Faithlife Proclaim

Avantages

What I love most about Proclaim is that it is so intuitive with the layout and how things are put together. It doesn't take a computer genius to be able to lay out a presentation. Also, the person left to run the presentation during the service needs to know nothing more than how to Progressive slide forward or backward. It's really that simple!
Proclaim is even made it super simple by integrating our work subscriptions, Bible versions in scripture, along with song lyrics within the software. It is literally a one-stop-shop. What used to take me over 2 hours to do in illustrator, Photoshop, and PowerPoint, I can now get done in about 30 minutes and Proclaim.

The customer service is also outstanding! Each time that I have emailed them, I've gotten a reply back usually the same day with a personalized email addressing my specific question. No Scripts or faceless reply to

Inconvénients

One of the things I like least about this software is the dependability of the sinking upload feature. I can work on a presentation at home, and press the sync feature leave my laptop open for a couple hours, and it still won't show up on the church computer several days later. We end up having to share the actual presentation file through Google Drive in order to make sure that everyone has access to the file that they need.
I wish that there was a way that I could actually see the progress of a file being synced and know what it is 100% uploaded and ready to collaborate with.

The other thing that I don't like about the software is that all the art, song lyrics, and in-depth Bible study stuff are all extra subscription cost. Period. In addition to the money that is spent each month on Proclaim itself. For a small church, this can be quite an expense and not everyone is able to pay it.
The church that I attend is about 30 to 40 people on a good Sunday, and they do pay for the Proclaim software, but I end up having to pay for all the artwork subscriptions myself just so that I don't pull my hair out trying to put presentations together. The basic artwork included with Proclaim is lackluster at best.

Avantages

I really like how much the software team is updating the product every release. The software itself is much better than many alternatives in this space. I really like how it saves the edits you've made to certain song lyrics and allows you to reuse old slides just with a quick search.

Inconvénients

It would be great to have a master template for the look / feel / design of the slides and then build off from it. For now we just named one of the days "Master..." and if you need to pull a song or a sermon slide you just search for that and reuse it. The sermon slides are cumbersome but when you get to know how it works it's not too bad. They finally allowed for lists of words to appear like PowerPoint presentations show them (one line at a time) and that was my biggest beef before. There's still a learning curve.

Avantages

I love the ability to record the audio of the sermon matched with the slides on the ​screen. It gives our congregation the ability to connect on multiple levels each time they access.

Inconvénients

Sometimes we lose "connection to the audio settings", for whatever reason, and the recording fails to happen.

Avantages

Proclaim is typically marketed to churches. It's connections to CCLI song select make creating presentations so easy and fast. You can type a song title and an arrangement and the slides are generated, no need to type words. The whole program had cloud access allowing you to have multiple users who all work on the presentation: a pastor can add sermon slides, the worship leader can add songs, etc. videos, announcements, and YouTube links are simple and everything can be done from different computers. It is even integrated with a function that records sermons and can automatically publish to Facebook, a website or podcast feed.

Inconvénients

The only thing I don't like is that the recordings can not have video added to them. The background library is a bit limited if you don't purchase the additional media packages

Avantages

The ability to collaborate with other contributors throughout the week from different places (cloud based) is probably my favorite feature.

Inconvénients

Being cloud-based means items added to the presentation have to sync and need a good internet connection. Occasionally, we've had trouble with syncing because of server problems on their end or because of internet connectivity on our end. We've always been able to work out what we needed before presenting, but sometimes it's been close or we've had to re-do our work because it didn't sync. They usually work out those kinks quickly (they've never been repeated two consecutive days).