Ekkli Features: Everything Your Church Gets in One Platform

Ekkli covers the whole week of running a small-to-mid-size church, not just Sunday morning. One login gives your team worship presentation, a church website, member records, volunteer rotas, giving, event registration and a congregation app — instead of five separate logins and five separate bills. This page is the full walkthrough, in plain English rather than feature-list shorthand, with a deeper page linked for each part.

It is grouped by who actually uses each thing: the visitor who finds your church online, the member with the app on their phone, the volunteer running the screen on a Sunday, and whoever keeps the whole thing organised during the week.

Everything described here is real and working today, not a roadmap item. Unless a feature is marked as an add-on, it is on every plan, including the six-month free trial — which covers the full platform for up to 50 people with no card required, so you can try all of it in real use before deciding what you need. There is a summary of what costs extra near the bottom, and an honest section on what Ekkli does not do.

1. What visitors see: your church website

Everything here is public and needs no login. It is your church's own presence on the web, running on the same system as everything else, so an event you create once appears on the website, in the app, and in the calendar people subscribe to.

Your own website

You get a real website, not a single landing page. Fixed pages like About and Contact, plus any custom pages you want, built from blocks you drag together rather than by writing code. Three designs to choose from, each with its own colour options, and your own logo. It comes on an ekkli.net address, or you can point a domain you already own at it.

News, galleries and photos

Blog-style news posts for announcements and updates, and photo galleries from events and services. Every photo you upload is automatically rotated the right way up, resized so it does not slow the page down, and converted to a modern format — you do not need to think about any of it.

Events calendar

Upcoming events, with open RSVP so visitors can register without an account. People can subscribe to the calendar so your events appear in their own calendar app and update themselves. There is also a snippet you can paste into another website — a denominational site, say — to show the same event list there.

Sermon audio and video

Sermon audio is hosted on your own site rather than linking out somewhere else, with a scrub bar that works properly so people can jump to the part they want instead of listening from the start. Video talks are pulled together into a curated list, with the embed set up to respect visitors' privacy whether the video came from YouTube, Vimeo or Rumble.

Live services

When you set a stream link for a service, a banner lights up across your site and a dedicated live page appears. When the service is over it goes away again. Nothing to remember to switch off.

Maps, videos and social feeds

Drop a map of where you meet, a video, or your Facebook, Instagram or X feed into any page as a block. Paste the link and it renders.

Contact form

Messages go straight to your inbox and are never stored in the system, so there is no pile of personal information sitting somewhere waiting to be looked after. Protected against spam without making a human fill in a puzzle.

Legal pages

Privacy and terms pages are generated for you. If your church is in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, an Impressum is required and prompted automatically — and re-checked if you ever change your church's country.

More detail: church website builder, church website with member portal, events calendar, sermon and podcast hosting.

2. What your congregation gets: the app

Members get their own area and an app that installs straight from the browser — no app store, no download, no waiting for approval. One person can belong to more than one church at once and see everything in one place.

Joining

Every church gets a permanent join link and a printable QR code — put it on the welcome card or the screen and people join themselves. Or invite someone by email. Either way, nothing is entered by hand.

Consent, handled properly

Each way you might contact someone — email, and so on — needs their explicit agreement, given by clicking a confirmation, never assumed from a silent tracking pixel. They can withdraw it at any time, from their own profile, without asking anyone. You keep durable proof of what they agreed to.

One detail worth knowing, because it catches out a lot of software: some email systems run automated scanners that visit every link in a message before a human ever opens it. Plenty of consent systems have quietly recorded those robot visits as real agreement. Ekkli's confirmation needs a deliberate action on the page, not just the link being loaded, so a scanner clicking through in the background cannot confirm consent on someone's behalf. It means your record of who agreed to what is one you can actually rely on.

Member directory

A searchable list of your church's members, where each person decides what appears about them. There is no phone number field in it at all — not a setting that could be left switched on by accident, but a field that does not exist in the software. Worth comparing with a church WhatsApp group, which hands everyone's mobile number to everyone else permanently.

My duties

Every rota assignment a person has, across every church they are part of, in one list. They can confirm, decline, or open a swap for someone else to pick up — and pick up swaps other people have posted. A reminder email arrives before each date, grouped into one message per person rather than one per duty.

Availability

Someone marks themselves away for a fortnight. Whoever builds the rota is warned when they try to assign them, rather than that person silently vanishing from the options.

Groups and chat

Groups people can join instantly, or ones where a leader approves each request. Each group has its own chat with images, files and reactions. Reactions show as counts only — nobody can see who reacted to what. You can delete your own message within ten minutes; staff can remove anything at any time.

Direct messages

Member-to-member chat, which each person opts into individually. If a message is reported it goes to a review page that only your church's own leaders can open — our staff cannot reach it, even during a support session.

Prayer requests

Four levels of who sees a request, from pastor-only up to everybody. A request can be posted anonymously to its audience while still being identifiable to pastoral leadership — so if someone discloses a crisis anonymously, it can still be followed up. Every time that happens it is recorded.

Sermon notes

People can take private notes against a sermon, including fill-in-the-blank prompts your church prepares in advance. The notes belong to the person who wrote them. No admin screen and no staff screen anywhere can read them.

Event registration

Register for an event; if it is full, join the waitlist and get promoted automatically, in order, as places free up. Nobody has to manage a list by hand.

Giving

Give once or set up a regular gift to a particular fund, paid straight into your church's own Stripe or Mollie account. Members can see their history, cancel a regular gift themselves, and download a statement.

Push notifications

For duty reminders, swap requests and chat. The permission prompt only ever appears after someone chooses to switch notifications on — never as a pop-up the moment they open the page.

Getting your own data out

Any member can request everything held about them and get a download, without contacting anybody. Their identity is re-checked before the file is released.

More detail: small groups, event registration, member directory and data protection.

3. What you run on a Sunday: presentation and display

This is the part that has to work at 10:45 with people watching. It runs in a browser, so there is nothing to install and no licence tied to one machine.

Screens and stage monitors

Full-screen lyrics, scripture and announcement slides. A smart TV or stage monitor joins by typing a short code — no login on the display device itself, which matters when the device is a TV in the roof. Changes push live to every connected screen at once.

Running it from a phone

Whoever is operating drives the running order, countdown timers, and push-to-screen announcements from their own phone. No booth required, and no scramble to the laptop mid-service.

Song library

A shared library of songs with lyrics split into labelled sections — verse, chorus, bridge — and full-text search across everything. If you already have a library in OpenLP you can import the whole thing rather than retyping it.

Song sets

Build the running order for a service. It has an owner, and you can add other people as co-editors — the worship leader and the tech volunteer edit the same set rather than emailing versions back and forth. Once a set has been used you can pin a snapshot of it, so it stays exactly as it was sung even if someone edits the underlying song afterwards.

Bible verses on screen

Full Bible text is built in, so scripture slides need no internet lookup and no copy-paste. A public-domain translation is included for each supported language.

Teaching slides and announcements

The same slide tools for sermon points, teaching series and announcements — not just songs.

Service plans

A dated order of service: welcome, song set, notices, talk, response. Any Bible reference you type into a plan item is looked up and fixed into the plan when you save, so the text is there on the day.

Look and feel

Background blur and dimming, fonts, and transitions, all per theme. Two dozen backgrounds included, or upload your own. Countdown timers and banner messages. Transitions respect the setting for people who find motion uncomfortable.

Offline export

Bundle a whole service into a single self-contained file — fonts, images and all — that plays with no internet connection at all. For the church hall with no reliable Wi-Fi, the outdoor service, or the Sunday the broadband is down.

CCLI Copy Activity reporting

For licensed churches in the UK and Ireland. Builds the report you submit yourself to CCLI from what you actually displayed, and flags any song still missing its CCLI number. It is a reporting aid built from your own history, not a live connection to CCLI.

More detail: church presentation software, worship display and remote control, song library, Bible verse display, teaching and sermon slides, offline presentation, CCLI reporting, importing from OpenLP.

4. What the office runs during the week

The admin area, run by your own church's leaders. Everything in it is walled off to your church specifically.

People

Approve or block someone, change what they are allowed to do, see at a glance who has agreed to what, invite by email, or import a list of names to invite in one go. A safeguard stops a church ever accidentally ending up with no administrator at all.

Tags and segments

Label people — Youth, Music Team, New This Year — and build lists from those labels. Access to this is a separate permission from general member access, and every time a tagged list is viewed or exported it is recorded.

Rotas

Recurring schedules: weekly, fortnightly, or patterns like "first and third Sunday", with one-off extra dates and skipped dates. Assign a named person, or just a role label with no personal information attached at all. Reminders, confirmations, declines and swaps all run themselves.

Email campaigns

Send to everyone who has consented, one group, or a hand-picked list. Bounces and complaints come back automatically and stop that address being written to again — you never scrub a list by hand. Available from the Growing plan up; see the pricing page for why.

SMS

Real text messages with their own separate consent, paid for with credits bought in advance so there is never a surprise bill.

Groups and forum management

Create and manage groups and discussion boards, set who can see what, and moderate. Groups can be set so only staff start threads and members reply — useful for announcements that still allow a response.

Giving and funds

Connect your own Stripe or Mollie account, define the funds people can give to, see a ledger of what has come in, and generate donor statements.

Attendance

Headcount totals for events. It is a number, not a register of who was there.

Media

Sermon audio, images, background music and video all draw on one shared allowance, so a church that uploads no video simply has more room for audio. When you reach the limit new uploads stop — nothing is ever deleted automatically, because a sermon recording is often a church's only copy.

Your church's timezone

Set once, from your country. Services, rotas, events and scheduled sends are entered and shown in your local time and stay correct through clock changes.

Getting set up

A first-run wizard walks you through the essentials, backed by a checklist that works out what you have genuinely configured rather than just what you have clicked past. Configure something outside the wizard and the step is satisfied anyway; undo it and the step comes back.

Switching things off

Optional parts of the platform can be turned off for your church specifically. A church that does not want a forum does not have one.

Exporting everything

A complete export of your whole church — people, songs, service plans, website content — available to you at any time, without asking us, on every plan including the trial.

Support access history

If one of our staff ever opens your church to help with a problem, it is recorded here, visible to you, with what they did and why. Support can look at your admin screens only in a mode that physically cannot save changes; making a change on your behalf needs a stated reason, notifies your admins immediately, and times out.

More detail: church management software, volunteer scheduling, volunteer availability, membership records, email campaigns.

5. Optional add-ons

Everything above is on every plan. These are the extras, each a flat monthly price, and some are included free on higher plans. Full prices on the pricing page.

• Custom domain support. Use a domain you already own instead of an ekkli.net address, and remove the "Powered by Ekkli" footer. You buy the domain from a registrar — we do not sell domains. Pointing it at your site means adding a record in your domain settings; if nobody at your church is comfortable doing that, we can do it for you for a one-off setup fee.
• Podcast. A proper podcast feed built from your sermon archive, with everything Apple and Spotify require, including artwork checked against their rules before you submit.
• Reach. A drag-and-drop email designer, and the ability to build a send list from tags rather than picking people by hand.
• Public API. Read-only access to your events, sermon details and public pages so another site or a developer can pull them in. No personal information is reachable through it.
• Production. The video layer for your screens: video as a slide, several clips sequenced with cuts and fades, green-screen output for a video mixer, transparent output for OBS, looping backgrounds, background music that ducks automatically when a video with sound plays, trimming a clip in the browser before it uploads, and offline export that includes the video.
• Hosted network. Run a shared private space — forum, events board, classifieds — for a group of churches you work with. Being invited into someone else's costs you nothing extra.

6. What Ekkli deliberately does not do

Worth saying, because the fastest way to disappoint a church is to let them find this out in month three.

• It is not a full church management system. There is no fund accounting, no custom-field system, and no report builder. Attendance is a headcount, not a per-person register. If your church already runs a database it is happy with, keep it — running it alongside Ekkli for Sunday, the website and weekday community is a perfectly sensible arrangement, and we would rather earn the rest of your week than demand all of it.
• Calendar sync goes one way. You get a proper subscribable calendar feed that updates itself and respects cancellations, so your events appear in people's own calendars. There is no "connect my Google Calendar" button yet, and changes someone makes in their own calendar do not come back. This is the one real gap and it is being worked on.
• One timezone per church. A church whose sites span two timezones is real but rare, and supporting it properly would complicate every date in the system, so it was left out on purpose rather than overlooked.

7. What comes with which plan

Everything in sections 1 to 4 is on every plan, including the six-month free trial. What changes as you move up is the number of people, how much media you can store, whether you can send bulk email, and which add-ons are included at no extra cost.

Support is identical on every plan and on the trial: a searchable knowledge base, a community forum, and email support from an actual person.

The full table — people limits, storage, email allowances and add-on prices — is on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

Do we have to use all of it?

No. Optional parts can be switched off for your church, and most churches start with one thing — usually the Sunday display or the website — and add the rest over months rather than in a weekend.

Does it work on a Mac, a PC, a Chromebook?

All of them, and a phone or tablet too. There is nothing to install and no licence key tied to one machine. If it runs a modern browser, it runs Ekkli.

What happens if the internet goes down mid-service?

If you exported the service beforehand, the offline file plays with no connection at all. That export is on every plan, and it is worth making a habit of it in a venue with unreliable Wi-Fi.

Can more than one person edit the same song set?

Yes, and there is no extra charge for it. A set has an owner and as many co-editors as you want. Unlimited admins, unlimited co-editors and unlimited screens are on every plan — Ekkli has no per-seat pricing at all.

What languages does it run in?

Eight: English, German, Polish, Dutch, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Romanian. A church runs the whole platform in its own language.