Built for UK churches,
by people who love them
ChurchLinker started from a frustration plenty of UK church administrators will recognise. Most churches we know were running on a patchwork of half-finished spreadsheets, a separate giving page, a couple of WhatsApp groups and one trusted volunteer who happened to remember everyone's birthday. Nothing properly talked to anything else. So we built something that does.
Speak to almost any UK church administrator, whether they're leading a village parish, an inner-city congregation, a historic denomination or a brand-new church plant, and you tend to hear the same story. Too much admin. Too many disconnected systems. Data scattered across far too many places. Never quite enough hours in the working week, and certainly never enough on a Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, the church management software that existed felt either too complicated, built for North American mega-churches with full IT departments behind them, or too basic, essentially dressed-up spreadsheets with a fresh paint job, or simply too expensive for a typical UK congregation. Almost none of it was actually built with UK realities in mind. Gift Aid, UK GDPR, safeguarding standards, multicultural ministry and the particular rhythm of British church life were all treated as afterthoughts that someone, somewhere, might patch in later.
ChurchLinker is our answer to that. One thoughtfully designed church management system that quietly brings together everything a UK church genuinely needs. People, giving with Gift Aid, groups, rotas, events, sermons, communications, pastoral care and a native mobile app, all in one calm place that's actually pleasant to use.
What makes ChurchLinker different
UK-first, not UK-adapted
Most other similar systems were designed for the American church market and only then partly modified for the UK. ChurchLinker was built for UK churches from day one. Gift Aid is native, not a plug-in. UK GDPR is wired into the architecture, not a checkbox. The default currency's GBP, the default timezone is London and support hours follow your week, not someone else's.
One properly connected system
Your people records, giving, group memberships, rotas, event attendance, sermons, notices and communications all sit in the same church management system and quietly talk to each other. When someone gives, it shows up on their profile instantly. When you send a communication, you can see exactly who got it. You update once, and the rest of the platform catches up on its own.
Built around the week, not just Sunday
Sunday's sermon is only the start. Optional searchable transcripts, summaries, key Bible verses and discussion questions help members revisit teaching across the week, while leaders get small-group guides and devotional content. It's the same teaching, just available where members actually live the rest of the week.
Pastoral care that's actually visible
Other church management systems treat members as rows in a database. ChurchLinker treats them as people. Our pastoral care dashboard surfaces who's quietly drifted out of contact, who's not in a group yet, who's a new visitor ready for the membership conversation, which bereavement anniversaries are coming up, and which DBS checks expire in the next month, automatically. Welcome-team members submit conversion requests, pastors approve in one click with a full audit trail. The formal Charity Commission members register sits alongside, distinct from the general 'member' status, with one-click AGM paperwork for the pastor and senior spiritual leaders. Software won't replace pastoral care, but it can stop people slipping through the cracks and lift the admin weight off the pastor's shoulders.
AI used where it actually helps, never where it doesn't
We've been deliberately careful with AI. Sermon transcription saves real hours. Member engagement overviews genuinely surface people you might otherwise miss. We've never bolted on AI for the sake of marketing. It's switched off by default, always optional, and your leadership stays firmly in charge of every decision that matters.
Priced honestly for UK congregations
Our pricing reflects what UK churches can actually afford, not what venture capital expects. We start with a permanently free tier, because even the smallest congregation deserves proper tools. And our plans are deliberately shaped so a church growing from 50 to 500 members never faces a sudden prohibitive price jump.
Our values
People before process
Church management software should quietly serve the ministry, not complicate it. Every feature we build starts with one question: how does this help a real person do their job better on a Tuesday afternoon? If we can't answer that honestly, we don't build it.
Honesty and simplicity
No hidden costs, no surprise charges, no dark patterns. Our pricing page actually tells you what you pay. Our terms are written in plain English, not legalese. And if something's not working the way it should, we'll tell you ourselves before you have to chase us.
Security as a form of care
When a UK church trusts us with their members' personal data, including addresses, giving records, pastoral notes and safeguarding details, that's a serious responsibility. We treat data security not as a compliance exercise but as a genuine act of care for the real people sitting behind those records.
Built for the long term
We're not chasing inflated growth metrics, and we're certainly not building towards a quick exit. We're building something we genuinely hope will serve UK churches for decades. That means careful engineering, conservative architecture and a stubborn commitment to not breaking things for the sake of novelty.
The local church is worth getting right
The local UK church does remarkable, quiet, lasting work in communities up and down the country. We're genuinely motivated by the chance to make that work a little easier, more sustainable and more joyful for the people doing it. This honestly isn't just software to us.
The person behind ChurchLinker
Ben Sonoiki
Founder & CEO, ChurchLinker
ChurchLinker started with a frustration. Ben watched his own church juggle three or four tools, a stack of spreadsheets and a Saturday-evening WhatsApp panic every week to coordinate the rota for Sunday morning. The pastor was doing admin instead of preparing his sermon. The treasurer was doing Gift Aid in a spreadsheet, by hand, the day before the deadline. Nobody signed up for that. Software was supposed to help, and it was making things worse.
Ben's a systems and web developer who spent years as an IT teacher in England. He's seen first-hand how good technology can lift people up, and how often it stays out of reach for the organisations that need it most. He brings both sides of that experience to everything ChurchLinker does: the engineer who can build it, and the teacher who knows how ordinary people actually use it.
He's also the namesake of the AI assistant on this site. If you've already chatted to “Ben” in the bottom-right corner, that's a small thank you; the real Ben is a person, and you can reach him via /contact.
He's also a business intelligence analyst and a database / report writer by trade. The kind of person who actually enjoys data modelling, query optimisation and turning raw rows into decisions a non-technical leader can act on. That ‘data brain’ is why ChurchLinker treats data protection and UK GDPR as a first-class concern rather than a tick-box. The self-service Subject Access Request export, the per-channel consent toggles with full GdprConsent audit trail, the member-initiated right-to-erasure flow with an admin review queue, the encrypted-at-rest pastoral notes, the HMRC retention carve-out built into the erasure helper. None of that's accidental. It's a data person quietly insisting that a church CRM should treat the congregation's data the way the congregation would expect a careful steward to.
Alongside the local church, Ben has a deep heart for small and medium businesses and local community organisations across the UK. He believes too many of them are stuck choosing between expensive enterprise systems they can't justify and basic free tools that hold them back. ChurchLinker is part of his wider mission, through Limelai Limited, to bring genuinely top-tier software within reach of small organisations at a fair, honest price, so they can spend their time on the people and the work that matter, not on the admin.
Choosing ChurchLinker isn't just choosing a piece of software. It's backing a small, independent UK team that genuinely believes the local church and local community deserve better tools, and is putting in the long hours to build them.
“Every church and every small organisation, regardless of size or budget, deserves tools that let them focus on people rather than paperwork. That's the one idea ChurchLinker was built on.”
Built with the local church in mind
ChurchLinker is built by people who understand UK church life from inside it. Having served on welcome teams, run small groups, kept rotas running and sat through more stewardship committee meetings than is probably healthy, we know the real day-to-day pressure on the people who quietly keep a church functioning.
We don't claim to have all the answers about church life. We do claim to listen carefully, care about the details and build church management software that genuinely respects the people who use it, both the pastors and leaders running it and the congregants whose Sundays it quietly shapes.
Ready to try ChurchLinker?
Free for churches under 50 members. No credit card required.