ChurchRaise

What ChurchRaise is

ChurchRaise is a church management platform with a built-in website builder, aimed at pastors, church staff and volunteers who need a professional website without coding or hiring a developer. The company's site describes a church website builder as a platform that lets ministry teams create and maintain a site on their own, and it says ChurchRaise offers one for free with customizable templates. The site does not state where the company is based.

What you build and how

The core product for this entry is the church website. You pick a template that fits your church, edit the content, swap images, update text and publish. The site's FAQ answers the obvious question directly: no design skills are needed, because the templates and a simple editor cover customizing content, swapping images and publishing without coding. Hosting is included.

What separates it from a generic site builder is that the site is wired into the rest of the church's data. The company states that your calendar, bulletins, giving and groups stay in sync, so the site is always up to date. In practice that means several ready-made sections:

• Calendar. You add the church calendar to any page, and new events appear on the website automatically with no extra maintenance.
• Bulletin archive. The archive is auto-generated. Each new bulletin is added to the site automatically, so nobody uploads or organizes files by hand.
• Forms. Prayer request and connect card forms appear on the site without manual setup. You update the form once and it is live across the website. Elsewhere on the platform, a drafting tool can turn a short brief into registration, signup and interest forms that are ready to edit.
• Groups discovery. The website lists every group automatically. Visitors can browse, learn more and submit a join request that goes straight to the group leaders.
• Integrated giving. Recurring giving happens on the website with no redirects, and donors can set up ongoing gifts in seconds.

The website is one piece of a wider publishing stack. The site says bulletins, email, SMS, the website and Quick Tap share one content stack. Digital bulletins give you one link for Sunday announcements that you can update anytime. Email and SMS send branded messages to the right people from one system. Quick Tap makes QR and NFC links that always point to the current destination. The Writing Desk offers AI help for announcements, emails and social copy, and a social media section covers guides and workflows for church social posts.

AI also reaches the website itself. The company says ChurchRaise can audit your online presence, suggest improvements for your church website and help you rank better when people search for churches in your area, so you keep the site visible without hiring a specialist. On the platform side, the home page describes built-in AI that drafts in your church's tone, with guardrails so you stay in control: you start the everyday work faster, then review, edit and decide what goes out. It lists drafting forms, writing announcements and pulling data into reports as examples.

Behind the website sits the church management system. Its areas include people and contacts, a church directory, connect cards, forms and sign-ups, households and a membership hub. Giving covers everyday online giving, campaigns and fundraisers, pledge campaigns, an online store, memberships and dues, and a finance hub. Groups and check-in, service planning with sermon tools, scheduling with volunteers and facilities, and a shared media library with AI graphics and motion graphics round out the list. The company says you can use ChurchRaise for bulletins, events, member records, giving, or all of them together, adding modules as the church grows.

What the pages say about cost and scope

Pricing is the headline claim. The home page states: "The platform is free $0 per month. No per-seat fees and no feature tiers." It lists people, giving, email and SMS, events, groups, forms, website builder and reports as included for churches of every size, and says the free platform is "not a trial that ends." There is no contract, and no credit card is needed to get started.

Money enters in 2 places. On giving, the company says you receive 100% of every gift. ChurchRaise is supported by optional donor tips or an optional service fee at checkout, and the church chooses which. Standard Stripe processing fees still apply, and a blog post on the site describes the giving tools as running on Stripe nonprofit rates. The second place is AI: "AI credits are optional. For image generation, not for using the ChMS." Messaging usage is also stated upfront rather than bundled into the free tier.

On scale, the home page says "Whether you serve 50 people or 5,000, the same platform covers people, giving, communications, and groups without enterprise pricing or a full-time admin team." A blog post on the site calls ChurchRaise "100% free" and counts 50+ ministry tools and 9 AI assistants. The platform's own framing is that it works alongside existing church software; the same post names Breeze, ChurchTrac and Planning Center as strong operational tools that ChurchRaise is meant to complement.

For churches considering a move, the home page promises that you will know what imports, what needs a quick check and where help is available, and says you can run ChurchRaise alongside your current tools until your contract ends. It also invites visitors to book a short platform walkthrough with the team. The website builder page gives no template count; it only calls the templates customizable. Its text states no security or compliance certification, no code export option and no self-hosting option.

Who it suits and who it does not

ChurchRaise fits churches where 1 or 2 staff members or volunteers carry communications, events and giving, and where budget matters. A church that wants its site to update itself from the calendar, the bulletin and the groups list gets that behavior without stitching tools together, and the free platform fee removes the usual monthly bill before a team can even try it.

It also suits a church that wants one system for the website and the day-to-day work behind it. A volunteer who can edit a document can run the site, and the AI audit gives a small team some search guidance without a specialist.

There are limits worth knowing. This is a church product, so a ministry that needs a general-purpose site with custom logic, a store unrelated to church giving, or code-level control will find the template-and-module model narrow. The pages describe visual editing, not a code editor. Teams that expect to leave one day should ask about data export, because the site's FAQ lists the question without a stated answer on the pages. Finally, the free price covers the platform; giving processing, messaging usage and AI image credits carry their own costs.