Breeze Review, Pricing & Features: Church Management Software for Small to Mid-Sized Churches

Breeze Pricing & Cost

Breeze has the simplest pricing structure we've seen in a long time: $50 per month. This includes unlimited people, users, all their features, and there are no set up fees.

Breeze has the following online giving fees in the US:

Cancellation: Breeze customers can cancel at any time.

To see an instant demo or sign up for Breeze, visit them here.

Table of Contents

• Full Review
• Breeze Pricing & Cost
  • Breeze Online Giving Fees
• Key Features
  • Member Management
  • Member Communication
  • Event & Facilities Management
  • Giving
  • Forms
  • Mobile Application
  • API & Integrations
• Is Breeze right for you?

Full Review: Breeze Church Management Software

Breeze ChMS was founded in 2013 by Jon VerLee. At the time, Jon saw a lot of complex church software that was great for large organizations with on-staff engineers, but very few solutions in the market for small and mid-sized churches. His vision was to build "the most-insanely-easy-to-use church software imaginable" assuming his customers would not have an IT person on staff. The company's software is used by more than 6,000 churches today. Breeze is based in Michigan and has 35 full-time employees.

After testing the software, it is clear that Jon and team have succeeded. Each view within Breeze is clean, and makes the most important features available to use. Good examples of this are the tagging feature that is flexible, yet quick for creating as many groups as you'd like. You'll also notice the email and SMS creation buttons conveniently located through the dashboard. Onboarding with Breeze is easy as well – their team is available to export data from your old system and import it into Breeze for free.

While Breeze does not offer accounting software, it is easy to integrate into Quickbooks and other tools. Here is an article from Breeze about this integration. Breeze also integrates natively with Planning Center Online, a popular service organizer and volunteer scheduling tool. Breeze also maintains an updated section of their blog with monthly product updates.

Overall, Breeze is excellent at what it does. The company set out to create an insanely-easy-to-use church management system that works for churches without IT teams, and it delivered. It's flat-rate pricing structure of $50/month for unlimited users and features reinforce the company's brand position. We highly recommend Breeze as a simple, affordable church management system for small to mid-sized churches.

Key Features

Below, we'll discuss some of the key features of Breeze, and how they would benefit your church. We have also included images to give you a sense of the look and feel of the software.

Member Management

Breeze allows you to easily create new member profiles with any fields you desire. The system's profile editor is refreshingly simple to use. All you do to add a new field to your profiles is drag a new field type into the profile, and label the new field. Your addition will be instantly available. Breeze allows you to create fields in the following data formats:

Here is a look at a member profile in Breeze:

Breeze also makes it easy to see all of your members, and filter them by various dimensions. You can combine filters for more complex searches. For example, you could find all members who joined in the last month and were born in a given date range, or with a specific family role. For any segment you create, you can email them, text them, or export the list with one click. Here's what the compose email interface looks like:

You can also use tags inside of Breeze to group people together. You can create any tag you would like, for example, Children's Ministry Volunteers. You can also categorize your tags into a folder/sub-folder hierarchy for more granular management. To add tags to member profiles, you can either search for an individual and add them, or use a pre-built segment to add multiple members at once. You can then email or text this group, export their info for mailers, add them to an event, or bulk update their profile information.

Member Communication

Breeze allows you to email and text people and groups from most sections of their application. These messages can be sent right away or scheduled for the future. You can also assign reminders to staff to ensure that future communications are not forgotten. These communication tools make it easy to send automatic reminders and RSVP notifications to your volunteers. Finally, Breeze has a native integration with Mailchimp, if you prefer to send email using that tool.

Event Management

Breeze allows you to distribute event registration forms through many channels, including your website. These online forms can also accept payments. The system comes with check-in functionality that allows your team to take attendance at all of your events using any device. That means your volunteers can check people in on their own smartphones.

Breeze also allows you to easily print matching name tags for children and parents as a security feature to ensure that the right parent picks up the right child. Like many things in the Breeze system, you can print these name tags with one click.

The event analytics functionality allows you to see who checked in, and who missed the event. From this view, you are able to send emails, texts or export the list. The system also comes with reports to view attendance by date, range and other dimensions. You can also send automated email alerts for people who stop attending.

Finally, all events are stored on a central calendar that makes it easy to see what is going on in your organization. From this view, you are able to create new events, edit events, and schedule volunteers. Here's what it looks like to create an event from the calendar view:

Giving

Through Breeze, you can set up online giving, giving by text and set up and launch pledges. It is important to note, that like almost every system, both online and text giving have a processing fee of 2.9% + 30 cents for credit & debit cards, and 1% + 25 cents for ACH.

Giving allows your team to keep track of who gave what, how much, and to which fund. You are able to record new contributions in a few simple steps: just visit the contribution tab, enter the person's name, the amount, and click enter. Breeze also allows you to enter the contribution using a check number or check scanner. It provides optional fields to record the fund, method of donation, date and a custom note. Here's a look at the interface for adding contributions:

You can easily generate giving statements that can be mailed or emailed on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. The tool also provides reports on who in your congregation has given a contribution. You can filter contributions by date, fund, method and several other criteria. The tool also comes with some basic, but practical graphs, such as giving over time.

Forms

In Breeze, you can create many types of forms that are conveniently integrated into client profiles. This includes common forms for registration, surveys, collect contact information, background checks and more. Here's what the drag-and-drop custom form builder looks like in Breeze. You can see the several types of available fields including name, phone, email, text, checkbox, dropdowns and dates. These forms can be shared through any channel or embedded on your website.

Mobile Application

Breeze offers an app for iPhone and Android users. Unlike the company's primary application, these mobile apps are somewhat slow and lacking in functionality. Some of the features available in the apps are:

Breeze API & Integrations

Breeze offers an open API that allows developers to access data in Breeze and build custom applications on top of the platform. The API returns JSON data and works for all major components of the system (i.e. people, contributions, events, tags, etc). Breeze also provides links to PHP and Python Wrappers. Full documentation can be found here.

In addition to Mailchimp, Planning Center and Quickbooks, Breeze has integrations with the following third-party payments solutions:

Is Breeze right for you?

Overall, Breeze is excellent at what it does. The company set out to create an insanely-easy-to-use church management system that works for churches without IT teams, and it delivered. It's flat-rate pricing structure of $50/month for unlimited users and features reinforce the company's brand position. We highly recommend Breeze as a simple, affordable church management system for small to mid-sized churches.

To create and test a free demo account for 30 days visit Breeze here.