Realm is a church management system from ACS Technologies, designed to create real ministry opportunities by making it easier for your church family to connect with each other throughout the week.
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Rock RMS
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Rock RMS is an open-source Church Management System (ChMS) designed to help churches and parishes deepen relationships, streamline operations, and support spiritual growth. More than just a database, Rock offers integrated tools for people management, sacrament tracking, communications, online giving, event registration, volunteer scheduling, and discipleship engagement.
Built by churches, for churches, Rock's open architecture and workflows allow it to adapt to any unique ministry…
Realm is a user-friendly, intuitive web-based database manager, great for church membership and financial information. Transitioning was easy--even our 90-year old attendance volunteer made the switch with ease. The customer service staff at Realm is fantastic. As I mentioned before, my one big complaint is the inability to pull a report with children outputted on the same row in excel as their parents.
Rock RMS is a great CMS for churches passionate about technology and innovation. It requires advanced developing skills to operate, which can be a challenge - but there are several partners available for contracting work. Successful usage of Rock RMS opens up the door for endless possibilities - from dynamic and beautiful websites, automations that serve both internal (staff) and external (customer) needs, and unending possibilities for innovative solutions!
In my opinion, you will need to have developers on your team, or partner with contractors in order to get Rock RMS set up properly and keep in maintained. I think you will also need to have Rock RMS Super Users who can troubleshoot bugs and handle basic requests from internal staff. There are also several functions that every day staff use which are very user friendly (i.e. Group Viewer, content channels, Group Scheduler, communication templates.)
Our transition to Realm was fantastic. We had a rep do two days of training with staff. She also provided us with a step-by-step plan for our rollout to the congregation. In addition to the fabulous customer service team, the "help" section of the Realm website is useful--it includes written answers and also video tutorials/webinars. The search function in the help section is built effectively.
From my experience Realm is fatter than SQLite. Realm has less Query and is easy to understand. even new developers also can use it In his/her project. It has a good document so a new developer can read and understand and apply it to the project. SQLite is old and not so easy to understand. we need to add a third-party library to easily use SQLite.
In my experience, Rock RMS is much more customizable, robust, and community focused than PCO. Planning Center's sweet spot is music management and volunteer scheduling, but I think Rock RMS outshines PCO with its integration of web sites and mobile apps, automations and jobs, workflows, and its focus on community. There are tons of free and paid plugins for Rock RMS, as well as multiple Rock RMS partners to choose from.
