EasyWorship vs. Proclaim?
Can anybody give inputs on pros & cons on these two from their latest update model?
I know EasyWorship is way cheaper than the Proclaim's subscription based, have been around for awhile which means better reliability.
Can you guys share your experiences..
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ps: I was delegated by the church to buy Easyworship today, but I was thinking of Proclaim also in my head.
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Proclaim is for online, multi user use. It allows you to integrate your Logos software into it. I would recommend that you Logos. You can download it, and try it for free.
Mission: To serve God as He desires.
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Lynden Williams said:
I would recommend that you Logos.
I agree, everyone should Logos. [:D]
I'm not that familiar with Easy Worship. It's been a very long time since I tested it. I can say that the biggest strength of Logos is the ability to create a presentation on one computer and have it just show up on the church computer once you open the app and then open the new presentation from the Open menu.
However, this brings a drawback. One must have an Internet connection on the PC used for the church, at least long enough to download the presentation.
As for the actual tool, building a presentation can be time consuming. It takes a lot of clicks to add things, make them look the way you want due to a lack of decent templates and no user created templates.
Logos excels at presenting Bible verses, lyrics with easy Song Select integration and slide shows or power point. One can also import videos in supported formats (I use MP4 most of the time).
It does not support video clips from a DVD and using YouTube means adding the webpage and playing it like one would on a webpage, which is not ideal.
Finally, my biggest complaint is that I can't import all my sermon pictures and then add scripture or video files between them. You simply can't do that which is why it takes a much longer time to create presentations with Logos than with other worship software I've used which does allow for this.
My second biggest complaint is that it takes way too many clicks to add things. In other software they integrate a file browser and I can drag and drop. Sometimes our choir presents concerts and I get a bunch of images that go along with the themes of the songs and I do a kind of karaoke where I just grab an image based on whats being sung or said and throw it up on screen. I won't be able to do this with Proclaim, which means the next concert will require me to grab the Windows PC, hook it up to the projectors (not a simple thing) and run the old software again.
I'm hoping the DVD and Youtube things will get fixed. I doubt they will ever fix the problem with too many clicks and the problem with not being able to put bible verses or videos between images in slide shows. It's as if the designers never build sermon presentations that don't just include bible verses. If they do, they don't have the authority or ability to change it because I'm quite certain that they would after using it for any length of time.
Finally, if you plan to buy get in quick. I think the pricing is about to double. They call it an end to the introductory rates, but that's just marketing speak. It will double regardless of what you call it if you don't get in soon and commit to a long term commitment.
Dr. Kevin Purcell, Director of Missions
Brushy Mountain Baptist Association0 -
thank you for the comments..
the thing I don't like is that you required to have WiFi connection, our church doesn't have that yet.
I guess Proclaim's features hasn't really convinced me yet to buy, plus it is too early to buy a new product like this.. too many bugs reported in the proclaim forum.
I'll stick with easyworship 2013 for now
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Thanks for the open and honest communication!
One of the main reasons the forums exist is so users can have that direct and sometimes immediate contact with our development team. Because of this, the majority of our posts are addressing bugs. This however is not a good representation on the majority of Proclaim users. I can assure you that only a small amount of users experience bugs and they are incredibly happy with Proclaim. The forums just do not reflect that as their intention is to report issues. What's great about this, is that you can see almost all of the issues are resolved. I think it's a great example of why Proclaim is awesome. Even if there is an issue (which there always will be with technology), there's a place to talk about it and get it resolved quickly.
I use Proclaim often and love it. Something I do is create a user generated template like I've laid out on our blogs here: http://blog.proclaimonline.com/2013/05/27/becoming-a-proclaim-ninja-using-service-templates/. Using this method every week I easily create a service within 20 minutes. I'd encourage you to follow our blog to check out more "Proclaim Ninja" posts to learn how to save time.
You also are not required to have a Wi-Fi connection. The congregation can use their smartphone data connection, and you can run Proclaim offline. Check this blog post for more details: http://blog.proclaimonline.com/2013/05/31/does-proclaim-work-offline/
We are always listening to our customers (and potential customers) closely, so we really appreciate the feedback and honest communication. Thanks again!
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Scott, I do exactly as you suggest.
I just did it in fact for tomorrow's service. Yet, to get my Bible verses to look decent, I spent 10 minutes formatting the text and adding stuff and had to do it for the Verse reference, the verse's translation label and then the verse itself. That's absolutely asinine that it should take that many clicks just to make a Bible verse look good. Took me ten minutes. Sure, the rest of the verses I add will look like this one, but come on!! I don't want the Bible verses to look the same each week. But I would like to set up some basic templates. Why can't you just add that for us. We've been begging for it for a long time.
A good template will pick a background, text formatting and layout. Save it and then add it to the verses for that week in just a few clicks, like have a link - use template with a drop down of available templates.
Dr. Kevin Purcell, Director of Missions
Brushy Mountain Baptist Association0 -
I know this is an old thread, but if there are any new users like me who find themselves here trying to get help with templates... anyway. Although you don't have the ability to save lyric templates like in MediaShout, I work around this by setting up the first song with whatever background and text formatting that I would like and then make a duplicate of the song. The all I have to do is change the song title of the duplicate to the title of the next song that I would like to use and Proclaim swaps out the first song for the new song- now with the new format from the first song in the series. The same procedure can be used for scripture references as well. Not perfect- slide templates would go a long way to making this a great product, but, until that happens...
BTW, why did we switch to Proclaim? First of all MediaShout and ProPresenter were ALWAYS crashing. Most likely issues with Windows, and the new MediaShout for Mac is well, disappointing. Proclaim allows me to format the worship, our Senior Pastor to format his own slides for his sermon, and our secretary to format the pre-service announcement reel simultaneously from the office OR home (when that late night Saturday night change or addition needs to happen!) I even added slides from our mission trip for a service while I was still waiting for our connecting flight in Chicago O'Hare. Sure, no high marks for ease of use, but reliability and having the flexibility to create services on my office PC or at home on my MacBook Pro are more important to me.
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Personally, you're taking a huge risk using a DVD or streaming through YouTube. I know there are last minute things that come up. But what I've told my church is that if they aren't prepared, then it won't happen. It's not fair for them to make the media team stress because they are too lazy during the week. As for guests that come in, I try to contact them a week before hand. Since I have "laid down the law" I have had no complaints and no stress.
As for templates, Proclaim has several now and a ton if you include Graceway Media's library (although, that's incredibly expensive).
As for the price, Proclaim is still cheaper on a yearly basis. Although, EasyWorship has won the price war big time simply because they haven't released an update in 6 years. You get what you pay for.
The only issue I have currently is the media browser. However, I've been told this will be fixed soon. If you add enough "smart" tags to things, then you'll be okay to get by until then.
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