For the past few months I've been searching for a web-based solution to creating and maintaining a database of chord charts and set lists for my worship ministry. I signed up for trial periods on lots of different online worship management sites (planningcenteronline.com, worshipplanning.com, etc.) but could not find a solution that was a good fit for me. Most sites focus primarily on planning worship services: providing tools for creating service orders, picking songs, communicating with musicians, etc. But I really only needed the chord chart creation and management part. Because I'm in a smaller church (with only one band and fairly unstructured service orders), I didn't need all the bells and whistles for service planning that most sites offer.
I did find sites that focus more on chord chart management, like song-manager.com, but none of them were very powerful or user-friendly.
Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I found gospelsoftware.com. They offer 3 services, but you can pick and choose which to sign up for. Their SongBook service is exactly what I've been looking for. Here are some of the features I like:
- It's online! For about four years, I've been using an opensource program called Opensong, which was a simple desktop application. All my songs were stored locally on my office computer, which meant I didn't have access to them unless I was at the office! There were also a few other worship leaders in my church using the same software, meaning we all had different databases. It was a pain having to email zip files of the song folders and trying to keep our databases synced. In fact, we gave up a while ago...
- It outputs nice-looking charts. Many of the other sites I explored had pretty ugly-looking chord charts.
- It has a specific import function for Opensong files. This was probably the biggest selling point for me. Instead of having to reformat every single song, I can import an Opensong file and Gospelsoftware automatically formats it (including all the song metadata, like author, key, copyright info, etc.)
Here are some screenshots:
