Most churches already have a noticeboard, a printed sheet and a group chat, and information still falls through the gaps. A screen in the entrance replaces none of that. It means the person who arrives ten minutes early reads something current instead of a poster for an event that happened in March. This page covers what belongs on a church screen, who keeps it updated when the person who built it is away, what it costs once, and what easyCMS deliberately does not do.
Why churches and easyCMS tend to fit
Churches and parishes usually share three things: a small budget, a rota of volunteers rather than paid staff, and a treasurer who has to justify every recurring line to a council. That is the buyer easyCMS is priced for.
- Licences are bought once and kept, so there is no renewal to defend next year
- One account covers up to five displays, which is more than most buildings need
- The guides and the AI assistant are free to everyone, with no account and no ticket
- Content is cached on the player, so a weak connection in a thick-walled building does not blank the screen
- A volunteer can make a weekly change in a browser in about five minutes
- Runs on Windows, Android, LG webOS and Samsung Tizen, so you can often use hardware you already have
Watch out easyCMS is not worship presentation software. It does not run live lyrics, liturgy slides or sermon points during a service, and it is not a substitute for the dedicated presentation software on the laptop at the back. easyCMS is for the notices that run the rest of the week. There is more on this below, before you buy anything.
What actually goes on the screens
A church screen fails when it becomes a slideshow of stock photographs. It works when each panel answers a question a real person walked in with.
Welcome and this week’s notices
The entrance screen earns its place first. Service times today, what is happening this week, who to speak to, where the toilets and the accessible entrance are, and whether the hall is booked this evening. For a visitor who has never been in the building, that is the difference between standing in the doorway and sitting down. Keep it simple: a multi-zone layout with the church name in a fixed header, a large panel for the next service and a rotating strip for notices will outlive any amount of clever design.
Service times and the week’s calendar
The Calendar widget reads an iCal feed URL, so if the calendar you already keep can publish one, the screen shows the week without anyone retyping it. Home groups, choir practice, the toddler group, the meeting on Thursday, the wedding on Saturday: they appear because someone put them in the calendar, a job that was already being done.
Good to know There is no Google Calendar connector in easyCMS. The Calendar widget takes an iCal feed URL and nothing else, so the calendar tool you use has to be able to publish one. If it cannot, the week’s events can go on a DataSet instead.
Announcements, appeals and giving information
Building fund progress, a harvest appeal, the roof repair, standing order details, the code for online giving, the collection for a local charity. Giving information is the sort of thing people are too polite to ask about and happy to read from a wall.
The hall, the crèche and the coffee area
A second screen away from the entrance does a different job. In a hall it carries the room booking for the day, the fire exits and the wifi details for a hirer. In a crèche or children’s area it carries the sign-in procedure and the leaders on duty. In the coffee area it carries photographs from the last event, next month’s rota and the sign-ups nobody reads on paper.
Hymn numbers and reading references
This is where a DataSet earns its keep. Build one table with a row per service and columns for hymn number, reading and psalm. The layout points at that table, so the numbers change when someone edits a row and the design stays exactly where the person who built it put it. A DataSet can be typed straight in or imported from a CSV, which suits anyone who prefers to prepare the month in a spreadsheet. Our guide to dynamic content and DataSets walks through building one.
Scheduling is separate from content, so the entrance screen can run a service layout on Sunday morning, a quiet notices loop on weekday afternoons, and nothing at all overnight. See scheduling content.
Where to put a screen, and what size
A church can start with one screen and add a second later if the first one earns its place. These are the placements that tend to be worth the cable.
| Location | Suggested size | Orientation | Job it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entrance or porch | 43”-55” | Portrait | Welcome, service times, this week |
| Back of the nave or narthex | 49”-55” | Landscape | Notices before and after a service |
| Church hall | 55”-65” | Landscape | Bookings, hirer information, group notices |
| Coffee area | 43” | Landscape | Photographs, rotas, sign-ups |
| Crèche or children’s room | 32”-43” | Landscape | Sign-in, safeguarding, leaders on duty |
| Outside-facing window | 49”-55” high brightness | Portrait | Service times for passers-by |
Two practical notes. Screens in historic or listed buildings are a permissions question before they are a technology question, so check what your denomination or the relevant heritage body requires before you drill anything. And a screen behind glass facing a street needs a high brightness panel or it will be washed out on a sunny day, which our guide to LCD displays for digital signage covers.
The volunteer handover problem
This is why church screens go dark. One capable person builds something good, then moves away, and nobody else dares touch it because the design looks one wrong click from being ruined.
The fix is to separate the design from the words, and easyCMS is built that way.
- One person builds the layout once: zones, fonts, colours, the logo, where the text sits.
- The changing content lives in a DataSet, a media folder or the calendar feed, not in the layout.
- Everyone else edits a row in a table or drops a new image in a folder. The layout is never opened.
Anyone who can fill in a spreadsheet can then keep the screen current for years without learning the layout editor. Write the steps on one side of A4, put it in the vestry folder, and the handover is done.
Tip Do the first build with two people in the room. The second one does not need to design anything, only to have watched it happen and to hold the written instructions afterwards.
One honest caveat: separate logins with roles and permissions are an Enterprise feature. On the 49€ and PRO accounts there is a single login, so volunteers share one set of credentials and anyone with the password can edit anything. That is another reason to keep the changing content in a DataSet, where a mistake is one row rather than the whole layout.
What it costs
One screen in the entrance
| Line | Cost |
|---|---|
| easyCMS account, 1 display licence, up to 5 displays, 1GB storage | 49 EUR one-time |
| Software total, paid once | 49 EUR |
That is the whole software bill. There is no year two.
Three screens: entrance, hall, coffee area
| Line | Cost |
|---|---|
| easyCMS account, includes 1 licence | 49 EUR one-time |
| 2 × extra display licence in the same order at 66 EUR | 132 EUR one-time |
| Software total, paid once | 181 EUR |
Licences bought in the same order as the account are 66€ each instead of 99€, a third off. It is applied automatically at checkout and there is no code to enter. Added later they are 99€ each, so the same three screens built up over a couple of years come to 247€ rather than 181€. If you know you want three, buy the three together.
Hardware sits alongside that. If you have a spare Windows PC you can use it, and the player software costs nothing, though the screen still needs its own display licence like any other. If you would rather have a box that arrives configured, an easyCMS Android player is 499€, and it still needs its own display licence, so it is a line on top of the licence rather than instead of it. A premium HDMI cable is 29€, and an expert support hour is 25€ if you want someone hands-on, refunded if the root cause turns out to be a bug in easyCMS.
How that compares, honestly
Almost every other signage platform is sold per screen per month. These are the vendors’ own list prices, checked September 2026, in the currency each vendor quotes.
| Platform | List price |
|---|---|
| easyCMS | 49 EUR once, then nothing |
| Yodeck | Free for 1 screen; Basic $8 / 8 EUR per screen per month |
| OptiSigns | Free for up to 3 screens with the OptiSigns logo shown on screen and community support only; Standard $10 per screen per month |
| ScreenCloud | Core $20 per screen per month, billed annually |
| TelemetryTV | Entry $8 per device per month |
| Rise Vision | K-12 Basic $11 per display per month; Business and Government Basic $12 per display per month; K-12 Enterprise $1,399 per school per year for unlimited displays |
| digitalsignage.com | mediaCLOUD+ $3.00 per screen per month; free up to 3 screens |
The number that matters to a treasurer is what the line does after year one. Three screens on Yodeck Basic at 8€ per screen per month is 288€ a year: 864€ by the end of year three, 1,440€ by the end of year five, and it is still being billed in year six. The three-screen build above is 181€ and stays 181€. Against that tier it breaks even at about eight months, and a single entrance screen at about six. Add the two extra screens later at 99€ each instead and the same network is 247€, which breaks even at about ten months. Our cost per screen guide shows the working. For a church council the point is not the size of the saving, it is that the line disappears from the budget afterwards.
Two things we will not pretend about. Yodeck gives you one screen free forever, and if one screen in the porch is all you will ever want, that is cheaper than 49€ and worth considering. OptiSigns will run three screens free if you accept their logo on your wall and no support beyond a community forum. We think a one-time 49€ with real email and phone support is the better deal for a building that will still be here in ten years, but those free tiers are real. Our page on digital signage with no monthly fee makes the longer argument, and full prices are on the pricing page.
What easyCMS will not do
The honest list, so nobody buys the wrong thing.
- It is not presentation software. No live lyrics, no liturgy slides, no sermon points advanced by a person at the back. Worship presentation needs dedicated software on a laptop connected to the projector. easyCMS drives the notices screens, and it is cleanest to keep the two jobs on separate displays.
- No charts widget, and no social feed beyond Mastodon. There is no Twitter or X widget. If you want giving progress as a thermometer, make it an image and update it monthly.
- 1GB of storage on the 49€ account suits images and short clips, not a library of full-length video. The PRO account has 5GB. See storage quota and media uploads.
- No free trial and no free plan. The account is 49€ and that is the entry point.
- You are not an administrator of the CMS. easyCMS hosts and runs the platform for you in the European Union, so there is no server to patch and no settings screen for you to break. If something needs changing at that level, email us.
Running it week to week
Who does it. One volunteer, about ten minutes a week, plus whoever keeps the calendar. Name a deputy as well, and keep both names with the written instructions.
How often. The calendar feed updates itself. Notices weekly, alongside whoever prepares the printed sheet. Hymn and reading numbers weekly, on a DataSet row. Photographs monthly. Design work happens once and then rarely.
When the internet drops. Nothing visible happens. Content is cached on the player and keeps playing to schedule, and the player collects whatever changed when the connection returns. More in digital signage without internet.
Checking it from home. You can see when each display last checked in and take a screenshot of what is playing, which matters when the screen is in a hall you visit once a week. See display monitoring.
Getting started. Connect your first display, then build from a template using creating layouts.
Questions churches ask
Can we use it for song lyrics during the service?
No. That is presentation software, and easyCMS does not do it. Use dedicated worship presentation software on a laptop for the service, and easyCMS for the entrance and hall screens the rest of the week.
Can it show the hymn numbers before the service starts?
Yes, and this is the right way round. Put the numbers in a DataSet and schedule that layout to appear before the service, then hand the projector over to the presentation laptop when the service begins.
Is there anything to pay every year?
No, unless you choose the Enterprise account, which is the only annual plan and is aimed at organisations running more than 25 displays. Church licences are one-time and lifetime.
Do we need a computer for each screen?
One display licence per screen. The player can be a small Android box, a Windows PC, or an LG webOS or Samsung Tizen commercial screen that runs the player inside the panel with no separate box at all.
Do you offer a discount to churches?
Our published discount is 30% on the LCD display and Android player bundle, and it is for schools, colleges, universities and student organisations. If you run a church school or a student chaplaincy, say so and we will apply it when we quote. See digital signage for schools.
Working out what you need
Tell us how many screens you are thinking about, roughly where they go, and whether you already have hardware or a spare PC. We will come back with a firm figure and an honest answer about whether one screen in the porch is enough to start with. We are a European company, DynamicDigital sp. z o.o. in Warsaw, Poland, VAT PL5213678094, and a VAT invoice is issued for every purchase.
Email info@myeasycms.com, call +48 509 937 137, or use the support request form. You can also browse the full feature list, or read what digital signage is if you are still deciding whether a screen is the right answer at all.