responses.

Digging around Churchikon reviews confirms that our experience was not a one-off thing. Reaching the support team is virtually impossible.

Churchikon Plans and Pricing

• Basic website — $59/year
• Premium website — $89/year

It would be unfair to charge a lot for your services when there are countless feature-rich solutions on the market, so Churchikon is as reasonable as they come.

Both plans require a one-time annual payment, but the monthly rates translate to roughly $6-$8, a conveniently-low price to build a church website.

To start, you can go ahead and sign up for the 30-day free trial. Afterward, you can easily upgrade at any time from your newly-created user account.

Churchikon Verdict

Churchikon is a simple, yet effective tool for churches to reach out to their followers online. Small ministries and organizations on a tight budget might find this solution especially suitable, but there are alarming signs.

Platform development seems largely abandoned, and there is no support assistance in sight.

Therefore, you’d be wise to approach with caution.

DigitalChurch doesn’t just want to be the next church website builder — it advertises its software as a “human connection platform.”

That all sounds great, but DC doesn’t seem so keen to share and build a relationship with clients. The company website has no “About Us” section, some of the pages contain little to no information, and a couple of links lead nowhere.

It seems we have to do our own quest for the truth.

John 8:32 — And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

DigitalChurch Ease of Use

Getting started with DigitalChurch, you can take advantage of a free church website builder and hosting for 14 days before you decide if you want to jump on a paid plan.

Our first steps with DC were less than impressive.

The platform is unnecessarily confusing, and even simple options like the login/logout button are well-hidden at first glance.

Once inside, things are not getting much better.

Even though the DigitalChurch tool is similar to WordPress, managing it is far from beginner-friendly.

We thought that having some previous experience gives us grounds for success. Surprisingly, that wasn’t the case here, not by a long shot. Navigating around the dashboard felt a little laggy at times, and we even had a couple of timeouts while editing.

To make things even worse, there is only one template to start with, and your church web design options are pretty basic.

Bad UX in 2020 can bring a lot of headaches – here is our detailed review on the subject.

DigitalChurch Features

Choosing between the three DigitalChurch premium deals strongly depends on your current needs.

If your church is small and doesn’t need anything flashy — the Basic plan is more than suitable to start. But if you are already expanding and want to grow your congregation further, the Standard and Premium packages will be a better match.

Starting from the bottom, your account comes with a drag-and-drop church site builder, equipped with some helpful SEO options and detailed visitor statistics.

The only church-specific feature seems to be the online giving platform you can easily add to your website.

Going up the ladder, DigitalChurch opens a new pool of opportunities for non-profits — building portfolio pages, event ticketing, member-only areas are all part of the growing set of features.

What else do we have here?

Online Learning

Spreading the Word of God is one of the primary reasons to create a church website in the first place. While having your own archive of sermons is great, you can do so much more when you have an online presence.

How about building your own online learning platform? This way, you can reach kids and adults alike, helping them learn more about the Bible and God’s ways.

It’s only available on the Premium plan, though.

User Groups

Believers are like one big family — you just have to find a way to bring them together. DigitalChurch shares that sentiment – it is all about building and expanding your online community.

Your website can encourage social interactions by building small, focused groups and sparking inspirational discussions among members. Users can create their own profiles and easily connect through social media channels.

It’s a big world, and we can always use a new friend.

DigitalChurch Integrations

We learned very little about possible integrations with the DigitalChurch platform. The company website revealed you could add a live streaming feature to your page, but that’s just about it.

No further information can be found in the help center or on third-party websites.

DigitalChurch Support

Just like many of the other picks in our church website builder rankings, your best helpers with DigitalChurch would be the online tutorials and the community support.

Regretfully, most of the offline help is rather useless. The forum page is empty, and the documentation contained a single article about emails, which leads to an error page. A couple of recent changes from December 2019 are the only sign that DigitalChurch is still operational.

The only way to reach a live person is through the chat messenger. The operators there were quite friendly and explained the option is mostly active during weekdays, in the EST business hours.

One thing we found particularly helpful is the fact that the DigitalChurch system keeps all past conversations. Just like in Skype or Viber, you can just scroll up and find previous instructions, links, or troubleshoot instructions.

DigitalChurch Plans and Pricing

• Basic — $16/mo or $144/year
• Standard — $29/mo or $312/year
• Premium — $49/mo or $540/year

For what it’s worth, the DigitalChurch community church builder offers some reasonable prices and billing plans that should be able to fit any budget.

You can start an account on a monthly or yearly subscription. The latter carries a further discount, shaving off about two months in website costs.

DigitalChurch Verdict

DigitalChurch offers a robust tool with enough essentials for a smooth site-building experience. You can find a place for sermons, prayers, baptisms, christenings, weddings, and other important events.

A bit more support and a couple of unique features would do this provider a favor. Still, DC tries to make up for its shortcomings with affordable and flexible pricing.

Church123 was established in 2001 by two Christian directors. The founders had the firm belief that websites were just as much about people as they were about technology – a philosophy they still follow today.

Church123 evolved steadily through the years, adding services like church website design, custom site development, domain names, and web hosting.

Can the provider stack well against the top names in 2020, though?

Let’s see what our tests had to say.

Church123 Ease of Use

In terms of usability, Church123’s tool is quite comprehensive and easy to utilize for your needs.

Signing up for a 30-day free trial and logging in takes no more than a minute. The backend looks a bit like a cPanel — nothing flashy, but extremely functional.

Church123 offers over 200 website templates for churches, more than any other platform on our list. The problem is they mostly look the same. There is very little design creativity involved — the themes contain a bunch of old stock images and various menu positions.

All in all, it’s easy to use, but a bit too basic for 2020.

Church123 Features

Just like we are all equal to God, all Church123 clients get equal server resources and site-building opportunities.

You can create unlimited pages on the Christian platform, and their customization is effortless. You can even use your own images to replace the boring stock footage outlook.

Church123 was probably the fastest church website builder in terms of the time it took us from the initial login to publishing our finished website.

A few other things also worked in its favor.

Podcast Storage

Church123 is very clear and honest about its storage policies.

Podcasts and audio sermons are getting increasingly popular today, and more churches are taking advantage of this format every day. You get a fixed amount of web space, worth about six years of Sunday service audio.

Should you need more — you can always contact Church123 and get additional space for a reasonable fee.

Member Pages

All modern church websites give followers a dedicated space – their own little confessional, so to speak.

You can do the same with Church123, creating member-only pages and protecting them with a user password. Choose exactly what the users see inside and what options they can access.

The more time people spend on your website — the more chances you have to turn them into loyal followers.

Church123 Integrations

Third-party integrations are where Church123 strongly excels.

It turns out the seemingly rudimentary tool is very flexible when it comes to add-on synchronization. There are useful instructions about pairing the ministry web builder with popular software like PayPal, iTunes, Amazon, Google Maps, and many more.

In short, what Church123 can’t do by itself is already covered by a backup plan.

Church123 Support

Church123 operates from the UK, and phone contact is available for clients from the Albion.

We didn’t find any chat contact, so we went ahead and sent an email full of sales questions. Church123’s reply was the fastest among all church domain sites, which would’ve helped the platform rank even higher.

Unfortunately, the answer wasn’t what we expected:

I’m sorry to say that we are still suffering from the impact of the Brexit decisions and the legislation that is coming into force. Due to the requirements that we understand are necessary to continue serving clients within the EU we are now ceasing all EU operations. Which is a sad situation to be in but I hope you manage to find a local host who is able to meet your needs.

We certainly appreciated the fast and honest response, and hopefully, Church123 can find a better solution soon.

Church123 Plans and Pricing

• Web Builder — $95/quarterly or $370 annually

The UK provider has a very unique approach to billing. Instead of a fixed rate for all clients, Church 123 applies regional billing. This means that prices might differ, depending on whether you’re coming from:

• the UK
• the US
• Canada
• EU
• Non-EU
• Asia
• Australasia
• Africa
• South America

Church123 is surprisingly offering only quarterly and annual billing, but if you have to break down the fee to a monthly cost, it would be around $30/mo.

Church123 Verdict

Church123 is ideal if you’re looking to build simple church websites and quickly publish them online. The interface is intuitive, and operations are simple… a bit too simple, at times.

Overall, it’s well-suited for UK clients and local congregations.