Who Still Matters in the ChMS Market?

What's happening in the ChMS market of late?  I'm trying to figure out who still matters?  Capterra has over 150 items on their list of products.  In 2005 and 2006, I had 21 products on my "watch list:"

1. ACS Technologies
2. Ascribe
3. Blackbaud
4. BrickRiver
5. ChuMMS
6. Church Community Builder
7. Connection Power
8. eTapestry
9. EzRA
10. Fellowship ONE
11. Icon CMO
12. iMIS from Advanced Solutions
13. Kintera
14. MemberConnect
15. MemberSystems
16. People Driven Software
17. RDS Advantage
18. Roll Call
19. ServantKeeper
20. Shelby Systems
21. Web-Empowered Church 

So what's happened since then?  The major add to the list is Shelby Arena, to differentiate it from Shelby V5.  I wish I could say that ProvisionCRM had taken off, but it's still a virtual unknown.  Of the 21 above, a few have mixed and merged, quite a few are still limited to a very small market segment, and I'm not sure one or two of them even exist any more.  If you look at market share, it seems only a handful matter (my opinion, disagreement welcomed!):

1. ACS
2. Church Community Builder
3. Fellowship One
4. Shelby Arena
5. Shelby V5

If you look at the Megachurch segment, it seems that Fellowship One and Arena are gaining market share, ACS is losing share quickly, Shelby V5 is losing share a bit slower, and CCB is moving along with some very happy users, but not a lot of penetration in terms of numbers.  The Hartford Megachurch research indicates some 1300 or more Megachurches in the US. My slightly-informed wild guess is that Fellowship One, Arena, and V5 each have 200-300 churches, while ACS and CCB each have 100 or less.  Those numbers just don't add up.  Are hundreds of Megachurches using self-developed software?  Certainly a few are.

If anyone has better statistics to share, please let me know!

And yes, I do know, there are at least two other products that are in early stages of rollout.  What would it take for them to have credible market share in the next few years?

Comments

[Jason Adelsberger]

I'd be interested in who's best in the small-medium sized church category. We're about 300 people and I'm guessing we'd want to track around 400-450 individuals. I find that F1, ACS and others price us out.

[TonyDye]

Thanks DL for your comments. I'm very serious, disagreement (argument?) welcomed. Above is all just my opinion -- it would be great to have some facts added in.

[TonyDye]

Jason, I've just posted an informal survey on the ChMS discussion group (http://groups.google.com/group/chms). Hopefully we'll get some useful results from that. What would you consider an acceptable price for your church?

[John Read]

My current implementation is with Fellowship One, and the cost seems about right: $110 for their "middle" package for an average attendance of about 400. I like F1 for its feature set, but our self-guided implementation has been slow because we have not devoted enough people resources to make it a dominant project.

I've been looking at Church Community Builder for a client church (I am a church back-office consultant) and find that it's a little less expensive and offers a similar feature set. But really, it's about as desirable as F1 based on my (unfinished) examination. The collaborative model that CCB uses seems like a very strong selling point, and I like the idea of church members having access to their profiles and the ability to edit/maintain them.

I suspect that I will recommend CCB to this client so that I can develop a side-by-side comparison between the two. Both seem like very safe choices and offer a broad array of features that will enable very effective membership tracking and management.

[TonyDye]

John, I keep hearing fairly good things about CCB, and expect it would be a good choice. One irony: in CITRT gatherings and such, we pretty much never run into anyone using CCB. I can't figure out why that is. CCB has built-in social-media type stuff, yet apparently CCB users aren't socially involved in church IT. Just weird.

[Bobkaleta]

Tony, We are currently in the final stages of reviewing Connection Power. After doing several demos, I'm really very surprised more churches are not finding this as a viable option. I was very impressed with the application, and my latest demo (On March 24th) reviewed CP's new report generator which was very impressive. I have contacted a few churches who are running CP and all seem pleased. I was hoping I might find a few others who are familiar with CP so that I could get their comments too. Thanks for starting this discussion.

[TonyDye]

Bob, I hope you'll share results of your evaluation. Connection Power was on my "watch" list quite a while back, but I just don't hear of anyone using it. I'm always looking for people who are satisfied with a ChMS product!

[Carlthomas]

I was down to CCB and F1. I went with CCB because I could not figure out F1 and refused to pay their $1k training fee. CCB was more intuitive and I could use it out the box. F1 is the cool choice because who is behind it but for me it was an easy choice.

Beyond these, I was amazed out antiquated many of the other alternatives were. The UI on many of these solutions seemed right out of windows 95.

[TonyDye]

Carl, have you already implemented CCB? I'd love to hear the "after the first six months" (or whatever) story. As to the old UIs, it is unfortunate that so many of the ChMS products have lots of years of legacy behind them. Arena, F1, and to some degree CCB, all had the advantages of fresh starts.

[Dwayne Sudduth]

Jason;

Look at PDS Live from Elexio; I believe that it is one designed for just such a body. http://www.elexio.com/