Presentation and lyrics software that a volunteer can run on Sunday

ProPresenter, EasyWorship, OpenLP and FreeShow with prices read off the vendor pages on 29 July 2026, what the CCLI Copyright License actually covers, and the failure modes that show up mid-verse.

The song lyrics went up one line behind for the entire second verse. Half the congregation stopped singing, the worship leader turned around, and the ninth grader running the laptop went red. Nobody had trained him, and the software had been chosen by a staff member who had never operated it during a service.

Presentation software is one of the few church purchases where the operator’s experience matters more than the feature list, because the operator is a volunteer, the failure is public, and the failure happens in the middle of worship.

Decide what is on the screen before you shop

Write down what the screen has to display, in order of frequency:

Song lyrics, every week
Scripture text, most weeks
Sermon points or slides, depending on the preacher
Announcements before and after the service
Occasional video, usually a missionary update or a baptism
A countdown or a static image before the service starts

Then write down what the screen must never do: cover the words with a busy photograph, autoplay audio during prayer, or display a Bible translation you do not preach from.

Most churches need lyrics, Scripture, and a handful of slides. Everything past that is where the money goes.

The four real options, with prices read off the vendor pages on 29 July 2026

ProPresenter costs $29 per month per seat, or $289 per year. A campus license covering 20 seats runs $59 per month or $649 per year, and the page marks that tier “Worship customers only. Best for churches with multiple ministries.” There is a 14-day free trial (ProPresenter). No perpetual license appears anywhere on that page, which is a change from how many churches remember buying it, so a church budgeting from a memory of a one-time purchase is budgeting from a product that no longer exists. ProPresenter is the standard in churches with a media team, and its strengths are stage displays, multi-screen output, and media handling. Its weakness for a small church is exactly that power: a volunteer facing a full ProPresenter interface for the first time will find four ways to break the service.

EasyWorship lists Basic at $17.50 per month or $210 per year, and Premium at $27.50 per month or $330 per year. Price scales with average weekly attendance, calculated by combining attendance across all services, so the figures above are the entry point rather than your quote. The Premium tier bundles what the page calls “47,800+ ready to use backgrounds, countdowns, and more.” The campus license “covers use of EasyWorship on multiple computers within a single location” and explicitly does not extend to additional church plants or campuses. There is a 30-day trial with no credit card required (EasyWorship pricing). It runs on Windows and Mac, it does the core job well, and its interface asks less of a volunteer than ProPresenter does.

OpenLP is free and open source, and its own site says it is “free to download, free to use, and free to give to all your friends.” It runs on “Linux, Windows, OS X and FreeBSD” and can “Display songs, Bible verses, presentations, images and more,” importing songs and Bibles from several formats, with VLC integration for media playback (OpenLP). The site does not name the license it ships under, so read that before a developer in your congregation builds anything on top of it. For a congregation whose screen shows lyrics and Scripture and nothing more, this is a serious option, and the money saved buys a better projector, which will improve Sunday more than the software would. The tradeoff is that stage displays are limited and support is a community forum rather than a phone number.

FreeShow is open source and states plainly that “FreeShow is and always will be free.” It advertises lyric integration, where you “enter the title and click search” and slides are created for you, and scripture integration to “look up passages and turn them into slides with one click” (FreeShow). Its home page does not list supported operating systems or a license, which is itself a signal about project maturity. Worth a genuine test if your team is comfortable being early on a tool. Understand that free and open source means the fix for your problem arrives when a volunteer developer gets to it.

None of the four charges by song, and none of them carries a music license. The license is a separate purchase from a separate company, and that is the next section.

The ranking for a church under 200 with no media staff: try OpenLP or FreeShow first for a month of Sundays. If the volunteers are fighting it, buy EasyWorship. Buy ProPresenter when you have a person whose actual role is running media, not when you want to look like the church that has one.

The license is not optional, and it is not the software

Putting a song’s words on a screen is reproduction, and reproduction of a copyrighted song needs permission. The software will happily display a song you have no right to display.

What the CCLI Church Copyright License actually covers. CCLI’s own page for the license says it lets a church “Project lyrics from a computer or digital device,” “Print song lyrics in bulletins, programs, and song sheets for your congregation,” “Record and capture your worship services (audio and video) for archive or limited distribution to those unable to attend in person,” “Arrange, print, and copy your own vocal and instrumental arrangements where a published version is not available,” and “Translate song lyrics into any other language where a published version is not available.” CCLI states the license covers “more than 600,000 worship songs and hymns” (CCLI Church Copyright License).

Read the recording clause twice. It says archive or limited distribution to those unable to attend in person. That is not a livestream on a public page.

Streaming is a separate purchase. The same CCLI page states that the Church Copyright License does not cover streaming and points to a separate add-on, the CCLI Streaming License, for live-streaming a service or uploading a recording of it to a website or social platform. If your church puts Sunday on the internet, one license is not enough, and churches usually discover this when a platform mutes the audio partway through the second song. The rest of the streaming decision is in church live streaming setup.

Prices are not stated here, on purpose. CCLI prices the Copyright License in bands, and its own license page routes to a “View Pricing” step rather than printing a figure. Every dedicated CCLI pricing and streaming-license URL tried while writing this returned HTTP 404, so this post publishes no CCLI dollar amount rather than repeating a number from a blog post that may be four years old. Get the band and the rate from CCLI directly, write the renewal date in the office calendar, and file the certificate where the media volunteer can see it.

SongSelect. CCLI operates SongSelect as the place lyrics and chord charts are obtained, and presentation software that imports from it saves your volunteer real typing time and prevents the misheard-lyric problem, where a song sits in your library for four years with the wrong word in verse two. Its site served no product or subscription detail to any request made while writing this, so nothing here states whether it is bundled with a license or billed separately. Ask CCLI what you already hold before you buy a fourth thing.

The line most churches cross without knowing it runs between the first band and the second. Recording for people who could not attend is inside the license. Putting Sunday on a public page is not.

Public domain hymns. A hymn old enough to be out of copyright is free to project. A modern setting of it is not. Copyright for works created after 1 January 1978 “lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years” (US Copyright Office, Duration FAQ), which is why a 1985 arrangement of an 1840 tune is protected even though the tune is not. Check the copyright line printed at the foot of the hymnal page, and when the arrangement is credited to a living person, assume it is covered.

The hardware that ruins good software

Nearly every complaint about presentation software is actually a complaint about a screen nobody can read.

Two mockups of the same public-domain verse on a 16:9 screen. The left screen sets four lines of small dark italic serif over a busy mottled photograph with a graphic bar across the bottom, at a cap height of about five percent of the screen. The right screen sets three lines of large light sans serif on a plain near-black field at a cap height of about twelve percent. Beneath each is the list of settings that produced it. — Same verse, same screen, same software. The measurable difference is cap height as a share of screen height, and nothing on the right costs money.

Brightness. A projector fighting daylight through clear windows loses. Measure the room during the service you actually hold, not during a Tuesday afternoon test with the blinds shut.

Contrast and type. Light text on a dark plain background, sans serif, sized so a person in the back row reads it without leaning. Photographs behind lyrics reduce legibility on every projector ever made. If you use images, blur and darken them substantially.

The cable run. Long HDMI runs fail intermittently, which is worse than failing completely, because it produces a black screen twice a service and nobody can reproduce it on Tuesday. Runs beyond about 25 feet want an active extender rather than a longer cable.

A confidence monitor for the worship leader. The single highest-return purchase in this whole category. A leader who can see the next line stops turning around, and the volunteer stops guessing.

A second machine with the same software installed and the same song library synced. Laptops die on Sunday morning.

Order of operations for a switch

Export the song library from the old system and confirm the file opens somewhere else before you cancel anything.
Install the new software on the actual Sunday computer, not the office desktop. Graphics behavior differs by machine.
Build three services in it while the old system is still running. Do not switch on a week with a baptism, a guest preacher, or communion.
Train two volunteers, together, in the room, on the real hardware. One page of instructions taped inside the media cabinet: how to start, how to advance, what to do when the screen goes black, who to text.
Run one full service on the new system with the old system open on a second machine. The safety net gets used once and then never again, and that once is worth the setup.
Set a template and lock it. Font, size, color, background, alignment. A volunteer choosing a font at 9:40am is how you end up with lyrics in script.

What to say no to

Say no to lower-third graphics, animated transitions between lyric slides, and rotating background video during congregational singing. Every one of them competes with the words people are trying to sing.

Say no to a subscription tier bought for a feature you will use twice a year. Rent the feature the two times you need it or do without.

Say no to putting the sermon outline on the screen unless the preacher genuinely writes to it. A three-point outline displayed while the preacher is somewhere else in the text tells the congregation the screen is decoration.

Where this sits next to the rest of the office

Presentation software is one line in a stack, and buying it in isolation is how a church ends up with a song list in one tool and a volunteer roster in another. Planning Center Services has a free tier limited to 5 team members, which covers the order of worship, song keys, and who is playing what (Planning Center pricing, checked 29 July 2026), and that is often the missing piece rather than a better lyrics engine. If nothing at all is in place, start with free church management software for where each free tier stops, then choosing church management software for the export test to run before you commit.

Compare current tools in the worship planning directory, and set the shape of the service itself with the order of worship.

Sources

ProPresenter, $29 per month per seat, $289 per year, Campus 20 seats $59 per month or $649 per year, 14-day trial. Checked 29 July 2026.
EasyWorship pricing, Basic $17.50 per month or $210 per year, Premium $27.50 per month or $330 per year, scaled by average weekly attendance, 30-day trial. Checked 29 July 2026.
OpenLP, free, Linux, Windows, OS X and FreeBSD. Checked 29 July 2026.
FreeShow, open source, lyric and scripture integration. Checked 29 July 2026.
CCLI Church Copyright License, permitted uses and the separate Streaming License. Checked 29 July 2026.
Planning Center pricing, Services free to 5 team members. Checked 29 July 2026.

Three pages refused. CCLI’s dedicated streaming-license and pricing URLs returned HTTP 404 at every path tried, and songselect.ccli.com served only a browser-compatibility notice, so this post carries no CCLI price and no description of SongSelect’s billing.