Organisation & background
Rock RMS is developed by Spark Development Network, a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and was first released in 2014 under the Rock Community License, which makes the source available but restricts use to faith-based and nonprofit organisations. Life.Church and NewSpring Church are large-church users involved in its governance.
Functionality
Rock RMS is a free, source-available church and relationship management system in which people, families, groups, financial transactions, locations and pages are all entities in one framework. Families are the basic unit, with relationships between people recorded, and an automated duplicate finder flags likely matches. A workflow engine handles processes such as life events, scheduled jobs run routine tasks, and reporting draws on the whole database. Person attributes add custom fields, developers can create new entities in code, and a REST API and the Lava templating language support integrations and custom pages.
Localised features
Ships with a built-in, non-compensated integration with Protect My Ministry, a US background-check provider, implemented as a fully admin-customisable eight-step workflow.
Implementation model
You can set it up yourself, or use a third-party partner. There are three routes: hosting it yourself with in-house technical staff, using an official or third-party hosting partner, or a fuller managed relationship with a dedicated Rock consulting partner.
Hosting
You can choose: vendor-hosted (SaaS) or self-hosted. Self-hostable on the church’s own Windows/.NET/SQL Server infrastructure, or via named cloud-hosting partners (Rock Cloud, Cloud 9 by 9 Embers), or a third-party Rock consultant.
Links
Last full research
August 2026