Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. The free version is available from the WordPress.org plugin directory and has no time limit or trial period. It includes the address list CRM with household records and member types, the calendar module with recurring events and PDF export, and sermon podcasting with an XML feed for Apple, Spotify and Amazon. Around 1,000 churches use Church Admin Plugin, many on the free version indefinitely. You can upgrade to premium from inside the plugin whenever you’re ready.
Free covers people records, calendar and sermons. Premium adds everything churches need for running teams and services: rotas and schedules with automatic email and SMS reminders, targeted email and SMS to groups, ministries and small groups management, children’s ministry with check-in and check-out sheets, safeguarding reporting, pastoral visitation scheduling, online giving with Gift Aid export, ticketed events, classes, prayer requests, Bible reading notes, and the Our Church App for iOS and Android. The free modules are identical in both versions — premium adds to them rather than unlocking restricted versions.
Yes. Premium is available at $9.99 per month, $29.07 per quarter, or $99.99 per year — the annual price works out at roughly two months free. Prices are also listed in GBP and EUR and convert to your local currency at checkout. Churches with fewer than 50 people have a separate reduced rate of $50.
Choose upgrade subscription
Yes. Churches with congregations under 50 people pay $50 rather than the standard $99.99 — this covers all the premium modules with no feature restrictions, so a church plant of 25 people gets the same rotas, giving forms, app and safeguarding tools as a church of 250. There’s also a full refund available within 14 days if it isn’t right for you.
Nothing moves and nothing is deleted. Your records live in your own WordPress database on your own hosting, so ending a subscription doesn’t remove your data or lock you out of it. The free modules — address list, calendar and sermon podcasting — keep working. The premium modules stop, but the underlying data stays in your database and can be exported. There’s no hostage-taking here, which is a structural difference from hosted services where ending the contract ends your access.
Comparing and Switching
Frequently Asked Questions
Three reasons churches usually give: cost, data ownership, and integration. Hosted services charge monthly and scale with your membership, so growth costs more; Church Admin Plugin is a flat annual fee regardless of size. Your data sits in your own database rather than on a company’s servers, which simplifies GDPR and means you’re never locked in. And because it’s already inside WordPress, modules can publish straight to your public website via shortcode, block or Elementor widget — your calendar, sermons and small groups appear on your site without a separate embed or sync.
Those are all hosted, US-origin services billed monthly per church size, and each is more feature-deep in particular areas — Breeze on giving workflows, Elvanto on volunteer scheduling. Church Admin Plugin’s differences are structural rather than a feature-by-feature contest: it runs on infrastructure you already own, costs a flat annual fee, keeps data in your own database, and is built around UK church realities like Gift Aid and GDPR. It suits churches of roughly 30–300 who want the essentials working well over a large feature surface they won’t use.
Yes you can. There is a full tutorial on how to do that at https://www.churchadminplugin.com/tutorials/import-schedule-csv/
Yes. Your data is in standard MySQL tables in your own WordPress database, so you have direct access to it whichever way you want to take it — many of the modules offer CSV export of data to administrators, and a standard WordPress database backup captures everything. Nothing is held in a proprietary format on someone else’s server.
Yes. Give members a subscriber-level WordPress login and they can edit their own record and set their own privacy options, which keeps your address list current without an administrator chasing changes. Family and individual privacy settings are respected everywhere the data appears. You can also set up a public registration page so visitors add themselves, with a follow-up flow of tasks, emails or SMS triggered from their first visit
Getting Started
Frequently Asked Questions
Most churches are up and running in an afternoon. Installation is the standard WordPress plugin process; after that it’s adding your people and teams, and setting up your services and sites. You don’t have to do it all at once — many churches start with the address list and calendar, then add rotas and communication once people are in the system. There are extensive documentation pages onevery single function in the plugin at https://www.churchadminplugin.com/tutorials.
No. If you can add a page in WordPress, you can use Church Admin Plugin. The interface follows normal WordPress conventions, and content is published to your public site using shortcodes, blocks or Elementor widgets in the ordinary way. The one place a little care helps is initial setup of email sending and permissions — both are documented, and support is available if you get stuck.
Yes. The plugin’s admin side is independent of your theme, and the public-facing output uses shortcodes, blocks and Elementor widgets that inherit your theme’s styling. Anything that might contain personal data is password-protected by default, so a member directory won’t accidentally be exposed by a theme change.
The admin modules run in the WordPress back office and don’t affect page speed for public visitors. Public-facing output is only rendered on the pages where you place a shortcode or block. As with any plugin, performance depends mostly on your hosting — a church with a large address list on very cheap shared hosting will notice the back office more than the front end.
Emails can be sent through native WordPress mail, through your own SMTP settings, or — recommended — through the Brevo or Mailersend APIs. Website-sent email is routinely flagged as spam, so using a proper sending service matters if you’re emailing a whole congregation. Brevo is free for 300 emails a day, which covers most churches and Mailersend had a “hobby” plan which would suit most churches.
Features
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, with the premium version. You can send SMS to everyone or to targeted groups — a ministry team, all the men, parents of children in a particular group. You connect your own account with Twilio, BulkSMS, Textmagic or CloudeService Zambia, so you pay the gateway’s rates directly rather than a marked-up per-message fee. Twilio is the recommended option because it allows replies to be handled inside the plugin rather than disappearing. Twilio have a non profit free allowance that can be claimed.
Yes, with the premium version. The giving module handles one-off and monthly donations through PayPal, and one-off donations through Stripe. You can add a fund dropdown so givers direct their gift to a particular purpose — building, missions, general — and there’s full reporting with CSV export. Because the form sits on your own site, givers stay on your domain rather than being sent to a third-party page.
Yes. The giving module includes a Gift Aid export CSV for UK churches, so your treasurer can produce a claim without rekeying donations from a spreadsheet. This is one of the things that comes from the plugin being built by a UK pastor for a UK church — Gift Aid is often an afterthought or an add-on in US-origin church software.
Yes. Schedules let you plan who’s doing what across your services and sites, and reminders go out by email and SMS, either manually or automatically. Volunteers can see their commitments through the Our Church App as well as on the website.
Yes. Our Church App is included with premium and runs on iOS and Android. Your congregation can use it to keep up with church life — calendar, sermons, prayer requests, Bible reading notes, rotas and push notifications. It’s customisable, and you can add your own pages to it without needing an app developer.
Yes, with the premium version. You can organise groups, publish an online signup form or print a PDF one, and produce PDFs of who’s in which group. There’s multilevel oversight for larger churches, so a groups pastor can see everything while individual leaders see their own. Group information can be published to your public website, with personal data password-protected by default.
Yes. The premium version has a dedicated safeguarding module for recording concerns and follow-up actions securely. Concerns raised trigger instant email and push notification to your named safeguarding team members, so nothing sits unseen. Alongside this, the children’s ministry module tracks safeguarding documentation and the onboarding of new leaders. Because the data is on your own site rather than a third-party server, your safeguarding records stay within your church’s own control.
Yes you can track weekly attendance with the raw numbers or individual attendance. Reporting will let you know if people are not coming so you can follow up pastorally and care for your church congregation.
Trust and Support
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, with no limit on administrators and no per-user pricing. Access is managed through standard WordPress user roles, and permissions are granular by module — Bulk Email, Bulk SMS and Push are separate permissions, for example, so your rota coordinator can send schedule reminders without being able to email the whole church. Administrator-level logins can do anything; everyone else gets exactly what you give them.
Yes, fill in the contact form and Andy will answer quickly.
A fair question for any small software project, and the honest answer is that your church isn’t exposed the way it would be with a hosted service. The free versionChurch Admin Plugin is distributed through the WordPress.org plugin repository, and your data sits in standard MySQL tables in your own database — if development stopped, your site keeps running and your records stay accessible and exportable. With a hosted service, the equivalent event means your data becomes unreachable on someone else’s shutdown schedule. It’s a labour of love and I have no intention of stopping!
Around 1,000 churches use it, across the free and premium versions. It’s been in continuous development since 2007, and many features exist because a church asked for them — the plugin grew alongside its author’s own church rather than being designed to a product roadmap
Andy Moyle is the author of Church Admin Plugin and a pastor who has led two churches in the UK. He wrote the plugin because his own church needed it, and has developed it since 2007 as the church grew and other churches started asking for features. That’s the reason the plugin’s priorities look the way they do — safeguarding, rotas, Gift Aid and GDPR are prominent because those are the things that actually consume a UK pastor’s admin time.