MinistryPlatform

There are several things that are pros about this software, and in most regards superior to other packages on the market:

1. Customization: This software is almost entirely customizable to the needs of your church. This is a major selling point for Ministry Platform. If you can dream it, you can pretty much do it.
2. Integrations: This software has many out of the box integrations with other packages from mail services, to background check systems, and has a full REST API for custom integrations that many have done or are doing (a few I've seen or used are digital signage, church app integrations with several app companies and authentication for Church Online Platform).
4. Community and Staff: The community is great. The community is good with other software packages, but ThinkMinistry attempts to foster a lot of inter-church communication and collaboration and it shows. We were a church that has used Shelby software for many decades and our experience with community under thinkministry has been superior. The staff are very very friendly and will do whatever they can to fulfill you needs in the situation you church finds you in. Sometimes they cant, but if they can they usually do. A++.
5. "The Grid." Being able to view all related data in a birds eye view without have to run reports saves you time. It isn't always pretty, but the power behind it is immense.
6. Full Access to "Your Data." I'll leave a quote from an employee friend of another ChMS... "We'd never do that."

There are probably a few more pros, but I ran out of space...

There are a couple things I wish were better about Ministry Platform:
1. I do miss the integration Shelby has between their Membership programs and their finance programs. Because ThinkMinistry does not have their own Financials software they have to integrate as best they can with what's available. That being said, they have done a great job and work to build most anything your church needs to accomplish your work.
2. Some effects of being extremely customizable software: Some Church Management Systems have better out-of-the-box reports and views. If you are a smaller church with no staff that have a basic understanding of a computer language in their past it may present some difficulties in customizing views and SQL queries. However, this can be overcome by interacting with their Professional Services department who can build pretty much anything you need, and the community interacts at a level that much can be done just in that.

Ministry Platform is an ideal church management software if you are an IT expert. It can do whatever you want if you have the know-how and patience to make it work. The developers would work with our church on whatever we wanted, but it came at the cost of being terribly user-friendly and nearly impossible to roll out. Still, the software proved to be able to do anything.

At the time that I used Ministry Platform, I was a a pastor at a megachurch and the verdict on Ministry Platform was pretty unanimous. It was terribly hard to to use and difficult to implement. The program felt like I was using DOS again. I had to remember certain commands and functions that if were not followed perfectly, nothing would work. The simplest functions like check-in required our IT team to be present to trouble shoot.

I love that it is easy to learn almost everything about Ministry Platform. I say "almost" because I do not know how to write SQL and that has been a lot harder for me to learn but the database is designed with my kind of user in mind. There are short cuts and "easy buttons" for those of us who need to do more complicated tasks but don't know that depth of technology.

That there are no group registration products yet - to make events such as conferences easier to reserve seats. But really that is probably my biggest struggle.

There are several things that I love about MinistryPlatform--its almost endless customizability, its ability to integrate with other systems, its long list of useful features--but probably the most significant is the team of dedicated servants of the Kingdom who create and support it. They are a genuine partner in ministry, and we definitely feel like they have our back and understand what we care about, and it shows in their hard work and consistent achievements in improving their product.

MinistryPlatform's primary user interface is not as pretty as most staff users would like; and although for me as a power user it gives me great flexibility to dig deep into our data, it can be overwhelming for more casual users whose objectives are more task-oriented. This is getting much better, however, and I am looking forward to the next major release to improve things even further.