If you have narrowed your search to ChurchTrac and SundayBridge, you have probably already read both marketing sites twice and are still not sure what each one actually does day to day. That is fair. Both companies talk about “managing your church” in ways that sound nearly identical until you open the app and start clicking around.
This is a feature list, not a sales pitch. ChurchTrac has been around longer and does more things; two of those things it does better than the other option here, and we will say which ones plainly. The goal is for you to know, before you sign up for either, what you will and will not be able to do on a Tuesday afternoon when the deacon calls asking why the Johnsons have not been at anything since August.
The one-sentence version
ChurchTrac is the larger, older, more feature-complete product: it adds messaging, a child check-in kiosk, and CSV import to a set of modules that otherwise looks similar to most church software. The newer option here is narrower on purpose — one flat price, no messaging, no check-in, no import — and it makes up the difference with a follow-up board that ages untouched guests and an AI layer that reads your own records back to you in plain language.
People, households, and the directory
Both tools give every person their own profile: contact info, household, groups, serving history, giving history, and some form of notes or care history attached to the record. Neither is meaningfully ahead here for a congregation of sixty to two hundred and fifty people; this is the part of church software that everyone gets roughly right.
The real difference is on the way in and the way out. ChurchTrac lets you import a spreadsheet of people directly, which matters if you are coming from a shared Google Sheet with three hundred rows and do not want to type them in by hand. The flat-price side has no import; a person on the team will load your spreadsheet for you as part of setup, which costs you nothing but does mean you are not in control of the timing. On the way out, both export your directory to CSV, so neither one locks your data in once you have it entered.
If you are moving off a spreadsheet for the first time, it is worth reading what actually changes when a church leaves spreadsheets behind before you decide how much the import question matters to you.
Messaging and check-in: the two clearest gaps
ChurchTrac can send email and text messages to segments of your people straight from the app — a group, a class, everyone who gave last quarter, whatever list you build. The other option cannot send anything. It will show you who needs a call, but you will make that call yourself, from your own phone or your own church email account, not from inside the software.
For a lot of small churches this is not as costly as it sounds, because the volunteer or staff member doing follow-up was probably going to call or text personally anyway rather than blast a group email. But if your workflow depends on sending a weekly announcement email or a text blast before events, ChurchTrac does that and the flat-price option simply does not, and no amount of positioning changes that fact.
ChurchTrac offers a child check-in kiosk — the tablet-at-the-door system that prints a matching security tag for a parent and a nametag for a kid before Sunday school. The other side here has no check-in kiosk of any kind. It has attendance entry with a named roster or headcount and a read-only Sunday school view showing classes, teachers, rooms, and enrollment, but nobody is tapping a screen at 9:15 on a Sunday to check a child in through it.
If your children’s ministry director asked for a kiosk by name, that is the whole conversation right there. Our guide on building a Sunday check-in process that does not depend on one person covers what a paper or low-tech check-in flow looks like for churches that are not ready to pay for a kiosk system either way.
Follow-up: where the smaller app does more with less
This is the one place the comparison flips. ChurchTrac tracks first-time guests and lets you note follow-up, but it does not force a next step to have an owner and a due date, and nothing in the app ages a guest who has been sitting untouched for three weeks. The other option builds the entire module around that: a guest becomes a next step with a named owner and a date, and the board itself surfaces anything nobody has picked up. It is a smaller, plainer tool than ChurchTrac’s guest tracking, but it is built specifically so a guest cannot quietly fall through.
If guest follow-up is your actual pain point rather than messaging or check-in, that difference in design is probably worth more to you than either of the two features ChurchTrac has and this one does not.
Giving, serving, and pastoral care
Both products record contributions, edit and delete them, chart giving trends, and generate year-end statements — neither one processes the payment itself, so whatever online giving link you already use stays separate from either tool. Both track serving teams with roles and assignments. Both keep some form of pastoral care record with history attached to a person, kept out of general view.
The depth varies by module and changes as each company ships updates, so treat this section as a starting point rather than a final answer; open a live demo of each and click into giving and serving specifically, since that is where subtle differences in reporting and permissions tend to hide. Our piece on tracking giving in a way that respects the giver walks through what a giving record should and should not expose to volunteers, regardless of which software holds it.
Reports and the newer AI layer
ChurchTrac has reporting built up over many years across its modules. The newer option has twelve reports across every module with charting, pivoting, group-by, and CSV export of pivoted or raw rows, and adds a smaller layer on top: a chat that answers questions over your own church’s records, and a short plain-language paragraph at the top of a dozen pages pointing out what is notable. Both are capped — ten questions a month included in the flat price, no add-on tier to buy more — and both are read-only by design, meaning nothing they surface can be typed back in as new data. It is a convenience layered on top of numbers you could find yourself, not a replacement for reading your own reports.
Price and the one-plan question
ChurchTrac scales its price with the size of your database and offers a free tier for the smallest churches. The flat-price side is one price, nineteen dollars a month, regardless of how many people, households, or groups you track. There is no permanent free tier: a 7-day card-on-file trial rolls into the $19 monthly plan unless canceled. The separate public demo requires no account or card, and you can cancel any month you want to stop.
Neither pricing model is wrong. A very small church might genuinely pay less on ChurchTrac’s free tier than on a flat nineteen dollars. A church that is already at two hundred people, or expects to be there soon, may find the flat price easier to budget against than a number that changes as the directory grows. If price scaling versus a flat fee is the deciding factor, run your actual headcount through both calculators before you commit either way. For a broader framework on weighing options like this one, see how to choose church management software without regretting it in a year.
Who each one actually fits
Pick ChurchTrac if messaging or a check-in kiosk is non-negotiable for your church, if you want to import a spreadsheet directly rather than have someone else load it, or if a free tier for a very small congregation matters to your budget this year. Pick SundayBridge if you want one flat price with no per-module upsells, if follow-up on guests with a named owner and a due date is the problem you are actually trying to solve, and if you are comfortable sending your own emails and texts the way you probably already do.
Neither answer is universal, and neither company is being fully honest if it tells you otherwise. Open both demos, click into the modules that matter to your specific church, and decide from what you actually see rather than from either homepage.